Let's Talk About the Shape of the Earth: An Interview with Dr. Danny Faulkner and an ISS Astronaut

The Backlash Against the Flat Earth Video and the Need for a Fuller Response

Let's have a real serious, mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart, and biblical discussion about the shape of the earth. Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today.

I want to thank you so much for joining me. So a week or so ago, I put up a short little 10-minute video on my YouTube channel with one easy way to refute the flat earth position. I knew there were a lot of flat earthers out there, but I kind of thought the position was on the wane.

It wasn't as popular as it used to be, say, five or six years ago. But apparently not, because I had tremendous blowback on that video. I was quite honestly shocked at the vitriol by many people. Now, granted, there were some who who disagreed with me, believed the earth is flat, but they were cordial in their disagreement.

Others, however, not so much. There were a lot of people calling me a false teacher, a deceiver, someone who hates God. I'm a liar. I'm calling God a liar. I don't believe the Bible. I'm a vessel of Satan.

One of the comments. So when I saw the incredible blowback, and probably 90 of the comments were in support of the flat earth. And that did surprise me. And so when I saw those comments, I thought, you know, I need to give a more comprehensive treatment to this because that little video was never intended to be that.

It was never intended to be comprehensive. Just one little kind of easy thing. So I employed the assistance of Dr. Danny Faulkner. Dr. Faulkner is a physicist and he is employed at Answers in Genesis.

And he has written a book on the flat earth position called Falling Flat. We'll talk about that. But he is an expert on this issue. He's done the research. He's attended a number of flat earth conventions and has met and talked with a number of the more prominent names in the flat earth movement.

So he knows this stuff. And so we do about a two hour long interview here and we engage some of the more popular arguments for the flat earth position. Not all of them because I mean, there's just too many to put in one video, but we hit some of the more popular ones.

We talk about long distance photography. We talk about the Van Allen belts. We talk about the belief that planes, if the earth was round, would need to constantly dip their nose to follow the curvature of the earth.

We talk about the Antarctic Treaty. We talk about the International Space Station. And we also most importantly talk about the Bible. What does the Bible actually say? Does the Bible teach that the earth is flat?

And so we're going to look at all of that. And there are time stamps down below in the description to help you navigate this interview because it is quite lengthy and you may have already noticed. Well, it looks like it's about four hours long.

This is a four hour plus long video because I have also included two other interviews that I did a couple of years ago on my YouTube channel that many of you probably have not seen. So I put these in there, but they're pertinent to this discussion.

And one of the interviews I did with Colonel Jeff Williams, he is a Christian astronaut who had four tours on the International Space Station. And so I put that in there and I also put in an interview that I did with Dr. Jason Lyle, who is a Christian astrophysicist.

And we also talked about the shape of the earth in that interview. So all the time stamps down below in the description to help you navigate this. This is a very important issue because I've talked to some folks just in the last few days.

Some people hold to this, some Christians, at least professing Christians, hold to this so stridently that it's actually causing marriages to break apart and families to break apart. For example, some husbands who have bought into the flat earth deception, but they believe that.

And their wives now, they've alienated themselves from their wives because a wife doesn't believe it or vice versa. And it's causing strain. I mean, real strain in marriages and causing families to break up.

This isn't just a laughable thing. This is actually quite serious because a lot of people have bought into this deception. And so I am wanting to reach the reasonable people. If you're one of those and you are a Christian, but you have been persuaded at least to some degree by the arguments of flat earthers, I'm trying to reach you because I think a lot of you are reasonable and you are open to discussion.

So that's what this long video is for, who it's for. There are some others, however, I think that are so entrenched in it that it really doesn't matter the amount of evidence that you provide. It doesn't even matter what you talk about from scripture.

There's nothing that will convince them. Some people I think are so beholden to this, that you could actually put them on a SpaceX rocket or a blue origin rocket and send them up, put them in orbit around the earth, even dock with the international space station, come back down safely.

And they still wouldn't believe the earth is a sphere. Those kinds of folks, there's just no reasoning with, but some folks you can be reasoned with. And so those are the ones I'm really trying to reach.

We're really, honestly, we're trying to help people. I hope that this video will be helpful for you. Now, I want to offer you a word of caution, particularly dealing with the interview that I'm included here that I did with Colonel Jeff Williams.

If you are a Christian and you believe the earth is flat, then you're going to have a decision to make because Colonel Jeff Williams, a Christian astronaut, now retired, but Christian astronaut who holds to a high view of scripture, holds to inerrancy, holds to a young earth, six literal day creation, as do I.

This is a man who had four tours on the international space station, the ISS. If the earth is flat, if the earth really is flat, Colonel Jeff Williams is a liar. But if the earth is a sphere, he's telling you the truth.

You're going to have to make a decision. And I would think long and hard before you come out and you call this man a liar. If you're lost, whatever. Lost people do what lost people do. But if you're a Christian, you need to think long and hard before you're willing to call this man and these other men liars, but especially Colonel Williams, because he's been on the international space station.

Slander is a very serious sin, listed amongst the sins of Romans chapter one that marked the lives of unbelievers. And so you need to think long and hard before you're willing to do that. We're going to give you an awful lot of scientific refutation of the flat earth.

We're going to show you that the Bible does not teach that the earth is flat. And I'm going to give you this interview with Colonel Williams. And so if you're willing to hold on to the flat earth after all of this, then I'm not sure that much of anything will persuade you, but you need to think long and hard before you call Jeff Williams a liar.

All right, dear ones, with that out of the way, let us get into this. My interview with Dr. Faulkner, again, all the timestamps down below there in the description, all the links to all the resources down below in the description.

I hope that this will be helpful for you. Share it with your friends, share it with your family members, share it with people that you know who are into the flat earth and please watch it. Watch it. Cannot watch it all in one time.

I don't imagine because it's too long, but work your way through this. I think it'll be helpful. All right, here we go. Well, Danny, brother, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us.

How are you? Pretty good. How are you doing? Doing well, doing well. Well, Danny, I wanted to have you come on the program because as you know, I did this short little video on the flat earth, 10 minute or so video that was not at all intended as a comprehensive treatment of the issue, but man alive, did it garner a lot of feedback.

And so I wanted to have you on, you are an expert. You have written a book entitled Falling Flat, A Refutation of Flat Earth Claims. Do you have a copy there? There we go. Falling Flat. And I have it on Kindle.

I didn't know about this book until a few days ago, but I've ordered it on Kindle. I'm going to order a physical copy as well. So I'll have all the pertinent links down below in the description. So Dr. Faulkner, Danny,.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I'm an astronomer. I went to college at Bob Jones University where I majored in math. I have a master's degree from Clemson University in physics, and I have a master's and a PhD in astronomy from Indiana University.

As I was finishing up my education, I took a job as a professor at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster. I taught astronomy and physics there for more than a quarter century. About a dozen years ago, I had an opportunity to retire a little bit early, and that allowed me to come up here in northern Kentucky where I live now.

I'm on staff at Answers in Genesis. I'm on the research department. I'm the astronomer. I oversee our astronomy and related activities, our outreach as we have their educational programs. But I do a lot of writing.

I do some speaking. Since I've been here, I've published I think about five or six books, and I also write a lot of stuff for our website. I stay pretty busy. The flat earth is one of those.

Things I've been looking into for quite a while. Let me ask you this first, because theologically, I want everyone to know exactly where you and I stand. I would imagine most would assume, since you're working at Answers in Genesis, you are a born-again believer.

You have a high view of the word of God, an inerrantist, correct? You believe in inerrancy?

Correct. All three correct, yes.

Okay. So far, so good. Young earth, six literal day creation, correct? Correct. All right. You wouldn't have a job at Answers in Genesis. That's right. I would not. That's right. So you and I are no theological liberals.

We believe in inerrancy. We believe in a literal reading and understanding of the record of creation in Genesis. Are you a Mason?

I am not, nor have I ever been a Freemason. I thought a flat earther was heckling us there. I'm sorry, what? I said, I thought a flat earther was heckling my answer.

Okay. Sorry. That's my little dog, Mia, and we have some folks working out in the backyard. I'm starting to suspect she might be a Mason.

Let me state again, I am not, nor have I ever been a Freemason. I get asked that from time to time, and I get accused of that all the time. A lot of flat earthers think that I am, but I'm not.

Yes. Okay. All right. Nor am I. I'm not a Mason. I'm not a Freemason. I'm not any other kind of Mason. And to my knowledge, I'm not even sure I know anyone named Mason. So we are not Masons. Okay. So, Danny, what led you to write this book, Falling Flat?

What began your interest in this topic?

It was about, it was eight years ago in February. I mean, just now, I'm starting my ninth year now. I was, in less than a week, I encountered, I had conversations with three different adults about three different young people who were into the flat earth movement.

And I was quite taken aback. I thought, well, I've had three conversations in less than a week. There must be something going on. I was on the road when the third conversation happened. So when I got home, I got online and boy, was I surprised to type in flat earth.

And at that time you would just get hundreds or thousands of hits promoting flat earth. I had no idea. There actually were a couple of clues going back a couple of years before that. I, and I think three different occasions or so that I can recall, somebody sent me a little YouTube video about seeing too far and on the earth.

And they came four or five months apart. So I didn't really put it together, but then I really got an education on that. So I started looking into it and delved into it. And I've taken it very seriously.

I believe with my biblical background and my background in astronomy and physics, it uniquely qualifies me to discuss this matter with some understanding and authority, I think. So I took it upon myself to look into it.

I asked some of the other speakers here at Entrance in Genesis, I said, have you been getting any questions about flat earth? And they all said, what? I'd never heard of it. But over the next few months, one by one, the speakers would come to my office and said, I got that question over the weekend.

And now we get it regularly here and on the road, our speakers go out. So it's become a big phenomenon over the last decade, really kind of erupting around 2014, 2015, big time. And it continued to grow.

To do this, I spent a lot of time, I read a lot of books, some of them written in late 1800s, early 1900s from the original modern flat earth movement, which then died back down over a century ago, and then was revived about a decade ago by several people, mostly on YouTube videos and social media.

If it weren't for the internet, we wouldn't be having this discussion, quite literally and figuratively both. But I read those books, I watched far more hours of YouTube videos than I would care to admit to.

But I've also attended four flat earth conventions. So I've been there, I've actually met many of the movers and shakers, some of the names you recognize. I actually have a good relationship with many of them, believe it or not.

And what I really like to do is talk to the people in the audience. And I've made friends there. I didn't know how I'd be treated the first time I went. It was in 2017. Turns out, it's okay. I've had a few bad experiences.

But for the most part, they've been very, very nice people, very nice people to me. And I'm really thankful for that. And I like the attitude of a lot of people I've met in the flat earth. Not all of them, but many of them that actually have a pretty.

Good attitude, I think. Yeah. Well, that's encouraging to hear. I'd say at least half. And I think most of the comments that I've gotten on my little video have been pretty, pretty nasty. I've been called a vessel of Satan.

I hate God. I hate the Bible. I don't believe the Bible. Of course, I'm a Mason. And I'm accusing God of lying. If someone were to take what you just said, I'm a Mason, they could really run with that.

So yeah, they could snip that. Yeah. So.

For the record, I'm no Mason. I've gotten a lot of the negative attacks too. A lot of times they come on the internet, not so much face to face, but on the internet. People do have a different.

Persona when you're not standing face to face with them many times. Yeah, that is absolutely true. That is absolutely true. So you touched on it a little bit, Danny. Give us just a bird's eye view of the history of this movement, because I've seen a lot of people in the comments say that the flat earth belief was the predominant view amongst Christians for all of Christianity.

So for most of the 2000 years of Christian history, most Christians have believed in the flat earth.

Is that true or not? Absolutely false. That was a myth created in the 19th century, and there was an evolutionary connection, believe it or not. You know, most of us grew up hearing what I call the Columbus myth, that everybody thought the world was flat until Columbus in 1492 showed otherwise.

And this has been repeated again and again. We're told that during the Middle Ages, the church taught the earth was flat, and on and on and on. And then it was disproved. As it turns out, that's not the case at all.

There was a medieval scholar named Jeffrey Burton Russell, who in 1991 wrote a book with the title Inventing the Flat Earth. And he goes through the history of the church and demonstrates that, no, the church never taught that, as it turns out.

There are only two people you can really identify in the history of the church, and they were early on, the early Middle Ages, who thought that. But they were outliers, and they were not really coded very much.

They were kind of weird guys. So the church never taught that. I think people kind of conflate that with the whole thing of geocentrism was fought 400 years ago, and how the Roman Catholic Church, you know, had a real dispute with Galileo and such.

So this myth was created in the late 19th century as part of what we call the conflict thesis that Christianity had held about progress and stuff, and the Middle Ages were the dark ages. And finally, the Enlightenment released everybody from all the darkness and the ignorance of the past.

And that's simply not true. It was a fabrication of the late 19th century. And many historians have tried to correct this issue, but it's rampant in our culture. People just keep repeating that lie. So the church never taught the earth is flat.

I think I also used to believe that Christopher Columbus set out to prove the shape of the world. I got it from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Yep, there you go. Would Warner Brothers lie to you? Right, exactly.

All right, well, so I want to run through some of the top flat earth argument. And by the way, you and I will probably both refer to flat earthers, and when we say that, that is not a pejorative. They refer to themselves as flat earthers.

It's just a convenient term. So when.

We say flat earther, that's not a slur. You know, my first article I wrote on this eight years ago, I think I discussed that. I was debating whether I should use the term flat earther. And what I discovered is that they used that to kind of repurpose the term.

So, again, I'm glad you pointed it out. We don't mean anything pejorative by it. We're simply using the term they use. It's unfortunate the rest of the world seems to use that as a pejorative.

Right, right. Okay, good clarification there. So one of their favorite arguments is the Antarctica Treaty. Mark Sargent said that the Antarctica Treaty is the only treaty in the history of treaties that has ever been upheld and followed and adhered to.

The Antarctic Treaty says that no corporation in the history of the world can set up shop.

Down there forever. And according to him, the Antarctica Treaty prevents anyone from going in the interior of Antarctica. It's illegal. And if you try, the military is there to shoot you, keep you from going.

So talk to us about that.

Yeah, that's a common flat earther claim. The whole argument here is that their model of the earth is it's round and flat. The North Pole is at the center of that round, flat disc. There is no South Pole.

And if you wonder what holds all the water in, keeps from falling off the edge of the earth, well, there's an ice wall at a great distance from the North Pole. We call it Antarctica. It's really just a ring of ice that prevents the water from coming out.

And there's a dome beyond that that rests somewhere out there and spins around each day. That's generally what flat earthers believe. There are variations on that theme, of course. And the reason why they believe the Antarctic Treaty prevents travel down there is it keeps flat earthers from going down there and finding the dome and finding the edge and so forth.

Now, when I first heard this claim several years ago, I looked up the Antarctic Treaty. It's not difficult to find. And there's no such language in there saying that prevents you from going there, nor are there any kind of weapons or ships that are going to intercept you to prevent you from doing that.

The reason for the Antarctic Treaty was there's a long history of different nations claiming new land that nobody else owns. And they didn't want anybody to claim Antarctica, even though a couple countries do.

They said, look, this treaty is not going to recognize any of that. Antarctica is an international preserve. Also, it's a fragile place. It's a very dry desert, as it turns out. And they want to preserve it for scientific purposes and such.

And they'd also wanted to keep the military out, stationing of troops there and stationing of military installations. That does not prevent military operations in the sense of exploration, like Admiral Byrd had gone down there many times, not as to bring weapons to Antarctica, but to actually explore it as part of what he did as being part of the Navy.

So non-military use and not a lot of people going into the place. And the treaty goes on to restrict what you have to do when you're down there. If you go, you have to pack out everything, including human waste, which is understandable, because if you dump that on the ground, it's going to be there for a very long time.

And nobody wants to mess with that in the future. So there are some restrictions placed upon that. And so as I am a U .S. citizen, if I wanted to go to Antarctica, I would have to get permission of the State Department because that treaty, I'm obligated to that treaty under the U .S. law and Constitution, as it turns out.

And they're going to make sure I have, first of all, the proper backing to have proper insurance in case I need to be rescued, have the proper equipment that I can safely get there and get back and not to pollute the place and all sorts of things.

So anybody who wants to go there can do so if they follow those rules. The problem is it's not cheap. It would cost you millions of dollars to mount such an expedition. So there aren't any ships that are going to stop you.

Flat earthers like to tell you that there's a bunch of naval ships there that will turn you back and shoot you if you don't. Let's face it, there's a lot of water out there. You could probably sneak in if you really wanted to.

But why would you want to? It's a pretty hostile place, as it turns out. So the Antarctic Treaty, they use that a lot. But if you read the.

Things that flat earthers claim. Yeah. Okay. So if you have enough money and you're willing to jump through all the hoops, you can indeed go to Antarctica. And, you know, there are other.

Situations like that. For instance, every year I go on a week-long raft trip in Grand Canyon. It's part of my job here. And we do geology by day and astronomy by night. But, you know, everybody wants to raft through the canyon.

And so it's restricted who can go through there. There's a lottery that you can be a part of to take a private trip through. But before you enter, they make sure you have all the equipments you need, all the things, safety and other things taken care of.

And by the way, you have to pack your poop out. You can't dump it there. You have to take it out with you. If you don't have plans for that, then you can't enter the thing. We go with an outfitter and they have to be inspected every time they go through.

So this idea of going through the hoops is not that foreign to us, as it turns out. It's just few people have actually gone into a place that's.

Quite so restrictive. And you say you've met some of the more prominent names. Who are the people that you've met, some of the leaders in the Flat Earth? Well, I went to a meeting back in October.

I met Mark Sargent there. I had not met him before. And he was very, very nice to me. David Weiss was there. We met a couple of times before. And he was not quite as nice, I guess, but not bad to me at all.

Let's see. I've met the late Rob Skiba. I had a good relationship with him. Robbie Davidson hosted the first three Flat Earth International Conventions. And he was super. He really was. Rick Hummer was the emcee of those three conventions.

And he was absolutely fantastic. He really was a likable guy. He likes me. I can tell. I like him. So those are some of the names of people that I've met that people might recognize. Bob Nodell, I knew him as well.

I did not know his wife, Cammie, until October. And when I went to the meeting in October, Cammie wanted to talk. We sat down. We talked for at least an hour one day. A very sweet person. I enjoyed talking to her.

We disagree, but we don't have to be disagreeable while we're doing it. So those are some of the names of people I've met. And I have a good relationship.

Yeah. But you weren't able to convince any of them?

No. You know, that was not my intent. That's an important point. I don't really try to convince flat-earthers. I'm happy to have conversations with them, answer their questions if they really want to ask me questions.

But I've found, for the most part, if a person's really convinced that the earth is flat, there's not much I can do to change their minds. I think early intervention is a key thing. And that's who I'm aiming at.

In fact, you'll find a couple of times in my book, I actually say that. I didn't write this book for flat-earthers. I wrote it for people who are looking for answers to the questions that flat-earthers raise.

Right. I agree with you. And judging from the comments, some of them, I think if you could actually put them on the space shuttle, even though the space shuttle's not flying anymore, but if you could put them on a SpaceX rocket and send them up personally, and they were to come down, I still don't think they'd be convinced.

Probably not. But there are some that are more reasonable and open-minded, fair-minded. And so those are the people we're trying to reach. And also, as you said, early intervention here. So, Danny, let's run through some of these more popular flat-earth arguments.

Mark Sargent, in an interview that he did on some European network, he went through quickly. And I'll play these clips. But one is long-distance photography. To your proof questions, I know we don't have a.

Whole lot of time left. Sorry. Let me give you the five bullet points that I gave Georgetown physicists. And he folded like a card table almost immediately. I put this challenge up to Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, any of these guys.

First one would be long-distance photography. Curvature of the Earth is eight inches per mile squared. We eventually should not be able to see over the hill. We shouldn't be a hill. It should be gone.

HD technology has changed that. Now we can see things way, way further. And some wonderful work being done by Nathan Oakley and some UK teams where they're actually seeing a horizon behind oil platforms.

At 10, 15, 20 miles. They claim that you can, if you go out to a large body of water, like Michigan, you can pull in objects, boats, land masses that, according to the curvature of the Earth, should not be visible at those distances.

And yet, if you have a Nikon P900 or whatever it is, you can pull these things back into view. That's probably the most common.

Argument here flashers make. They say we see too far. They take the P900 and P1000 and zoom in and say they're pulling things back in that should be obscured by the Earth's curvature. In fact, this idea that ships disappear whole first as they travel away, that argument goes back to Pliny the Elder in the first century AD.

I think he was probably thinking more in terms of as a ship approaches land, if you're up on the top of the mast, you can see the land before people on the deck can. It works both ways, you see. I don't live near a large body of water, so I can't do this experiment myself very often, but I do travel, and when I do, I often will take equipment with me to check this myself.

I use the observatory. We have an observatory here at the Creation Museum, and we have a three-and-a-half-inch Questar telescope. It has superb optics on it. It has a focal length of 1 ,300 millimeters.

People who do photography, they're usually impressed with that focal length because that's a whale of a telephoto lens. There's a port on the back I can pull out, unscrew a plug there, and I can take a camera adapter and put in my digital SLR camera in there, and I take pictures.

The first time I did this would have been almost eight years ago. It was at Virginia Beach, and I was taking photographs of container ships as they were coming and going there at the port there at Virginia Beach.

As I did, as the ships moved away, you could tell they got farther away because they're getting smaller and smaller appearing in the view. As they did progressively, more and more of the holes and eventually even some of the containers were being covered up.

I've done this since in South Florida a few times. I've gone down there to see my sister, and the few times I've done this experiment, I always, always get results that are consistent with the Earth being a globe.

I can only assume two things or conclude two things about flat earth arguments here. Maybe three things. One thing I conclude is that many flat earthers have not done this themselves. They're relying upon the testimony and the photographs and videos that other flat earthers have made.

The other two things I can conclude is either they are just very lucky and do this on days when such a thing is possible, or they do it all the time and they simply select the data that they want. You see, seeing too far is something that's been documented over the years.

It's nothing new to flat earthers. It comes from what's called a temperature inversion that sometimes happens particularly on warm summer and spring days. If you go to the beach much or any body of water in spring and summer days that are warm, you know the water's always cooler than the air temperature is.

Usually, air temperature's warmest at the surface, and then it decreases as you increase in elevation. If it's a very warm day and cold water off the coast, you can end up with a layer of very cool air next to that water.

It can be quite thick actually. The speed of light is slower in that cooler air than it is in the air above. As the moves across the surface of the water and it starts to climb out of it because of the curvature of the earth, it gets refracted back down, bent back down because of the temperature inversion and the different speed of light in the thing.

One of the most famous examples they have out there is what's called the black swan. It's a screenshot taken from a 2016 flat earther video where a guy's on the southern coast of California and he's looking out at two oil platforms, one a little over six miles, one a little over nine miles away.

He has his camera a short distance above the water. He argues that if the earth is really a globe 25 ,000 miles in circumference, then the nearer platform ought to be partially blocked and the more distant one even more blocked.

He shows a picture where it looks like the horizon is behind both of them and they're not obscured at all. They take a screenshot of this photo and say, we see too far, therefore the earth can't be a sphere, it must be flat.

If you watch the video, and I'm sure you have now, I know I have many times, you will see that he shows in there a photograph that he took of the same oil platforms, but they were obscured as much as you would expect them to be if the earth is spherical.

Also, he puts up text in there both places on these photographs. He says, on most days I see this, I see what's consistent with a spherical earth, but on rare days, not very often, on rare days I see what looks to be like flat earth evidence.

On the basis of that, he concluded the earth is flat. He threw out 99 of the data and he kept maybe 1 of the data. That's not the way to decide anything, let alone in science. So I've never seen that.

I'd love to get a photograph where I could see too far,.

But so far I've not been able to do that. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And another example of this is the southern end of Lake Michigan, of course, Chicago on the west side. And if you go to the east side there, I think it's roughly 60 miles.

And on rare days, these days that you're describing, you can actually see the skyline of Chicago. But most days you can't because it's too far and it's beyond the curve. But on these rare.

Days you can, correct? Yeah. And by the way, I've tried that myself several times looking across Lake Michigan. I've never seen across it. It's on rare days. And the guy that they really credit to this is Joshua Nowicki.

He's a superb photographer. He's taken a number of really interesting photographs there, not only that, but other things on Lake Michigan. And he's not a flat earther. That's important to note, but he knows optics very well and he knows weather conditions that are conducive for this.

And you need some zooming to be able to do that with either with a telescope or with a zoom telephoto lens or something in order to do it. And by the way, you don't see down to street level on the Chicago.

If it really were flat, you should be able to, but you don't. It's partially obscure. And you have to ask the question, why? If the earth is flat, that's the case, but that's another big example they use.

That the Nowicki photograph. Yes. Yes. Okay. So temperature inversion easily explains that. Yeah. All right. So the second one, Sargent says, why doesn't our atmosphere rush into the vacuum.

Of space? Gravity versus the vacuum of space. Gravity is holding things down, right? That's gravity. No problem, right? You make the upper part of this, a vacuum chamber, you pull a cork, everyone's, everything's going to rush upstairs.

Well, why, when you go outside, why isn't the air outside rushing into space? You can't, the atmosphere, why doesn't go, why doesn't go into space? Can't say gravity anymore because gravity didn't hold the air in this room for that.

Little test. I've encountered this question many times. There was one time I famously refused to answer the question because the person asking me, I didn't like his attitude at all. It's out there on the internet.

People want to go see it. I won't tell you who it was. You can figure that out. And so people conclude, oh, he couldn't answer the question. Well, yes, I could. I just, number one, I didn't want to. And number two, the reason why I didn't want to is because he wasn't going to listen.