Roundworld Consipiracy: Status Quo & Depth Perception

Part 5: Status Quo

In Part 5, Sargent is largely speculating - attempting to prove himself right by discussing the progression of events that might have led to the population of a dome-world being deceived by their own leaders about the existence of the dome. I won't waste time on the historic details, because an imagined history is not proof, whether he gets any particular points right or not. He is clearly excited by the idea that religions are superior to science, but that's just more of his own biases shining through.

The nerds are stuck in their labs, let's party!

He also makes elaborate claims about how human beings would react to the big reveal, without citing any behavioural studies or even examples that could lead to his assumptions. So there's nothing to refute here either. Mr. Sargent has stated an opinion. In my opinion, his world view is ridiculous and irrelevant, but we're both equally free to express those opinions.

Part 6: Depth Perception

Here, he starts off by suggesting a recap of the design features... and proceeds to give you lots of new information instead. He describes the elaborate features that would have kept us from discovering the dome. Most of the system would be meaningless as soon as we developed flight technology, or mounted a recording device on a rocket.

The big point he tries to make here is one that, on the surface (so to speak) is harder to disprove; it's about the foundations of his dome-world. He claims that we don't really know what's below our feet, quoting Wikipedia's entry on how we came to the currently accepted model of the Earth's internal structure.  The problem there is that description, in fact the very quote itself, describes a series of advanced scientific procedures that have proven extremely reliable in predicting reality. Here's another link that provides a starting point if you're interested in a more elaborate explanation. His argument is basically that none of that makes sense to him, no one has been able to explain it to him, and therefore it cannot be true. Am I the only one who sees the arrogance in that idea? The people who devote their lives to understanding how this world and the greater Universe operate must be lying, because I can't understand their work by reading about it on the Internet. I do not understand, so you must be wrong. If that is not arrogance, then I do not understand the meaning of the word.

In place of the carefully considered and studied model of the globe's internal structure, he posits a much more complex mechanism of furnaces and pumps to create magma, preventing us from digging all the way down to the floor of the dome. The more he describes his dome, the more obvious it becomes that it was built, not by the laws of physics, but by an intelligent, purposeful, and extremely advanced society or individual. He does refer to the "creator(s)" at several points along the way, but doesn't go too deep into that discussion just yet.