How I know the Earth isn't flat

And you can too.

When I was a little boy I wanted to be an astronaut. I really thought I could. 

When it was 19, I enlisted in the Air Force. I wanted to see the world and be a man and take care of my girl.

My first two years in the Air Force was Russian School and signals intelligence technical school. After finishing, I got a Top Secret SCI clearance. This simply allowed me to know about facts that were not publicly available.

When I was sent to my first duty station in Europe, that was the first time I ever flew across the ocean. I noticed how quickly we flew eastward from daylight into the dark of night. 

In Italy, I spent two years listening to Soviet pilots, air traffic control and air defense outposts. Everything was in code and military jargon.

After my tour in Europe, I was sent to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to work at the (then) Foreign Technology Division. You know Wright-Patterson, it’s where crashed UFOs are said to be stored at Hangar 18. It was also home to the SR-71 Blackbird and the Air Force Museum. One of my favorite moments there was to get into the cockpit of a ‘found’ MiG fighter plane.

My first job at FTD was to translate highly technical Soviet military manuals and scientific papers, many open source, and others acquired by means I did not have ‘need to know.’ Areas that I translated were in advanced mathematics, computer science, high energy physics, space and aerospace systems, as well as advanced medical and biological studies.

Two years later, the Air Force sent me to my next duty station in Japan. During the 20-hour flight from DC to Tokyo, the Sun was shining in my portside window the entire time as I flew westward. Shining for 20 hours. 

In Japan, I was given a very special job that would forever change my life—and little did I know that decades in the future, it would become an inoculation and weapon against the greatest, most insidious psychological virus in history: The Flat Earth conspiracy theory.

This is the part nobody ever believes when I tell it. I was told I'm not supposed to talk about it, but it is all open source today and it's all true! I am not revealing any secret sources and methods. This was simply my introduction to the subject matter at hand.

My new dream job was to monitor the Soviet space program. Specifically, I got to listen to the cosmonauts in the Mir space station, every day for 4 years. Well, it's not just listening, it's also recording and transcribing everything said: from repairs and maintenance, to orbital maneuvers, coordination with ground control, chatting with the wife and kids, even show-and-tell sessions with a classroom HAM radio club in Australia. I knew these guys better than my own uncles.

Russian space station Mir, photographed by a crewmember of the STS-74 mission when the Space Shuttle Atlantis was approaching Mir for docking in 1995.

There were also scientific experiments, observations of celestial and terrestrial targets, and most critically, EVAs (extravehicular activities), and docking and undocking. This is when things could go seriously wrong.

My workstation was basically an expensive HAM radio connected to a movable antenna that can be programmatically pointed at an invisible moving object in the sky as it passed on my side of the globe every 90 minutes at about 17,000 mph. 

The perigee of the Mir was about 400 km, which means that, at best, it is that far away when passing directly overhead, but the majority of the time it is much farther, up to the radio horizon of about 2,000 miles, called the signal footprint.

For this reason it was important to point the antenna as accurately as possible, otherwise a good part of the flyby would be with very poor reception and not make for good intelligence. 

The way this was done was through a computer program that translates a satellite's orbital parameters, expressed in what is known as a two-line element (TLE) ephemeris dataset, into a script for commanding the antenna to move every second, following the object. Its accuracy had to be within the beamwidth capability of the antenna, as I recall, about 5 degrees. 

Russian Soyuz (Union)

Soyuz launch from Baykonur

One problem that always existed was that during the launch of the rocket carrying the Soyuz manned spacecraft or Progress unmanned supply craft into orbit, we didn't have tracking data as it was not yet in orbit to be tracked by RADAR. 

We would guesstimate where the antenna should be pointed after confirming that the launch went as scheduled. This resulted in a situation that, during the most critical operations, we rarely could get a good signal. 

But I got to thinking: the rocket always launched from the same place, Baikonur cosmodrome, and always into the same orbit—where the Mir would be when the two were to rendezvous. The only difference was the time and Earth's actual position due to its rotation. 

So I thought it should be possible to "progress" the orbital ephemeris dataset from a previous launch. Same trajectory, different object and time. Just math is needed. I contacted the intelligence agency (No Such Agency) for whom I was tasked with this job, and inquired as to whether such a process was possible. The mathematicians said, no, it is not.

I ignored them and asked for permission to start a project to do this and was given a green light. I was sent away from the radiotelephone shop to work in the code shop.

I had to learn the C programming language, as well as orbital mechanics and quaternion mathematics. In addition to that, I had to write a device driver that would control the antenna from the data output by the first program. I probably still have the source code in my file cabinet.

My daily observations of the Mir space station were almost quite literally, Major Tom talking to Ground Control, or to his mother-in-law, thanking her for the Christmas cookies that came on the last resupply vehicle. I sent the transcripts to NSOC.

I'll be forever grateful that my supervisor had confidence in me to make this work. It became the foundation of my future career in software engineering and data science after I separated from the Air Force. 

Experiment 1: HAM radio relay satellites 

I want to first draw the reader's attention to the fact that anyone in the whole world can do all these things that I have mentioned, but learning the Russian language is not necessary, nor the advanced mathematics and the physics formulas of orbital mechanics. All of the code for computing orbits and ground station antenna control has been publicly available for decades. Ephemeris datasets are easily obtained from space-track.org.

Now one has to have a certain level of trust in the laws of mathematics to take the next leap of faith, but if you really want to know, you can know. 

The thing that needs to be confirmed is the fact that low earth orbit HAM radio relay satellites exist. That is my claim.

These enable two-way communications between ordinary hobbyists—even schoolchildren. The barrier to access is quite low. You do need a program to calculate the trajectory or at least the timing. And you do need a radio and directional antenna. As for HAM radio licensing, one only needs a license to transmit, but not to merely listen. 

Get a HAM radio and an antenna on a gimbal and a computer and you can listen to any satellite in orbit. You don't even have to believe it is really there. Just FAFO. Nobody on Earth will know you are doing this experiment. NOBODY.

Do it as often and for as long as you like. LEO objects come every 90 minutes, with the exception of periodic blackouts due to the difference between the satellite's orbital precession and the Earth's rotation. 

If physics isn't your thing but you have trust in the laws of probability and statistics, consider the following: Remember that I said if you aren't pointing the antenna at the exact right place at the exact right time, you will hear nothing. What is the chance that you can intercept a moving signal from the sky with an accuracy of five degrees and 30-second time resolution, repeatedly, consistently? Take all the time you need. Repeat the experiment as often as you like.

You might even get a HAM buddy in another part of the country or on the other side of the world to do the same experiment. You can compare notes. This is the scientific method.

You can experimentally verify that you can talk to a friend on the other side of the world via an invisible, moving dot in the sky.

Imagine yourself as Observer 1 and your HAM buddy, Observer 2. The communications relay satellite is the Proxy Observer. The Proxy Observer’s extreme altitude of 400 km and the extreme distance between communicating Observers 1 and 2 eliminate unknowns about atmospheric optical aberration and so on.

The geometry is easy to do, and the case is even firmer when considering communications satellites that are geosynchronous, as their signal footprint is much wider and without the problem of timing. By the way, this is how Navy ships communicate with each other and with command via satellite. Commercial ships too.

Only on a flat earth can ships communicate with each other thousands of miles apart without satellites. On a spherical earth, they can’t.

I would like to see what alternative hypothesis is proffered, but to me, my argument supersedes all inconclusive debates.

But in my opinion, the single observer of a LEO satellite is the better experiment, as it eliminates the possibility of collusion and introduces the element of statistical analysis. Either the signal is there when it should be or it is not. It is either moving rapidly, or it is not.

If you do the observation, you probably will conclude that there is no telepathic television on the "dome" sending a false signal every 90 minutes, moving 180 degrees of azimuth and elevation in ten minutes—just to fool lil’ ole you personally. Flat Earthers need to explain who has the technology to pull off such an illusion, and how it works, including how your mind is being read when you do your secret experiment.

Alternative Experience 1: Global travel

Personally, I think it is enough to have the objective experience of flying East from New York to Rome, from broad daylight to night time in 1 hour. I've done that. 

Or if that's not good enough, fly from DC to Tokyo for 15-20 hours with the sun in your face the entire time as you fly west. I've done that. 

Or if that's not good enough, go to Argentina. You'll notice that the Sun and Moon  are to the north. And watch the night sky. The northern constellations are not visible but the Southern Cross is. Everyone should go see the Southern Cross. I've done that.

Also, in the southern hemisphere the toilet water flushes down in the opposite direction—clockwise. I've done that. Confirmed.

Coriolis Effect on the equatorial line, south of the line, and north of the line -- in 2 minutes. Flerfers won't do this lowest-tech experiment. They really just don't want to know the truth, but call themselves truthers.

Flat Earthers need to explain why the stars in the night sky appear to revolve counter-clockwise when looking to the north pole but clockwise when looking to the south pole, yet in both cases, the stars rise in the east and set in the west.

This is the prima facie case (note: a legal term meaning evidence adequate to establish a fact or raise a presumption of fact unless refuted) for the spheroidal rotating Earth. Flatlanders ignore this because there is no evidence against it. One can simply go there and see it with one’s own eyes. This implies either a fundamental inability to do spacial-geometric reasoning, or a lack of intellectual honesty.

Or if Argentina's too far, you can just go to the equator in the Amazon where the Sun and Moon pass directly overhead on the equinoxes. There is no summer or winter. Half the year the sun and moon are to the north, half the year they are to the south.  

Or if that's not good enough, get on a sailboat and sail around the world. Or take a blimp or a balloon. Learn how to use that flat map and protractor and sextant for measuring angles off the tangent of the ocean. Learn geometry and physics. Learn about reality.

FAFO. Go to the edge. Circumnavigate the Ice Wall. I don't need to because I already know. I did the work.

My alternative suggestions for experience, flying east, flying west, flying south, are, I think, very accessible but open to innumerable attacks because they are not clean, controlled experiments. And they are not as cheap as at first they might seem.

For example, to be convinced of the situation at the equator, one has to remain in the area for a good six months. That isn't cheap or easy.

The situation is more difficult for staying in Argentina, South Africa, or New Zealand, as those are the embarking points to the Antarctic Ocean. I, for one, cannot deal with the cold or the political situation. The Argentine police were hostile to me the moment I got off the bus simply because I am a gringo.

I do think travel to those places can be viable alternatives to my HAM radio satellite relay experiment. The problem is that I have done it, yet this has had no effect on people who have not done it.

Therein is another serious problem to be analyzed.

This comes down to trust, and that is my main complaint about publicized experimental results. They are, in the end, no substitute for actually replicating the experiment for oneself. 

That is why I say that the scientific method is only useful for convincing oneself, but not others.

There is another problem: I have an Australian friend who is a nomadic computer nerd. She has flown from Australia to Spain, to Florida, to Mexico, to Bali, and yet she remains convinced that the earth is flat. I cannot fathom it, but I conclude that global travel in itself is not sufficiently convincing for some people. She is not a mathematician so I'm afraid that a conversation adhering to logical rigor is not possible.

If you're rich (I'm not), for a million dollars Jeff Bezos will take you to the edge of space. I don't recommend opening the airlock. The crew will knock you out and put you in a straightjacket, but the passengers will want to flush you out through the toilet airlock. 

But if all of that is too time-consuming, expensive and dangerous, just get a HAM radio or maybe a telescope.

Alternative Experience 2: Observe a Starlink launch

It's perfectly easy to spy a satellite at twilight. Depending on one’s latitude, one could see a string of pearls—a cluster of Starlink satellites waiting to be maneuvered into their final orbits. 

If you cannot see them from your latitude, you can drive to Florida and even see them launched into space. 90 minutes after launch, you’ll see the string of pearls pass by from the south—the opposite whither one saw them inserted northward into orbit. This is so easy and requires no HAM radio, but you cannot choose the time. Flat Earthers need to explain the ‘illusion.’

Experiment 2: Get Starlink

Here's another experiment you can do: actually get a Starlink station. High-speed, low-latency broadband internet in remote and rural locations across the globe can be had for $110/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $599. Put it up on top of your home and explain where the internet is coming from. For a few dollars more, you can even get an RV model antenna and go hundreds of miles into the desert. The internet will be there.

I think it would be a good idea to start a Go Fund Me to get Starlink for our favorite Flat Earther podcaster. They can then broadcast from the Kingdom of Nye—if they accept the gift.

Mutually-reinforcing experiments crush satellite deniers

All these experiments are independent corroboration, mutually reinforcing—taken together, better than any conjecture or debate can do, which is nothing. 

Someone who hasn't done any of these things doesn't know. They only believe. They are practicing mathemagic without a license. 

My HAM experiment is an appeal to reason, not a Toastmasters debate. For people who will not or cannot apply logical rigor to observations of verifiable phenomena, a debate always ends in death by a thousand paper cuts.

The Flat Earth conspiracy theory is a psychological weapon

The Flat Earth conspiracy theory is the most insidious psychological virus in history. It is a poison pill that contaminates and neutralizes anything it touches.

People are justified in disbelieving NASA as an untrustworthy front with NAZI origins. They are justified in believing that the Apollo missions, as we know them, were a hoax. I have my own ideas that are even less popular than those most people have heard of or can imagine.

But we mustn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. NASA does launch rockets into orbit. There are satellites. Are we to deny that air exists because it is totally invisble and NASA claims it is real? Of course not.

But let’s leave NASA out of the equation. The Soviets have also been launching satellites and space stations into orbit since the 1960s. Are we now to believe that the Soviets were also in on the ‘round earth hoax,’ given that the flat earth conspiracy theory requires that a dome holds the air in our terrarium? What evidence can be shown that Russia is not launching satellites into orbit?

And what about the European Space Agency—and more recently, the satellite operations of Israel, India and China? Who is orchestrating the hoax with authority over all nations? Who is silencing the rocket scientists who are all ‘in on it?’ The monstrosity of it all needs to be explained, does it not?

The Flat Earth conspiracy is a psychological weapon. It is an attack on American and Western Civilization as we know it. It is an attack on reason itself, and frankly it’s doing a pretty good mind job on people.

I decided about 10 years ago that I would no longer abide people who believe the Earth is flat. I've had many friends that I've stopped talking to, even though they were very nice people that I liked, because the fact is, we don't live in the same reality. 

There is no way I can trust their judgment or respect their opinions about anything. These people are intellectually disabled, regardless of their competence in other domains. 

They are certainly in no position to fight a psychological war when they are already casualties of the greatest PSYOP in history. They are a "zero to the left" (of the decimal point)—military jargon for dead weight.

But today I see that my former attitude won't do. That's because the Flat Earth conspiracy theory is a neutron bomb on society that has already done much damage and this must be countered. Not to neutralize the person, but the PSYOP.

In the truth movement, this PSYOP chips away at any possibility of unity where it counts. There is no truth in it. It destroys one's credibility and authority, and causes division. It is exactly the same effect as one crew calling another crew shills or assets. Everyone becomes accusers, including so-called Christian Patriots. They are working not only for the WEF and CCP, but ultimately for the Father of Lies, the Accuser!

The Flat Earth is a foil for any truther, journalist or researcher. Whatever they have got right about the Globalist conspiracy, the COVID vaccine conspiracy, or the banking system, is instantly tainted. Reasonable people are not going to listen and they will sit out of the fight that needs to be fought, because those people are just crazy conspiracy theorists with no credibility.

People will turn away in droves from the flerfers, as others flock like sheep into the conjectures of a person who has not made the effort to sort out this  fundamental aspect of reality. They are going to do nothing to stop global control, by globalists, on a globe, as they ignorantly squabble about fundamental geometry. 

The Flat Earth is repellant to the thinking mind, an insult to God, and a return to a Dark Age. Because of it, I want nothing to do with Christianity and I do not want to associate with Christians. He or she who strives to be a witness for Christ ought to think about the people they are alienating from redemption. 

It is important to recognize that erroneous dogmas only bring disrepute not only to the Bible and to Christianity, but to everything it comes into contact with. Whatever truth, allegorical or otherwise, found in the Bible is irreparably transformed into an infantile collection of myths. 

Those ‘baby christians’ who cite the Bible as the inerrant Word of God ought to learn about how it came to be what we have today.

Isaiah 40:11 says:

It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in… 

English “version” commissioned by King James (a homosexual pedophile)

However, this rendition is the result of translation from Aramaic to Hebrew, to Greek, to Latin, and finally into Dark Age English. Anyone who knows more than one language already understands how things get ‘lost in translation’ and how imaginary statements that never existed can emerge out of the biased and imperfect mind of the translator. Here is the same text translated directly into modern English from the original Aramaic:

And him who sits on the sphere of The Earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretched out the Heavens like a vaulted bowl, and stretched them out as a tent for a dwelling…

Aramaic Bible in Plain English

Why the difference? It is simply that the ancient Hebrews were stinking illiterate desert nomads, only recently freed from centuries of slavery (so it is said). Their degenerate slum slave creole had not elaborated an advanced geometric ontology and lexicon, as had other cultures long before that time. Ancient Aramaic simply had no vocabulary to differentiate geometric concepts of two dimensional and three dimensional "circles," much as the notion of a hypersphere didn't exist until the 20th century.

Hence, a two dimensional circle and three dimensional ‘circle’ are the same word in ancient Aramaic. So if someone won’t learn math, geometry, logic, and reason, they can at least learn how to have a sane perspective about the scriptures. When you learn about ancient languages and especially about translations with doctrinal assumptions imposed on their interpretation, you find that assertions that the bible declares that the earth is not a globe are not justified.

Centuries before the Western Age of Enlightenment, while Europe was practically reverted to cave-dwelling serfdom, the Arab world already had astronomy, algebra, geometry, and advanced architecture. 

Astronomy and geometry are the study of nature and of reality! 

In the mid-20th century, we began launching satellites into space that would help us determine the exact circumference of the Earth, 40,030 km. 

But over 2,000 years earlier in ancient Greece, a man arrived at nearly that exact same figure by putting a stick in the ground. That man was Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician and the head of the library at Alexandria. 

Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, a city south of Alexandria, vertical shadows were cast at noon on the summer solstice. The sun was directly overhead. He wondered if this was also true in Alexandria. 

So, on June 21 he planted a stick directly in the ground and waited to see if a shadow would be cast at noon (the highest elevation it would reach on that day). It turned out there was an oblique shadow, and it measured about 7 degrees. 

Now, if the sun's rays are coming in at the same angle at the same time of day, and a stick in Alexandria is casting a shadow while a stick in Syene is not, it must mean that the Earth's surface is curved. And Eratosthenes probably already knew that. 

The idea of a spherical Earth was floated around by Pythagoras around 500 BC (!) and validated by Aristotle a couple centuries later. If the Earth really was a sphere, Eratosthenes could use his observations to estimate the circumference of the entire planet.

BusinessInsider

Eratosthenes did that with a crude sundial clock, a stick, and geometry. I learned that when I was 12 from Carl Sagan. And yet today, grown adults are trying to use math to prove that the earth is flat without doing any experiments, without fucking around and finding out themselves!

Accurate calendars and clocks are the result of astronomy, and the means by which accurate mapping of the earth was accomplished centuries before the Europeans circumnavigated the globe.

Learn about the Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical computer that is at least 2000 years old and could predict solar and lunar eclipses. 

Learn about the Piri Reis map of the world, a 16th century map accurately depicting Africa and South America, based on a synthesis of many other maps that predate Christ. It shows the coastline of Antarctica without ice, by the way—a condition that has not existed for over 12,000 years. 

• Piri Reis Map explained by Graham Hancock

Learn about the over 200 giant pyramids around the world that permanently mark the earth’s orbital precession over a period of 25,000 years with respect to the constellations. Notably, the Giza complex is a marker for the turning of Ages aligned with Orion. There are at least four other complexes around the world with the exact same configuration.  Graham Hancock has made the case that not only was the main purpose of the pyramids to make a permanent record of astronomical climate cycles that would survive dark ages and ice ages, but that they were constructed well over 12,000 years ago, during the Age of Leo. 

So my point is that if you can’t or don’t want to learn math and physics, at least learn about clocks, calendars, maps, monuments and languages. Learn, learn, learn! Every angle of attack you take on the problem only reinforces the others. 

How many coincidences before impossible?

-Q

My final peeve with this endless and divisive bickering is that I could be doing much better things with my time. We are teetering on the very edge of a total controlled demolition of the entire world monetary system. Who is working to solve the inevitable problems that are just around the corner? This is what I would prefer to be investing my time into. Instead I am dealing with this nonsense.

Many of the same people who are debating about the shape of the earth think that buying guns, gold and bitcoin are somehow going to maintain the continuity of civilization. They are totally unprepared. Do they know how to carry on civilization without banks and debit cards and ATMs? Do they know what community currency is? Are they holding local elected officials accountable? 

No. They are trying to prove that the earth is flat! 

There are three maxims I repeat incessantly. I know they are true better than anything else:

1. Everyone is wrong about something.

2. Everything takes longer than you think it will. 

3. Truth does not require your participation in order to exist. Bullshit does.

FAFO. That is all.