"Over a long time-scale, the Earth acts like a highly viscous fluid," says Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Today the Earth is mostly solid with a liquid outer core, but when the planet was forming, some 4.5 billion years ago, it was very hot and behaved like more like a fluid-and was subject to the squishing effects of gravity.Īnd yet, the Earth isn't a perfect sphere it bulges slightly at the equator. That's not the case with any other shape-some part of the material will be more than 5 inches from the center of the mass. No part of the mass is more than 5 inches from the center. Say, for example, you have a sphere of modeling clay that is exactly 10 inches in diameter. All of that pulling makes an object as compact as it can be, and nothing is more compact than a sphere. These objects, and billions of others, have the same shape because of gravity, which pulls everything toward everything else. Not every celestial body is a sphere, but round objects are common in the universe: In addition to Earth and all other known large planets, stars and bigger moons are also ball-shaped. To say the evidence is overwhelming is an understatement. There is zero doubt about this fact in the real, round world. "Theories" abound on YouTube, and the flat-Earth Facebook page has some 194,000 followers. Hughes isn't alone in his misguided belief: Remarkably, thousands of years after the ancient Greeks proved our planet is a sphere, the flat-Earth movement seems to be gaining momentum. For the cost of his rocket stunt ($20,000), Hughes could have easily flown around the world on a commercial airliner at 35,000 feet. He fell back to Earth with minor injuries after reaching 1875 feet-not even as high as the tip of One World Trade Center. According to The Washington Post, Hughes thought they were "merely paid actors performing in front of a computer-generated image of a round globe."
It didn't matter that astronauts like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong had been to space and verified that the Earth is round Hughes didn't believe them. The plan: Strap himself to a homemade steam-powered rocket and launch 52 miles into sky above California’s Mojave Desert, where he'd see Earth's shape with his own eyes. On March 24, 2018, flat-earther Mike Hughes set out prove that the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee.
0 kommentar(er)
