"Mad" Mike Hughes

Mad???.......why wouldn't he just rent a plane, he could get much higher, and wouldn't have to risk his life in the process....because he's insane!...this man is obviously incapable of logical thought, he should be institutionalised for his own protection....

The irony is that he could not prove the earth was flat by flying up in the air, only that is was not flat.

You can barely discern the curvature of the earth at 35000 feet with a wide angle photograph, but you could send a GoPro camera up in a balloon and reach a high enough altitude to see the curvature.

(Even then, spherical aberration might make the horizon looked curved when it was not...)

Of course, he didn't want to prove the flat-earthers were wrong, not after they helped pay for it.

Who said, " There's a madness to their method ".

Those that said earth was round first, were termed eccentric. Now is turn of the round eggs, to call fat earth earners, eccentric. OK. With so many photographs from above, we may have to accept the sperocity of Earth and other planets, but I am with my friend in one aspect. THere could be water on moon. A photograph of moon looks very similar to earth with its vast surface reservoirs.

Every body has a right to think, the way he wants to.

THere could be water on moon. A photograph of moon looks very similar to earth with its vast surface reservoirs.

Actually, there is a little bit of water on the moon, either bound up in the minerals or as ice in the permanently dark craters near the poles. Free water on the sunlit surface would be disassociated by the solar radiation and the hydrogen would escape the moon's gravity.

But the "seas" are dry, dusty plains, according to the guys that have walked around up there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_water

If direct radiation from the sun (the same radiation as that, earth is exposed to) could dissociate water to Hydrogen and oxygen, then, what prevents us from exposing our water reserves, may be saline, to solar radiation and get hydrogen and oxygen, in the process ?

Dissociation, or electrolysis is not that simple.

I think he meant desublimation. In a low pressure environment water is either gas or solid, no liquid water is possible. On the Moon water would rapidly boil away to a gas and the tiny droplets would become solid, probably not visible to the naked eye.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/06/29/water-in-space-what-happens/

No, he is just independent, and obviously doesn't believe anything he is told or has read. You get a few of these characters in each generation.

If he hurts himself, so what, as long as it doesn't affect others.

You can laugh at him, or with him, but he's not certifiable, just different. Accept him for what he is. We don't get enough eccentrics the way we used to.

The eccentrics of old worked on the cutting edge of new knowledge, not in the bowels of stupidity....

The Wright bros....Robert Fulton....http://listamaze.com/10-famous-people-eccentric/...

In that rocket (steam powered, if I read correctly) he wouldn't have time to take a panoramic photo at the apex of his trajectory, so the only thing I could imagine would be a photo taken with a fish-eye lens, which makes all flat objects appear curved - exactly the opposite of what he was trying to do!

Something tells me he would use a Polaroid Instamatic

Responding to some:

Institutionalized? Why? He won't prove science wrong in this case (though I teach my students that "Settled" and "Science" don't belong in the same sentence, some Science IS more sure than others. Not going there, now, but, just saying, is all!), and if he lives or dies happy, it is HIS choice. He isn't deliberately (that is, with personal malice aforethought) killing himself (i.e., committing suicide) so why stop him? He IS enjoying himself, or so he says. Don't take that away from him.

And "the depths of stupidity"? Since when? He chooses not to believe what society believes, and for that we call him stupid, or insane, and threaten his freedom? Don't ask any student to ever take a second look at what is accepted dogma on any subject, if you don't want our youth to throw that back in your faces.

And the places in life where unorthodoxy is useful, or even necessary, and often life-saving, go to far to enumerate here. But surgery and general medicine, robotics, flight, military tactics, international trade and coordination, as well as statesmanship, are all places we have seen in the last 10 years (IF we open our eyes and look, without regard to politics and what we LIKE) great gains made.

Sure, failures tend to be spectacular, but as I ALSO tell my students, we don't learn much from the success that is formularized as:

1. I wonder if, or I posit that:

2. I tested my thought, and:

3. Yep, it's just as I thought:

4. Moving on.

More, we learn from the spectacular failures that make us pick ourselves up, sift through the wreckage, re-read our and other's documentation, and figure out what went wrong.

It may be apocryphal, and I wasn't there to hear it, so I don't know, but I have heard that Thomas Edison said "I didn't fail the first 1,000 trials to build a light bulb. I learned 999 ways that don't work!" Smart man, I'd say. Of course I wouldn't be the first to say so, either.

Come on, anybody that seriously believes the Earth is flat, is also likely to have other thoughts not so harmless...Like everybody with dark hair is an alien that must be destroyed...what will you say then? maybe he's right?!? I understand a lot of this flat Earth stuff is tongue in cheek, at least I hope it is, but you have to draw the line someplace, and that someplace is when lives are in danger...Now if the guy just wants to play daredevil that's fine...but even then it's in a carefully controlled environment with numerous safety precautions in place....I'll admit I don't know all the details of this story, and the fact that the rocket actually functioned as intended does lend some credence that the guy isn't totally bonkers...but I'm getting tired of all this the Earth is flat crap, and I think enough is enough....somebody is going to try this and fail horribly then another government conspiracy yarn will start....which is how these things always go...

Sometimes, I think folks like this just enjoy getting people all fired up. I'm sure he's having a great time.

Well, it sounds to ME like he was having a lot of fun at the time. Of course he did say he probably wouldn't be able to get out of bed the next morning. But sometimes I can't either, and I'm thankful for the extra sleep.

"...and from there it's turtles all the way down."

?????. . . . I must have missed something important to the discussion. If anything is important to THIS discussion, that is. But I WOULD like to know what I missed, if only so I could be more educat.... Oh, forget it. Just fill me in. I need all the laughs I can get. K?

From the diskworld series by Pratchett.

The world is a disk on the backs of four elephants that in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle. In one book a lady is asked what's under the turtle and her reply was that from there it's turtles all the way down.

It's also useful to note that in the first couple of books, the scientific question of the day was whether the turtle was a boy or a girl.

Never read the series. Sci-Fi? Sci-Fi humor? Your take. I know I could Google it, but unfortunately for Google, their take is usually what they are told it should be, since I doubt they ever read/review anything they tout.

Definitely sci-fi humor with heavy political sarcasm. On about a par with the six books in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. The six books of the trilogy have been taken as irrefutable proof that 1+1+1=6.

"Nunc is visis, Nunc non visis" is the motto of the magicians guild, translated as, "Now you see it, now you don't." The City Watch moto is "Fabricati Diem, Punc", or, "Make my day, Punk." Recommend that you read it and judge for yourself.

Hmmmm. I might, but I usually read sci-fi purely for the entertainment, and living too close to Washington, DC for the last 38 years, I can tell you, Poly-Ticks are not entertaining. OTOH, they are, as defined by their name, many blood-sucking and disgusting parasitic insects.

Nonetheless, I might still get around to reading them sometime. Thanks for the clarification.

I had a friend who read Hitchhikers Guide on a treadmill who started laughing so hard she fell off. Be careful out there.

It's hard to compete with Elon Musk!

Of course the earth is flat. Even the mythology of our language proves it.

How indeed, could one go to; "The four corners of the Earth" if it were round?

The four corners of the globe? <b>HARRUMPH</b>

Purrrrrr.... Marum.(Die nüchtern Katze)

Well, he did it. The good news is he didn't take anyone with him.

Some people just cannot accept being wrong.