Roundworld Conspiracy: Long Haul & Creative force

Part 7: The Long Haul

Here Sargent actually does something right, from a scientific standpoint. He not only explains his real-world observations, but points his audience to where they can observe the same. Plus, air travel is much more accessible to the average citizen of Earth than space travel, so he's getting close to some testable hypotheses with this video.

Go ahead and get comfy.

His argument is that you can't book a direct, intercontinental flight through the southern hemisphere, and the flight times you do find don't make sense for a round world. He lists a number of cities in each hemisphere, with booking sites where you can perform the observations yourself. His proposed explanation is that it's an elaborate smokescreen to cover the fact that the Earth is flat, and those flights are not really taking the paths that we're supposed to believe they are.

My first thought here was that he only looked at standard commercial flights, and hadn't even tried looking at charter options. Granted, proving that you really could charter such a flight could be expensive, so there had to be another way to poke holes in his explanation. (He'll mention in a later video that another listener, having attempted to repeat his observations, actually did find a direct commercial flight, and take-off and landing times work out for a round world after all, but by the time I reached that video I'd found the following other holes).

The indirect flights are actually pretty simple to explain, if you look at it from the perspective of simple capitalism. Commercial airlines exist to make money, and they've got a lot of overhead to cover, (pardon the pun). A single long-haul flight from, say, South America to Australia would be particularly expensive, and bypass a lot of other popular cities along the way. Break it up into shorter hops, and you're not only servicing the customers who would take the long trip, but also people flying to and from those intermediate destinations at the same time.

As for the flight times, this guy clearly isn't an aviator. He explains his calculations in enough detail to see that there is no allowance for weather conditions or jetstreams. He also doesn't mention anything about the difference between air speed and ground speed, suggesting he doesn't understand the relevance.

Part 8: Creative Force

He was doing so well in the last video, but the veneer of science is completely stripped away for this one, wherein Sargent reveals his true colours; it all comes back to the Bible. Here he uses a version of the Tower of Babel story to somehow make us feel better about being trapped inside a domed world.

There are no references here, no real arguments to refute. He's just attempting to be inspiring. Personally, I'm not impressed by his sermon.