The Pnictogen Wing

@pnictogen-wing

they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)

The Pnictogen Wing @pnictogen-wing10/22/2023, 3:14 AM

do flat-Earthers have a coherent notion of what the SKY is?

I've never had the courage to dive into that stuff myself, but I've always wondered how they dealt with the stars. it doesn't seem like they could accept the generally accepted notion that they're objects at effectively infinite distance from the Earth, because then how could you account for different stars appearing in the sky depending upon latitude?

I suspect that flat-Earth models sort of fudge the question of what they think is up in the sky, because the sky simply isn't important to them except as a sort of backdrop. flat-Earthism seems to overlap heavily with worshippers of the "literal" Bible, so maybe they figure the sky is little more than an irrelevant light-show that God's seen fit to run in the background of our lives.

~Chara

#flat Earth

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in reply to @pnictogen-wing's post:

ꙮ tatybara ꙮ @tati10/22/2023, 3:20 AM

your intuition is correct.

The Pnictogen Wing @pnictogen-wing10/22/2023, 3:27 AM

it's a potent symbol, I guess...effectively reducing not merely Earth but the entire Cosmos to a single plane. it's like...believing that the entire Cosmos can be represented by a Jordan Peterson diagram =p

ꙮ tatybara ꙮ @tati10/22/2023, 3:53 AM

honestly they are so uninterested in a concrete model that i get the impression the content of the belief is almost tangential to them.

i think what they value is the combined identity of being one of the few who “figured it out”, being a member of the calvinist elect, and to project the authority of the sciences / adopt academic dressings as they simultaneously demonize their institutions. classic christian move tbh, good ol’ syncretism.

Æ et al. [&]@AE-et-al10/22/2023, 4:11 AM

There's a couple theories of how flat earth "works." One is that the sky is, like, a bowl. So the stars are points "painted" on the inner surface of the bowl. So moving around the earth shows you different stars since you're seeing different parts of the sky.

My favorite flat earth theory is that the reason why "gravity" exists is because the flat earth is constantly moving upwards, like an elevator, and it's accerlating at 9.8 m/s^2. So that's the "down" feeling. Yes, this does mean the earths velocity will eventually hit c, but I imagine they don't, uh, believe in c either. I have never seen explanations for that or where the energy to go up comes from, or where we're going, or if we'll ever run out of space to go up. I also have no idea how that would fit into the stars looking different lol

But yeah, I think your sense that they don't bother might be right. The entire reason why they think the earth is flat is that it appears to be with a very nearsighted and small dataset of "this is what I can see standing here in this very moment" and not, you know, collaborating with others or moving around the world or taking measurements throughout the year. Who knows maybe God makes the stars different for different reasons. It is a s mystery 👻