I was not aware of this. thank you

this makes so much sense but it makes me so uncomfortable 

i wish i hadn’t seen this

One time my bf was telling me about people who argue about intelligent creation by saying “the earth is perfectly round!” And I said “but it isn’t!” And he was so proud of me

okay so im just learning this

I’m not happy about this

What a stupid rock we live on

We don’t live on a rock. We live on a Potato.

Sorry, peeps, but this is mislabeled. As should honestly be pretty obvious when you compare it to a picture of Earth from space:

However, I can’t entirely blame people for being fooled; reverse-google-imaging it will give you hundreds of shady gif-collecting sites labeling it “earth without water.” But this is also not true.

This is where it originally comes from (hooray for Tineye). If you don’t want to bother to check the link, it’s the page for a Matlab program designed to image geoscience data. That gif is a map of gravitational field strength across the earth… exaggerated by a thousand. Here’s what it looks like not exaggerated:

As you can see, significantly less potato-y. But still lumpy, because that’s the whole point of the program: to show areas where the numbers are higher as higher and areas where the numbers are lower as lower.

As the page itself points out, in real life, the Earth is very close to a sphere. However, there’s a pretty simply and logical reason for this: gravity. Things that are in higher areas relative to the center of the planet will tend to move downhill, resulting in the lower parts being filled and the higher parts getting shorter.

So, you know, if you ever run into any of those loony intelligent-designers an earlier commenter mentioned, now you know the REAL reason they’re wrong.

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

As an intelligent-design believer for all thirty-odd years of my life, I have literally never encountered anyone arguing that one sign of intelligent design is the earth being round? Like I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but this feels along the same lines as my geology professor who sarcastically claimed IN CLASS that “Theology majors” can’t comprehend the whole universe fitting into a tiny ball before the Big Bang. And I had to be like “I’m not a theology major but that’s not what we question, we more want to know ‘But where did the matter COME FROM before that point?’

I’m never sure if these assumptions about us are based on misunderstandings or if these guys just happened to encounter some fringe argument that most of us Creationists have never thought was relevant to the discussion.