Phobos is just not very aesthetically constructed.

You can't fool me, those are just the cookie monster's eyes

Since our moon is moving away from us we’ll have these sorts of eclipses in the future. The fact that we’re living at a time when they’re the same apparent size is pretty amazing.

I had lots of cars the size of burgers though, when I was a little child

I mean it's almost the size of that apartment building in the back.

(Or is it fore? Never quite grok'd any of that perspective stuff...)

I think the vast majority of promoters online were trolls, and the vast majority of followers were morons

They moved on to qanon. That's not even a joke.

You haven't heard as much from them because they are being drowned out by MAGAs. Though, TBF, the overlap between flat earthers and MAGAs is pretty large.

There's actually a trip to Antarctica to see the midnight sun funded by globe earthers planned soon. Many flat earthers were invited, but most have chickened out and the rest are hedging their positions with "24 hour sun doesn't mean anything, even if we see it, it doesn't matter".

A friend of mine got into flat earth. He didn't care about proofs or anything like that. As far as I could tell, he was in it for the community.

All the hype was subsumed by people following cults that actually have an impact on our daily lives.

I was curious about this too. From random web searching (Syfy.com), the sun is 200,000 times brighter than the moon in the visible light region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It's a happy coincidence that we get to experience both total and annular solar eclipses. It wasn't always so, and it won't always be so. There was a first annular eclipse, and there will be a final total eclipse.

A burger for Americans

There’s a fascinating documentary, Behind the Curve. It talks about how, for a lot of these people, it began with the thrill of having some secret knowledge that others don’t, and then found they had a community and felt included for the first time in their lives (for some of them). That sense of community is really important to humans, so now, just like religion, there is more binding people to the movement than just the hidden knowledge.

(If I’m remembering correctly. I may be conflating it, it’s been a while since I watched it.)

Flerfs can't understand scale, they can't understand 3d space, they can't understand distances, they can't understand pretty much anything. The world is scary for them, they deserve our pity AND scorn. If only they paid attention in school

They certainly deserve our pity. They’re lonely people who were never great in school and now get to think they’re smarter than others AND have found a community that accepts them.

Unfortunately the very pressures that made them susceptible to the flat earth movement and other conspiracies are the same pressures that keep them from accepting that they’re wrong. “Scorn” probably isn’t a useful tool, even if it feels like the right one (and they absolutely deserve it).

The Socratic method would be far more effective. Continue to ask them questions, accepting as a given that they’re intelligent people and treating them as such. Innocently interrogate them, with genuine interest, about the things they are saying until they reason themselves out of their positions.

But this will only work if they’re someone you know, most likely. Otherwise they’re likely to shun you the first time they come across a question that truly shakes their position.

We're dealing with a class of people who genuinely think Sesame Street is a commie psyop

Theta = 1/2 human fov

r = radius of sun