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Flat Earthers
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- geo
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- brian douglas
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Re: Flat Earthers
That is just plain silly...
Everyone knows the world isn't flat, but actually a disc balanced upon four elephants which in turn stand upon the shell of The Great A'Tuin.
Geesh...
Everyone knows the world isn't flat, but actually a disc balanced upon four elephants which in turn stand upon the shell of The Great A'Tuin.
Geesh...
On the thin ice of modern life...
- Robert Tulip
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Re: Flat Earthers
I wrote a song called Flat Earth, back in the mid 80s. Here are the words.
Flat Earth
I drove from Perth to Sydney across this big country.
It went up and down in places, but it was flat as the wide blue sea.
The world is flat, The country is flat The plains are flat, Gravity what’s that?
Some people say that the world is round. How crazy is that? The people on the other side would all fall off - Bye bye England, Bye bye America
Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilee, Copernicus and Kepler and Newton -Why couldn’t you see?
The sun and the moon go round and round High up above the trees. If we lived so fast we’d all fall off. Isn’t that plain to see?
So come on out to the Western Plains and have a look round with me. Tell me if you think its flat or round, I’m sure you will agree
The world is flat, the country is flat. The plains are flat, Gravity what’s that?
I would die one thousand deaths for you Live one thousand lives. I would do anything to hold you in my arms so let your loving shine.
I would sail across the Pacific Sea just to see what I could find, And bring it home again and I’d give it all to you, so let your loving fly.
Keep on climbing through the clouds till you’re standing in the light of the sun, and shower peace and love and joy on everyone you see till you know that you are free
The world is flat, The country is flat The plains are flat, The world is round.
Flat Earth
I drove from Perth to Sydney across this big country.
It went up and down in places, but it was flat as the wide blue sea.
The world is flat, The country is flat The plains are flat, Gravity what’s that?
Some people say that the world is round. How crazy is that? The people on the other side would all fall off - Bye bye England, Bye bye America
Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilee, Copernicus and Kepler and Newton -Why couldn’t you see?
The sun and the moon go round and round High up above the trees. If we lived so fast we’d all fall off. Isn’t that plain to see?
So come on out to the Western Plains and have a look round with me. Tell me if you think its flat or round, I’m sure you will agree
The world is flat, the country is flat. The plains are flat, Gravity what’s that?
I would die one thousand deaths for you Live one thousand lives. I would do anything to hold you in my arms so let your loving shine.
I would sail across the Pacific Sea just to see what I could find, And bring it home again and I’d give it all to you, so let your loving fly.
Keep on climbing through the clouds till you’re standing in the light of the sun, and shower peace and love and joy on everyone you see till you know that you are free
The world is flat, The country is flat The plains are flat, The world is round.
- LevV
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Re: Flat Earthers
Hey Robert, how about posting a video or at least an audio clip of you singing the song. I'd love to sing it to a couple of friends who support other crazy conspiracy theories.
- Chris OConnor
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- Robert Tulip
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Re: Flat Earthers
Thanks very much Lev and Chris. Here is a basic video of me singing this song and playing guitar.LevV wrote:Hey Robert, how about posting a video or at least an audio clip of you singing the song. I'd love to sing it to a couple of friends who support other crazy conspiracy theories.
https://youtu.be/zGZhEJ6bO-I
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Sep 16, 2020 6:06 am, edited 2 times in total.
- Robert Tulip
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Re: Flat Earthers
The point of this song is to reflect on how our immediate sense perception supports flat earth theory, together with geocentric concepts like sunrise and sunset, and how the flat continental plane of Australia seems immense when you are in the middle of it. I also have an ironic dig at the old idea that people living at the antipodes must either walk on their heads or be at risk of falling off the planet like people hanging onto a ceiling.LevV wrote:Thanks for doing this, Robert. Great job. Once again, showing us more of your skills and talent!
A consequence of the Scientific Enlightenment was the denigration of this whole incorrect naive perspective. The great scientist Carl Sagan explained as the Pale Blue Dot the realisation that when our planet was photographed by the Voyager spacecraft from the other side of Saturn, humanity seems insignificant in the overall scheme of things. Sagan said "Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light."
When I wrote this song, I was exploring the idea that human existence is the only thing of significance, since significance only has meaning in relation to human goals. Until modern times, our normal family and tribal interactions with each other happened inside our visual horizon, for which the earth seems to be a flat disk, despite fancy pants observations of ships gradually sinking below the horizon. So flat earth thinking somehow validates normal experience.
Understanding the scientific realities that the earth is a globe, that it orbits the sun, and that the galaxy sits within the immensity of the cosmos, require an intellectual theory that stands in a strong and usually unrecognised psychological tension with normal everyday experience.
Irrational religious beliefs arise partly from this revolt of the normal, a sense that moral relationships require a comprehensible controlled cosmos in which our lives are at the focus. The solidity of a predictable flat earth beneath our feet seems to provide an emotional guarantee of stable order, within an enchanted universe run by God. Science has taken away that sense of magic, but in doing so has often also taken away a simple sense of meaning and purpose in life.
- Robert Tulip
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Re: Flat Earthers
Hi Brian. What makes you think the Disc World is not flat in Terry Pratchett's cosmology?brian douglas wrote:That is just plain silly... Everyone knows the world isn't flat, but actually a disc balanced upon four elephants which in turn stand upon the shell of The Great A'Tuin.
Geesh...
My view is that the turtle he describes at the bottom of the universe was originally based on observation of the Large Magellanic Cloud from southern India. From their latitude the LMC appears as a large round blob on the southern horizon, about 400 times the size of the moon.
This imaginary turtle can meaningfully be depicted as sitting at the bottom of the universe, since it is actually at the south pole of the sun, and the south celestial pole rotates around it every 25771 years. My view is that the ancient Indian astronomers accurately worked out this observation of the apparent slow motion of the south pole around the turtle at the bottom of the universe, based solely on visual astronomy conducted over a very long time.
- brian douglas
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Re: Flat Earthers
Robert Tulip wrote:Hi Brian. What makes you think the Disc World is not flat in Terry Pratchett's cosmology?
.
The Discworld... in reality is round, but due to the high concentrations of magic that is now native to the Discworld and certain activities within the Unseen University have compressed the round world into a disc... and may or may not have borne into being 3 elephants for rotational support... and maybe a giant self-aware turtle to bear the weight.
So to speak...
On the thin ice of modern life...