What are they teaching the kids at Texas Tech?
Tyler Owens, a defensive back for the school’s team who was among many being scouted this week at the NFL combine, spoke to the media yesterday and — who knows why? — decided to come out and proud as someone who doesn’t believe in space or “other planets.” Including the ones we can see from this planet.
"I don't believe in space," Owens said in a video posted to Twitter by Bleacher Report's Brent Sobleski. "I'm real religious, so I think we're alone right now. I don't think there's other planets and other stuff like that."
What Bible verse is that in? Tiffany 3:16?
Here we go!
Owens explained that he used to believe in “the heliocentric” but that he started reading some flat earth stuff and “they made valid points.” This, we can assume, is what led him to the idea that there are no other planets.
To be clear, the “valid points” tend to consist of standing on a beach and filming oneself yelling “Where’s the curve?”
Now, if you haven’t been paying attention to the whole flat earth thing, you may be thinking “Oh, is he confused? Does he just mean that the earth is flat?” but no. It’s been a thing for a while now. Basically these people are so very Christian that they believe in the literal “firmament” mentioned in the Bible and more or less think it is like a plastic bubble surrounding our precious, flat, John Travolta of an earth.
Why … it appeareth no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (Sorry not sorry.)
Here, allow this incredibly smug man who sings songs about conspiracies explain it to you.
Yeah, the government spends $24 billion a year on NASA to convince people that space is real, in order to prevent them from believing in god — which definitely sounds like a thing a super-religious country like the United States would do.
That seems like a lot of money and effort, given that people have believed that space is real since … forever? Ancient Greece? Probably other civilizations? Quite frankly, despite all of the nonsense about Christopher Columbus trying to sail around the world to prove the earth wasn’t flat, this is really the first time since very ancient times that belief in a flat earth has been relatively common. Plato acknowledged a spherical earth around the 4th century BCE and while there were certainly some early Christians (we’re talking 300-500 CE here) who believed the earth was flat, it was by no means widespread.
All of this is to say that I don’t think the US started NASA just in case, several decades in the future, people somehow caught on to the “fact” that the earth is flat and space is fake.
Honestly, I feel a little badly for this kid. He’s young, he seems nice, and he can still learn. I hope that someone can take him aside and explain that, no, the flat earthers do not have valid points and space definitely exists. Venus and Mars are supposed to be visible next week, so perhaps that someone can get him a telescope and literally show him the other planets. That would be nice!
PREVIOUSLY:
OK, I got a flat earther story. Back in the day, I got into an argument with one of these clowns. I asked him for his strongest evidence that Earth was flat. He pointed out that you can see Toronto's skyline from Niagara on the Lake in New York across Lake Ontario, and that's not something that should be possible given the distance and how large we believe that a spherical earth is.
So I checked his math. I ended up calculating the curvature of the earth should effectively lower Toronto's buildings a couple hundred feet. There are a lot of buildings in Toronto that are taller than that (at least 20 over 1000 ft.) so Toronto's skyline being visible was not an issue for a spherical Earth.
The guy ended up thinking Toronto was much further from Niagara on the Lake than it actually is, because -- get this -- he Googled the distance from Niagara on the Lake to Toronto, and Google gave *driving directions* from Niagara on the Lake to Toronto, which is around 80 miles. Because Google assumes that you're not going to go straight across the lake. I used 25 miles in my calculations, because that's the line of sight distance across Lake Ontario that I measured with a ruler on a map.
Now this is what gets me: I subbed in 80 miles for the distance in my calculations, and he did all the high school trig correctly, predicting an over half mile drop in elevation. He can do all the required math correctly, but he can't read a goddamn map.
Did I explain this to him? Yes. Did he believe me? Absolutely not. Even after I posted pictures of the map I got directly from Google? Still no.
This isn't CTE. That wont show up for a couple of decades. This is because he was an elite athlete his entire life and saw no reason to actually learn anthing while in school. Or in the gym, or on the practice field or whever he was during classes. And there weren't any adults around him that cared for him other than how he could be used to further their own carreers.