Introducing suityou01

Hello folks,

I am a UK resident who frequents the local Stand In The Park (SITP) and one of our members is a Flat Earther. I have long parked the flat earth debate as something to look into later, and it seems that now is the time that I am ready and have the time to look into this more formally. That said, I would have to say that any preliminary enquiries and or questions I have posed have left me rather nonplussed. For example I have enquired how satellites work and been told they hang in the stratosphere from balloons.

I try to keep an open mind, and am always respectful of other viewpoints, but I have to confess that my initial viewpoint is leaning towards skeptic, almost certainly because of these initial interactions. That is not to say that I am disparaging of the SITP member, who earnestly believes what they are telling me, it's just that I cannot go there mentally or intellectually without further proof.

My initial round of questions were around how do satellites and the ISS work? What flightpath does the ISS take? How does the Perseid meteor shower work? What happens if you fly in a straight line until you reach the edge, do you end up in outer space?

So you get where I am coming from, I hope? I thought maybe I could join here and ask my quesions (and search for answers already given so as not to waste people's time) without haranguing my more SITP member.

Nice to meet you all.

Suity

Hello suity, welcome to the FES.

We had a friend once, let’s call him Daz.

Daz was a great bloke, he didn’t excel at school but wasn’t a dunce. I believe now he would have been diagnosed with a thing and dosed up and had an excuse not to do stuff but back in the day he was given a spanner and he turned into a decent mechanic.

All that aside, when we got older and started branching out and going on holidays abroad, Daz came it’s always handy having a mechanic when you are driving through Scandinavia in a Ford consul and a Moto Guzzi and he was still a great bloke.

The problem with Daz became apparent on our third holiday but had been brewing on the first two.

Holiday 1, he’d nearly fallen of a barge in a lock after losing control because he abandoned the helm to go for a piss.

Holiday 2, He was nearly buried in an avalanche after deciding to go the prohibited route down the mountain because it looked cleaner.

And holiday 3 wasn’t away, we went camping in Swithland woods about twenty miles up the road because it was autumn, lovely and it was the season for Fly Agaric mushrooms, and they grow there under the Silver Birch.

In the middle of the wood is an old granite quarry, that has signs all around it saying Danger to life do not enter, not only that but I knew one of the rangers that looked after the place and he’d told me why it was dangerous (and about the mushrooms), the sides are shear for a while and then it opens out like a flask, being in a wood it is murky with all the rotting leaf matter and being 50 meters deep (165 feet), below about 6 foot it is very, very cold, on top of this the sides rise up a further 15 foot on three sides and the jump off those sides will plunge you below that level and people have died from that shock and never resurfaced, apparently some of them are still down there.

Off course this is a story you pass on to your fellow campers, both for its interest value and as a salutary tale, the next morning I woke up to a bit of a kafuffle, came out of the tent and Daz was standing there wet getting a roasting from our resident serious person, it turns out not only had Daz gone for a swim, he’d jumped off the steep sides to get in because the walk in part had razor wire on the gate, when we all said didn’t you hear the story Jura told, he said, “Yeah but I proved him wrong.”

If you stay here any time at all you will meet a lot of Daz’s.