Flat-Earther tries to fly in home-built rocket, crash-lands, dies.

[DetlefK]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/22/us/science-channel-mike-hughes-dead/index.html

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The problem is not Flat-Earthers per se. Have your weird ideas, nobody cares. The problem is, that there is a whole economy dedicated to taking advantage of this people. Professional conspiracy-theorists, professional science-deniers, professional contrarians who attack anybody voicing the establishment-position of a topic. If there is a consensus on a topic, they are against this consensus.

Normal conspiracy-theorists, sovereign-citizens, Flat-Earthers, anti-vaxxers and whatnot have (fairly well understood) psychological reasons for believing what they believe. But there are people who PRETEND to believe this for money, for clicks on their websites, for views on Youtube, for selling merchandise, for donations.

There are whole shadow-societies out there on the internet, echo-chambers, where people come together to indulge in their own version of reality. They have their own understanding of how mathematics work, how the laws of physics, chemistry and biology work, how the legal system works... And these echo-chambers, run and hyped by con-artists, encourage people in their delusions!!!

For example, the famous Youtube Flat-Earther Anthony Riley kept insisting that 5 divided by 0 is 5, using some word-play as his argument.
Another famous Youtube Flat-Earther, Nathan Oakley, failed to convert meters to kilometers and got irate, shouting vile insults, when people tried to correct him.
Another famous Youtube Flat-Earther, going by the handle "Phuket Word", keeps making claims about geometry that can be debunked in less than 5 minutes with a piece of paper, a pencil and a ruler.
Just the other day the Youtube Flat-Earther going by the handle "JM Truth" was asked how he can deny the science. He responded that scientists don't know how the scientific method works.



And these people have this delusion that they know what they are talking about, that they know more about science and engineering than the people who actually study this stuff. They attack calculations as trickery, as "mathemagic", and ridicule cartesic coordinate-systems as "Muppet vision".






For years, the Flat-Earther "Mad" Mike Hughes wanted to fly to a high altitude in a home-made rocket to see whether the horizion is curved. A few years ago, a journalist asked him, how he can be so sure that that won't get him killed. He answered that rocket-science is not as tricky as it's made out to be.

And now he's dead.

And you can bet your bottom-dollar that there will be conspiracy-theories how NASA killed him to keep him from proving that Earth is flat.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

1. Being an asshole should be illegal. n/t

[Shermann]

2. Trump has normalized science-denying

It used to be in the shadows. Now it's mainstream.

[Voltaire2]

3. Actually 5 is as good an answer as any.

Divide by zero has no defined result.

[Ghost Dog]

4. To be fair, the steam 'rocket' did fly.

But there was a little parachute problem (it fell off at launch). Two parachutes deployed correctly during the previous test. Investigators might want to look into possible causes for the inconsistency?

[GeorgeGist]

5. 2 is better than one?

(it fell off at launch)

[Ghost Dog]

6. I'd want three, and an inflatable bubble...

I only saw one fall off.

[packman]

7. I KNOW the earth isn't flat

If it was, over the past few millenniums, all the cats would have knocked everything over the sides.

[Midnight Writer]

8. Mad Mike could have just took a ride in a plane. Or sent up a balloon with a Go-Pro.

I think Mike just wanted to ride a rocket. Flat Earth was just his excuse.

[Dr. Strange]

9. Damn.

If you can't trust a flat-earther to understand rocket science, who can you trust?

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. It looks like he "converted" to a flat earth to get funding

He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for the longest limousine jump - over 31 metres (103 ft) in a Lincoln Town Car stretched limo.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51602655

Still, Hughes converted to the flat-Earth belief recently, shortly after his first fundraising campaign for the rocket earned just $310 of its $150,000 goal. His second campaign, this time posted after his conversion and with the support of the flat-Earth community, succeeded in hitting its $7,875 goal.

"I've been a believer for maybe almost a year. I researched it for several months in between doing everything else — you know, I've still got to make a living and all that kind of stuff, and building this rocket actually eats up a lot of my time," he told the flat-Earth Web show. "But when I'm not doing that, I research things."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/22/565926690/i-dont-believe-in-science-says-flat-earther-set-to-launch-himself-in-own-rocket