What's the deal with the flat earth society? It's a joke right? They do believe the earth looks round?

from a distance....Tell me it's a joke?
If not, well, some rich guy can take their president on a commercial space trip within the next 10-15 yrs...

Gino, wtf is a window licker...isn't it someone who loves shopping?

They are making a trek to the edge in the near future.
They have a lot of rappelling equipment.
They intend to go down as far as they can so they can debunk all the round earth believers.
Who and where they are going is a highly kept secret.
There is a bunch of guys with nets looking for them.
So there!

Round earth is just propagada. Dont believe everything you have read.

Sorry ... real ! Read all about 'em.

http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonsk...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_...

Yea they are real, and have joined the ranks of all the other idiots

Yes, they are real. But then, so are the creationists. Neither group is particularly good at the sciences.

It's not a joke. They seriously believe the world is flat. They're lunatics.

Then again, it doesn't seem so ridiculous when you consider how many people STILL don't believe in evolution....

Whats the deal with people who believe a man parted the Red Sea, a man took two of each animal on earth on a boat, a man walked on the water, turned water into wine, talked to a donkey, raised a dead person to life without medical science, and stopped the sun in the sky to finish a battle? They're for real and hope to change the science curriculum in schools across America some day!

I think it's a joke now. Have a look at their website - the style's much lighter than other conspiracy sites.

For a lot of the people in the Flat Earth Society, they are using it as a point of argument and to practice debating skills. Arguing a rediculous postion can give good practice in debate. It also helps to explain to a lot of students why something as simple and obvious as 'the world is round' can be difficult to argue and makes them question / explain just why they believe it. A lot of people find they have a hard time explaining something that simple and makes them question their own other beliefs to make sure they are correct. The Flat Earthers also show how a rediculous or 'what if' argument can always be brought up to argue scientific fact, but that doesn't mean that 'what if' scenario is as credible as real science.

The Flat Earth Society is an important tool of rhetoric, scientific teaching, and debate. Most people don't realize that the people arguing aren't just wingnuts...they are trying to make people think about the things they accept as a given.

I'm sure there are some people who still believe the world is flat, similar to how the Intelligent Design movement has people who believe it 100% though. There are people who believe anything you can imagine, and some things that if they explained it to you would have you scratching your head and saying 'wow, that's really out there'.

Yes there is a flat Earth Society. They probably don't have much of a clue about what they believe, other than that they have been told that Earth is flat and the Moon landings (providing information that the Earth is not flat) must be a hoax. And hoax stories are very popular right now, given the present political context...

No, they are not very good at science.

Their 'president' died a while ago (they could have elected a new one since then) and the group is no longer as organised as it used to be. Like any other group held together by a 'belief against evidence', they are far more interested in control over young minds than in the truth. Long-time members are also eager to prove themselves right, otherwise they must accept that they have been wrong all these years (and that is very difficult for humans to accept).

Some creationists are better at science (that does not make them correct, of course). However, they suffer from what I call the Galileo syndrome: Galileo was arguing against a group that held Earth as the centre of the Universe and everything orbits Earth. Galileo was promoting Kepler's system where the Sun was at the centre of the Solar System and planets orbited the Sun, not the Earth.

Galileo's "proof"? He found moons orbiting Jupiter. This is a proof that not everything orbits Earth. Galileo made the mistake of thinking that just because he found a flaw in the other theory, that instantly made his theory correct.

They could have both been wrong. If anything, Galileo's proof could have been used to create a new model where everything orbits Jupiter. It is, after all, the biggest planet and it was named after the chief-god of the Greek mythology (Jupiter is the latin name of Zeus). In Greek mythology, Helios (Sun-god) sometimes asked Zeus for favors, not the other way around.

As it turns out, Kepler's theory was far better, but that had nothing to do with Jupiter's moons.

Creationists work the same way. They find flaws with other theories (in itself, that is part of any valid scientific approach -- no theory is perfect and finding flaws help us make theories better), but they use those flaws as proof that their theory is better, even though the flaw may have nothing to do with the issue.

For example, looking at magma flows and trying to determine the age of rocks, one sometimes find contradicting results: according to this sample, the rock is at least 2 billion years old but according to the other sample of the same rock, it cannot be more than 1 billion years old. The correct scientific conclusion: at least one sample is wrong or the theory on how to determine that rock's age is wrong.

The creationist conclusion: therefore the rock is 6000 years old.

These are the same people who first said the Apollo missions were faked. But they went farther than just saying the landings were fake, they said the whole space program was fake. When I was watching the live TV coverage of Apollo 8, and they showed the first live TV picture of Earth as a whole globe in space, Walter Cronkite said something like, there you see it, the Earth is really round, but he also said that the flat Earth society was claiming that we were being hoodwinked by NASA. That was 1968, and there are apparently still such people around. As far as I know, they are serious about it. Certainly the people who claim the Moon landings were fake are serious.

they're a bunch of window lickers!!!


....
only a window licker would have to ask what one is...
it's another word for the term coined by Carlos Mencia... "dee-dee-dee"