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.