Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Aug 11, 2026 4:10 pm
So if the Earth were the same mass as it currently is but it were the shape of a giant coin, would there still be gravity holding us onto it so that we could walk across the faces of the giant coin-shaped Earth? Or would gravity be skewed to where, walking along one of the broad faces of it, you would be pulled slightly sideways also toward the center of the disk?
Gary, it was probably due to my poor way of explaining the concept, but you are missing the point of my ILP thread.
Keep in mind what I stated in the
parenthetical section of the preface to my little thought experiment...
Today, I prompted it [AI Overview] into creating a fanciful image of what the Earth would basically look like if...
(without disrupting or destroying any of its natural features or processes)
...you could somehow take it between the palms of your two hands and squish it into a more flattened structure...
To which I then posited the Earth as being like a
"giant coin" wherein half of us are positioned on, let’s say, the “top” side of this (for the moment)
"horizontally" oriented coin in a situation that feels completely normal to us...
(as in "up is still up" and "down is still down" from our perspective)
...while, at the same time, the other half of us are positioned on the other side of this, again,
“horizontally” oriented coin in a situation that feels completely normal to them,...
(in other words, because gravity is still working normally, "up is still up" and "down is still down" from their perspective)
...yet, looking at this coin-shaped Earth from its
“edge,” it would show the two groups as being completely
“upside-down” from one another.
Now with all of that in mind, if we picture our coin-shaped Earth as being, say,
a hundred-thousand kilometers in diameter while only being
one-meter thick,...
...then just imagine looking down at the ground and realizing how strange it would be to know that just one-meter beneath your feet, the oceans, lakes, rivers, cars, cities, animals, etc. etc.,
- along with the entire other half of humanity - are all functioning in a context of reality that is completely
upside-down from the context of reality that you are functioning in.
And, the point is that ^^^that^^^ is almost precisely what we are actually dealing with as we stand on this orb.
And the fact that we are standing on something round, as opposed to something flat and coin-like, makes no difference.
Furthermore, when you couple all of that with the additional fact that, again, this giant coin
is "flipping" through space in, again, a
“rotisserie” cycle that only takes but a mere
24 hours to complete,...
...while simultaneously flying
- (think "Ferris-wheeling") - around its energy source at approximately
107,826 kph (67,000 mph)...
...then the strangeness of it all
is off the charts.
Now you, Gary...
(and probably everybody else who reads this)
...will probably think to yourself
- “so what” - and not experience the slightest inkling of a reason to think that there is anything strange going on here.
And addressing ^^that^^ right there - that obliviousness to the strangeness of reality - is, in fact, the ultimate point of the thread we are discussing.
Indeed, the ultimate point of the first portion of my ILP thread was to try and make clear how obvious it is (obvious to me, anyway) that humanity’s general level of consciousness seems to have been
“purposely attenuated” in such a way so as to make us completely oblivious of how exceedingly strange our everyday world and the universe truly are.
In other words, our minds seem to have been
purposely "designed" and
"calibrated" to filter-out anything that might cause us to question or doubt the seeming
"naturalness" of this
"dream-like" Illusion that we call
"objective reality."
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