Water mountains are my new favorite concept

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    I think they’re onto something. In fact, these water mountains seem to be so common, it might just be one big water mountain that covers the whole planet, and is so big it eventually wraps around and meets itself at the bottom.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      No no no. That would NEVER work! See, what’s actually happening is the lizardmen are driving these ships, and taking them to the pirate ports where they sell everything. Thats when they buy evrn MORE drugs, and Steve said I can have some of the drugs. So I started eating these gummies, but it turns out they’re just regular gummy bears. They’re still good though. I would trade you some of my gummy bears for some actual gummies, but I have misplaced my pants…

    • rockyTron@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yep. This is due to variations in the gravitational magnitude at any point from the earth, moon, sun, and other bodies, as well as the periodicity of the earth/moon/sun rotations interacting with friction (between the sea and the sea, the sea and the atmosphere, and the sea and the lithosphere), and creating a giant standing wave (which is constantly changing, like an instrument or a musical composition) of ocean water all over the earth. This doesn’t even take into account atmospheric pressure and water temperature/viscosity variations. The earth is a complex system with waves upon waves upon waves of interacting coupled oscillations all interfering with each other. Whoa 😳

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          Phytoplankton produce 50-85% of all the oxygen on Earth, and cyanobacteria did even more before them. Before all this free oxygen could float around in the air, all the metals in the ocean had to be oxidized, which is where the massive banded iron formations come from, and then all the minerals in the crust had to oxidize too. Every layer of Earth’s surface was radically changed by this, taking a billion years and likely prompting the evolution of eukaryotes.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        like an instrument or a musical composition) of ocean water all over the earth.

        Somebody way better at music should find a way to turn that into music.

      • sinkingship@mander.xyz
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        5 months ago

        And more. Major river discharge can raise the sea level in the area. Then big circular currents similar like when you stirr your cup of coffee or tea. Or chocolate milk 🤤

    • vaionko
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      5 months ago

      Isn’t that how tides work? The hills move? I’m probably all wrong

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        5 months ago

        It’s all about gravity and then some.

        The tides and ordinary waves caused by wind will appear as moving hills.

        The daily tides happen from the moon pulling the water towards the line between the moon and earth. This forms the tides that go around the globe everyday. It happens on both sides of the globe, like this:

        picture of tides

        The topological map shows something else than tides and moving waves though.

        The globe isn’t perfectly round. It’s shaped like an irregular geoid, almost shaped like an ellipsoid, but not exactly. The ocean surface topological map takes the usual tides in account and maps the surface in relation to the geoid, so it shows where the water level is higher or lower than it would be if it was perfectly distributed.

        The earth’s gravitational field is not perfectly regular, so it will pull more water towards certain areas, and there are things like ocean currents and the regular trade winds happening from Earth’s rotation, all shaping the sea in hills and valleys that are not just waves. These variations span large areas and doesn’t appear as much in relation to the tides. It basically just goes to show that sea level is not at all level. For instance, the east coast of USA has a higher sea level than the west coast. If sea levels should rise from melting ice, it is therefore more likely to spill over the east coast than the west coast.

  • douglasg14b@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    This is what fundamental scientific illiteracy gets you.

    When you have no reference point for how the world around you works anything makes sense.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      Flat earthers 10 years ago in school: “when am I ever going to need to know the difference between a plane and a sphere in the real world?!”

    • courval@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Nah it’s just trolling and people like you overreacting and feeding the social media machine, Zuck et al. love it

  • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    They have to be trolling, right? There’s no way a flat earther thinks water can bend like that.

  • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    I believe in water mountain. Just one of it. And it’s round. That’s why ships always disappear the same distance away if your height is the same, and why they disappear further away if you’re higher up, again with a predictable relationship. The water mountain surrounds two thirds of the earth, and goes all the way around the round earth.

  • IndiBrony@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I don’t think this guy got the memo: the flat earth argument is that water finds its own level. “Large bodies of water don’t curve” as they say.

    They believe that the ships don’t actually disappear and that the strong zoom of a Nikon P1000 can actually bring ships back from behind the “curve”.

    They’re a very special set of people 👍

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      I’m imagining you ruining your players’ suspension of disbelief by including something that real people in the real world really believe.

      • Glemek@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I hope it doesn’t! I hope they see it or hear of it and are intrigued. Maybe they wonder if something exciting is going on there, and want to check it out.

        Idk yet, but they’re probably resulting from a leak from the elemental plane of water, or a leyline nexus or something there and water magic is stronger there and so there is a flotilla of wizards trying to study it under the harsh conditions. Or it could be a hole in the world and somewhere else there is a big whirlpool, and the wrecks get spit out at the top of the water mountain and there is a whole culture of salvagers who explore the turbulence and dive for treasures. Maybe an empire of sea elves has been magically growing it for decades with the intention of using it as a weaponized tsunami so they can raid and conquer farther inland. I love irl conspiracy shit like this that asks more questions than it answers, because in a fantasy setting the answers get to be cool.

  • John Richard@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I have never met a flat earther, but if I did and she was hot I’d see what else I could convince her to believe.

  • Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    There’s a simple reason why you have to make up water mountains to picture the horizon:

    Scale issue.

  • fckreddit@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    I refuse to accept ships disappear behind something because I have never seen a ship disappear behind anything.

    • davidagain@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      In my extensive experience of watching ships (I live near the coast and near a nationally significant port), I find that by the time they’re far enough away to be disappearing, they’re also small, indistinct and hazy. I can’t honestly tell you that in many years of looking, I’ve ever seen a clear cut case of the bottom of the ship disappearing before the top. It’s all very indistinct indeed.

      If you want to convince flat earthers, the ship past the horizon thing isn’t going to do it.

      • Wolf314159@startrek.website
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        5 months ago

        There is no convincing them through any kind of logic or observation. The logical proof of the shape and size of the earth is remarkably simple and straightforward, with math any trigonometry or geometry student could prove on their own. Eratosthenes did it a few thousand years ago with observations from a deep well and the shadow of a vertical rod a significant and measureable distance apart on the same day at the same time. These are simple and direct observations that anyone could make and repeat themselves. If Eratosthenes proof isn’t clear enough to them, nothing will be.

        There was even a documentary in which self professed flat-earthers performed a variation of this experiment with some careful arrangement of a laser over a large lake. Unsurprisingly, they did measure the curvature of the earth (with much less precision than Eratosthenes), but they still couldn’t accept the results.

        • davidagain@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I think we both agree that if someone really doesn’t want to believe something, they’ll disregard things that conflict with their world view.

          What I suspect we’ll disagree on is the extent to which everyone, very much including those of us who consider ourselves rational and sensible and at the science-trusting end of debates, form our beliefs about reality via an almost exclusively social and societal process of parental beliefs, teacher beliefs, peer beliefs, reading on and offline, and interaction with others. Not through experiment. Rarely through actual evidence. Mainly through believing other people who we think are telling the truth or better informed than us.

          This is the context for my point about the ships over the horizon thing. It’s not even very convincing evidence to someone who already believes the conclusion and sees a lot of ships sail away.

          • Wolf314159@startrek.website
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            5 months ago

            Stop trolling me by trying to blur the line between scientific processes and social belief structures. Claiming that I don’t also apply logic and scientific thinking to analyze my own beliefs is also petty rage-bait, as if epistemology hasn’t also existed for a very long time.

            Nope, not getting into with a long-winded blowhard confusing belief with objective observation and dead simple geometry. This is the same rhetoric used by the new fascists to shout down science. Being polite and pretending to be genuine doesn’t mean you’re not a troll.

            • davidagain@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Honestly, I’m not trying to troll you at all. We all come across people who believe crazy stuff, but if you genuinely want to persuade people, recognise where they’re coming from.

              I have some important questions for you if you honestly believe that your belief system was arrived at by the empirical process:

              Firstly, think about that rather bold claim and compare it with how many things you believe are true and how much rigorous empiricism you’ve engaged with yourself, personally. (You can’t count any times when you just trusted someone else who claimed it by appeal to authority, a well-known logical fallacy, because that would be both a social source of belief and literally illogical.)

              Secondly, what counts as correct science and what counts as bogus science, and by what means is that decided? What process decides which information goes where? Who makes the decisions and why are they the ones who do?

              Thirdly, how do you, personally find out about that stuff? How many journals do you read regularly? How many things written by the people who saw the evidence did you ever actually read? Who wrote the things you did and do read, and why do you believe them?

              Claiming that I don’t also apply logic and scientific thinking to analyze my own beliefs is also petty rage-bait, as if epistemology hasn’t also existed for a very long time.

              I’m honestly very skeptical of how much self reflection you put into how you know what you know given that my claim that pretty much everyone comes to their beliefs about the world through social interactions (rather than via experiment and direct evidence) is so new to you that it made you angry. Yes, epistemology has been around a long time, but you simply can’t have studied Philosophy of Science and be flabbergasted by what I’m suggesting. It’s another example of you trusting someone else and believing their conclusions without going into it all on detail and questioning it for yourself. Before you get cross about that too, please read the next paragraph.

              No one can read it all. No one can repeat even a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of the experiments. You can’t be an expert in all branches of science and philosophy even if you tried. You can’t even begin to read it all. So you take it on trust. This isn’t bad. It’s sensible. It’s how you were (correctly) brought up - trust what your teachers tell you about science, because your parents, who you trusted implicitly before you even walked through the door of preschool, brought you up that way, because they believed those sources of belief before you did.

              If the New York Times claimed that some professors at Cornell had found a tweak of relativity that removed the need for a theory of dark matter or dark energy because it matches the observed mass and expansion of the universe, and that the new theory also removed the inconsistency between relativity and quantum mechanics, you would likely believe it, especially if other papers ran with the same story and clever people you know told you more details having read a write up in the New Scientist magazine.

              And yet by the same process, we knew that Pons and Fleishman had attained nuclear fusion in the lab. How did we subsequently know that it was bogus? By the same social process. Hundreds of millions of people changed their beliefs about the world twice. A handful of people did something empirical.

              None of this is bad. But don’t assume that an appeal to examine evidence that you haven’t investigated yourself is going to convince a sceptic. They think they’re being more rigorous than you. They weren’t brought up to believe teachers or they weren’t brought up to trust “scientists”. You won’t convince them with the same appeals to scientific authority that work on you.

      • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Really? I’ve seen it firsthand quite often. It’s very obvious when you’re in a kayak, because you’re so low to the water.