At the end of the documentary “beyond the curve” the flat earthers manage to get enough money together to buy a gyro laser to prove the earth isn’t spinning. It costed the 20.000 dollars. The found out the earth was spinning constantly. They said needed time to come up with an explanation why this would be happening when the earth was flat, but in no way they thought “maybe we were wrong after all”.
I just showed that to my girlfriend for the first time. It’s pretty fascinating. It’s pretty clear how many of these people just yearn for community and are just kinda too weird or crazy. But also some of them just want to be right about someting and be smarter than everyone else. Whenecer you see their experiments in tge documentary or on youtube or wherever, it’s fascinating how they are clearly smart enough to come up with that stuff, but not smart enough or too.stubborn to draw the right conclusion. Some of them might just ve truly masterful trolls.
It’s bizarre they know enough science to be able to prove the Earth is round, but then ignore it anyway.
That doc showed the whole flat earth movement appeared to be one guy’s attempts to get into a milfy redhead’s pants. Poor guy was like a little lost puppy.
I also like when they got a light to shine through 2 holes and the distance they were at required them to elevate the camera because of the curve of the earth
Haha yeah! Actually I doubt they believe the earth is flat, I got the feeling it’s more an excuse for outcasts to unite and feel unity, the “us against the world” thing. Like: “If no one accepts me, I’ll just go all the way into weirdness and find others who are also not accepted, so we won’t have to be alone. Let our thing be so damn weird and stupid, no accepted person would dare to join us.”
But that’s just my hypothesis after watching this docu and some other stuff about and from them.
But there are some fanatics that actually believe it, but I think they need mental help because they strike as people having a constant psychosis. Even the general group finds them weird and extreme.
It’s really sad.
Just some context: Ancient Aliens is racist. It’s roots are literally Nazi.
You see, it’s only achievements in brown countries that need alien help. The Greeks didn’t need ET for the Colosseum, heavens no. We just scratch our head at Africans or Americans building pyramids and stuff.
In the 30s, Nazi “researchers” believed in something I’ll call “Ancient Aryans” which is exactly the same as Ancient Aliens except it’s pure Germans who are visiting these primitive cultures and raising architecture. What happened to the Germans? They were annihilated by in-breeding with locals of course.
I’ll take this opportunity to shill for one of my favorite content creators, Miniminuteman, who just so happens to have a video debunking Ancient Aliens (two parter actually)
Googledebunkers unite!
It is both surprising and completely expected that Milo would have fans that not only are active in Lemmy, but also commenting in a science-based community
Even if Nazis believed in Ancient Aliens as some sort of weird ubermensch theory, that doesn’t make the idea itself racist at all.
People are fascinated by aliens. Before aliens people tended to attribute giant structures to gods and spirits when they lost the historical records. You don’t need racism to believe in crazy fantasy ideas, you just need to be a bit too credulous.
The Nazis doing something isn’t the best argument of it not being racist
Correct.
The inverse is just as true; Nazis doing something doesn’t mean that it IS racist.
Hitler was a vegetarian. That doesn’t make a vegetarian diet racist.
Hitler didn’t smoke. That doesn’t make smoking antifa.
I never understood this. Any measurement you do with a wheel you could do with a line of length equal to the circumference. So whether they knew about pi or not is irrelevant?
You’re doing a measurement, and using a wheel to measure. There’s a mark on the wheel, so that one turn = one unit of measure. So if all of your measurements are x turns of the wheel, then all of your measurements will be x/pi.
So mathematicians studying it will discover the measurements are all some multiple of pi. Journalists unlucky enough to have to write about this stuff know like 1 thing about archeology but like 2 things about math and 10000000 things about sensationalism, so they write articles about the one thing they know about archaology, the two things they know about math, and the 10000000 things they know about writing a sensationalist article, rinse repeat.
mathematicians studying it will discover the measurements are all some multiple of pi.
Only if you measured it in wheel-lengths… In meters it would just be an arbitrary number
The ratios will still apply
Yes but the ratio to the wheel radius. So unless you know that, the circumference is just an arbitrary length
It isn’t just a single linear measurement, it would be multiple measurements. Also they weren’t using meter circumference wheels, the wheels would be, to us, some arbitrary standard that would be revealed when dividing the two lengths by pi.
I think the point of the post re: the tired paleontologist is that the pi-related ratio just isn’t that interesting, Ancient Aliens uses math to mystify the subject, not make it simpler to understand. So I think the thing youre hung up on is the point of the post. It just isn’t that interesting of an insight if you understand the math, but of you present it a certain way, youre like selling the idea that ancient civilization had access to abstractions (like pi) that maybe didn’t “exist” for ancient civilizations. But when you think if it in terms of practical applications, you realize that the tools and the work that people were doing didn’t require exactness of abstraction, just exactness of practical function.
Ancient Egyptians did have a concept of pi, but to them it was 22/7, which is more than close enough for any practical application. Pi is 3.1415… and 22/7 is 3.142. They didn’t need that exact of a figure to build a pyramid, their calculations were as good or better than our engineers use in practical application. Civilizations that are around for thousands of years end up figuring shit out when they try to do stuff. We use mathematics to plan, and so did they; but to build something you don’t need someone who has memorized pi, you just need engineers with practical experience building things. Ancient civilizations had that, their tools contained their methods of abstraction, even in rare cases their books did not.
But Ancient Aliens never imagines real people with real experiences, it assumes stupidity and brutishness in its subject, when actually they are objectively stupid and brutal. You’re confusing rationality for sensationalism, which I appreciate imagining the world as being more rational than it is.
Wheels are always a fraction of pi. Whether you like it or not. Lengths of string can be arbitrary, but a circle’s dimensions are always tightly related to and proportional to pi in some way. I also recall that wheel measurements are more precise for large scale building because, unlike rope, leather and cloth, a wooden wheel doesnt stretch. Two wheels made similar will stay more between a much tighter error factor than two pieces of rope. The rope might start at the same length but will deform differently as they are used.
Because this was how you did geometry and math in general in ancient times even till around year 500. The biggest problem was to easily construct exact angles. because it is rly hard to construct a triangle ruler with old materials. but a circle can be constructed with a pencil and a string and with 2 circles you can easily construct exact angles.
I believe they are talking about how the base/height ratio of one of the pyramids is very close to pi
When I realized that the whole Ancient Aliens bullshit was written by a butthurt Dane who has no real contribution to the civilization other than white supremacy as pseudoscience, that whole conspiracy theory became easier to debunk.
When I tried to figure out who the “Dane” is, and so far it seems you mean Erich von Däniken, whom is not Danish but Swiss.
Holy hell I was misinformed then, I’m really sorry.
No worries - we do have some weirdo’s here
