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In a world where

  1. Earth does NOT have gravity (Gravity does not exist).

  2. Our oceans are created by Ice walls.

  3. Ice walls? How can they exist so long?

In the Flat Earth model, the Ice walls are situated OUTSIDE of the planet, which means that Solar winds, UV rays, etc. could be battering it every moment. Thus negating the statement that the Ice walls surround the planet. Is there any "possible" scientific way to have this kind of Ice wall?

Characteristics

  1. Situated on the outer rim of the planet, so that Earth's ocean does not dry up, or fall into space.

  2. The Ice walls shall not melt for all eternity.

Ice walls last forever! But please help me to explain this tommorrow.

EDIT:

It seems to look like most of the people here think I'm a flat earther. (It's actually funny to see the comments and answers). I was only wondering on how to make the Ice wall on a flat earth remain for all eternity, without gravity affecting it, or is it even possible?)

P.S. Magellan's crew circumnavigated Earth in 1522 wink

This is important since everybody thinks I'm a flat earther, here is a proof that the earth was circumnavigated

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. $\endgroup$
    – L.Dutch ♦
    Commented Oct 3, 2018 at 3:32
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    $\begingroup$ Does the ice wall need to be made of traditional ice? As in, can it be something resembling ice that is not really frozen water? $\endgroup$
    – Cubemaster
    Commented Oct 3, 2018 at 15:57
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    $\begingroup$ @Separtrix We know that there are many World Turtles, because we are shown others in "The Light Fantastic". $\endgroup$
    – Chronocidal
    Commented Oct 4, 2018 at 7:48
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    $\begingroup$ @Daniel You're assuming straight-line acceleration. If you were constantly turning with 1G of acceleration, then you would inscribe a large circle instead. $\endgroup$
    – Chronocidal
    Commented Oct 4, 2018 at 7:50
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    $\begingroup$ our world is going to be constantly losing ice to space through sublimation, that is actually a major source of lose to glaciers at higher altitude, exposed to vacuum it will be far worse. So your world is going to be constantly losing water mass even with the ice wall. $\endgroup$
    – John
    Commented Oct 4, 2018 at 12:24

9 Answers 9

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Nightsky cooling will be important.

The sky is cold. Even with a full atmosphere in the way, it can act as though it is -50F. With no atmosphere, it can get down to almost 0K. That lets you radiate a lot of heat!

Clearly the only source of heat or UV radiation or whatnot is the sun, which we know orbits closer to the center of the flat earth, so there wont be as much irradiance falling on the ice (see that there? I used science!)

Thus the ice walls are simply the equilibrium between the cooling capacity of the sky and the heating capacity of the sun and oceans. And not one alien or pyramid was involved in it's making!

The only issue left is the question of lasting for eternity. I'm going to chalk it up to a linguistic mismatch when they use the word "eternity," because there no known scientific principle for why any configuration of atoms will remain for eternity. However, when your life experience is short enough that you can't have walked around the planet enough to observe any curvature, it's reasonable to use "eternity" when you're really just talking about a very long time. Even real comets last 10,000 years. A large body of ice like the ice wall could last much longer. That'd be long enough for the dinosaurs to go hide all of the fake fossil evidence for us!

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    $\begingroup$ @Mr.J They are an enormously disjoint bunch. Everyone is constantly picking their favorite inconsistency in the data and trying to make it work. Leads to a lot of models. $\endgroup$
    – Cort Ammon
    Commented Oct 3, 2018 at 3:28
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    $\begingroup$ This will be my last take on something controversial.. I only want a never ending supply of Ice wall. $\endgroup$
    – Mr.J
    Commented Oct 3, 2018 at 3:29
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    $\begingroup$ @Mr.J Nope, there is absolutely no corroborated ancient text that refers to a 'flat earth'. Any reference to such is only a few hundred years old. Not even the Greeks believed in a flat earth. Atlas held up a globe,. The circumference was pretty much calculated about four THOUSAND years ago, and never ever through all history or mythology was it ever disputed that the earth was round.. At no time, in any historic record, is there ANY mention of falling off the edge of the earth, except in modern revisionist history. $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 2:13
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    $\begingroup$ Magellan KNEW the earth was round. He knew astronomy, and used it to navigate, The star charts at the time all accounted for the earth's curvature. See this, for example There were no flat earthers until modern Western mythology created them. If Magellan did not have a concept of the earth as globe, he would never have been able to find his way back home. $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 2:21
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    $\begingroup$ See Myth of the flat Earth for further reading. Now ask yourself, 'Why would the educational system deliberately teach a falsehood, as if it were the truth? What advantage is there for training people to believe in falsities? Who best profits from accustoming and conditioning people to believing in untruths, and accept them without question?' $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 2:32
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If there is no gravity, then there is no earth

Let's start with that statement - there is no gravity. Does mass then not get attracted to each other? Would there even be a sun? How did this disk form?

A possible way to do this but keep this statement true (but retain scientific 'gravity') is for a far advanced alien civilisation, creates a disk world, and 'constantly accelerates' the disk through space to form 'gravity' (without 'gravity').

Your ice walls perhaps are not really ice walls, but structural integrity members created by the aliens as a network of crystalline carbon nanotubes.

However the aliens will need to push the disk (and the sun and the moon) at 9.8 m/s/s to retain this effect. At this acceleration, your system will quickly within a few years reach very fast speeds and you will notice the stars significantly blue-shifted, and you might notice other strange effects. Needless to say, over centuries no-one may know where your system will end up.

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snow

Disclaimer: I hope to provide something to help suspension of disbelieve, as there is imho no way something like this could ever survive real scrutiny.

As the center of your world is warmer than the edge, high pressure area's will naturally occur there, creating winds towards the edges. These winds will carry the water vapor that originates from your oceans, and when they reach the colder regions at the edge will release said water vapor in the form of snow. The snow will fall on your walls, get compacted into ice under it's own weight and slowly move downwards to replace the ice that is lost to melting in your oceans. So while the walls are eternal, the ice it consists of is actually always moving, being replenished from the top and melting away from the bottom.

If this sound familiar to you it should, because this is (in a nutshell) the mechanism of real world glaciers. Of course it wouldn't actually work, what with the physical impossibility of a flat earth and all, but maybe it's something that can be made to sound convincing.

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The official flat-earther explanation is that the sun races over what we globists call the equator. It is far from the wall, which gets little to no radiation at all. As for the interstellar medium, it does not exist - it's just yet another lie.

You just lost an IQ point for looking at this.

The truth is far more complex than that, though. The Earth is not flat - the ice wall is actually a ring around a giant finger. It has ice because the ring is metallic and as we all know, metals are naturally cold.

👌🏼

The wall will last as long as the ring exists, which might be forever from a civilization's point of view. It will be removed if the giant ever gets a divorce though.

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  • $\begingroup$ @Mr.J so you are ok with an answer based on farts being the most upvoted, whilst an answer based on alternative formats and an actual mechanism for heat sinking being downvoted? $\endgroup$
    – The Square-Cube Law
    Commented Oct 3, 2018 at 0:07
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You should have a closed system or a system where energy that comes in and goes out tends to be balanced.

Now, think of winter and summer. The sun goes around the flat earth, not following a circular motion, but a slight oval shape. Each day getting closer to one side of the glacier and getting further away from the opposite side. Or taking longer to pass through the summer side and going quicker over the winter side. Oversimplifying it, this creates areas where sunlight is stronger and areas where its dimmer.

The wall that is closer to the sun melts and the opposite side builds up ice from the seas, maybe from atmospheric humidity. Basically, the freezing side loses energy to the vast space. Each cycle tends to balance things out and maintain itself immutable.

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Assuming that this flat planet is situated in our solar system then placing it at the same distance as the planet Mars Would mean that the sun would never warm it enough for water ice to melt.

You would then have the problem that everything inside the ice walls would also be frozen, as you wouldn't have any geothermic activity causing warming (because the planet is flat) but that's not part of the question.

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/explore/ice/background/iceSolarSystem/

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    $\begingroup$ Without gravity, how would it orbit anything? $\endgroup$
    – Daniel
    Commented Oct 2, 2018 at 14:31
  • $\begingroup$ Good point. I'll change my answer to "at the distance of Mars from the sun". Although if gravity doesn't exist then the sun won't exist in the first place. $\endgroup$
    – Matt Hollands
    Commented Oct 2, 2018 at 14:37
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    $\begingroup$ Caution, trying to seriously deal with flat-earth logic could harm your brain ;) $\endgroup$
    – Daniel
    Commented Oct 2, 2018 at 14:38
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You can build this world, according to Larry Niven's Bigger Than Worlds at least, you'll need to read the full text of the piece to get what you're looking for, it's the "Pie-Plate" world proposed as an intermediate stage of Ringworld construction. It's a flat disc with the surface area of a planet and a miles high wall around the outer edge to keep the atmosphere in. And some form of infinite fuel rocket under it thrusting at 1G to give the surface pseudo-gravity and keep it in a stable orbit (you can take this off since you don't have gravity).

The problem is with use Ice in particular for that wall, it will tend to Sublime rather than melting when heated in a vacuum and the gas will be almost impossible to retain and refreeze. The walls can be made of something stronger and designed to act as radiators leaving them frosty on the inside but presenting a hard ablation resistant face to the radiation and debris of space. Such a wall would form an integral part of the world's water cycle; the water vapour frozen onto them would act like a glacier in terms of a water source for the world.

Note those walls won't last for eternity, nothing does, but they'll largely still be there long after the star they're orbiting burns out, even if they spend some time inside that star in the process. The material suggested for their construction is not currently a real material, in fact it probably qualifies as a form of exotic matter. What you could use that is a real material, although one we cannot yet make it with our current technology, is what Wil McCarthy calls Wellstone, a programmable lattice that can create pseudo-atoms with properties that can't exist in nature.

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  • $\begingroup$ Going with the disk idea and the miles-high wall, you really do not need gravity. If one posited a very long, very strong cable or tether that connected the sun to the center of the disk, and then spun the disk around the sun. centripetal/centrifugal force would flatten everything against the disk. That is, everything would be given a velocity that, through inertia, wanted to continue on a tangent, but the rotation of the disk 'cuts it off', like swinging a pail of water around your head. All the effects required, but no gravity, $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 2:06
  • $\begingroup$ @JustinThyme That's a lot harder to do than strapping a rocket to it. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 11:38
  • $\begingroup$ Hey, I just picked up my media device and read on the news that a RingWorld was under construction. Or not. Hard? Meh. Never been a limitation before. $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 13:26
  • $\begingroup$ @JustinThyme By "lot harder" I mean "not doable", at least not with the basic technology you need to build the disc. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 13:31
  • $\begingroup$ I do not recall a 'science-based' or 'reality-check' tag. How 'doable' is RingWorld? $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 13:35
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The presence or absence of gravity is a red herring in this scenario. Completely irrelevant. The water would not fall off the disk because of gravity, unless there were some very distant gravitational source pulling it away from the planet, nor would it stay on the disk because of gravity. If gravity DID exist, the water would form into a ball at the center, not flat on the disk surface.

There is another much more important factor.

Centripetal/centrifugal force. If the disk-earth were spinning', the water would be flung off simply because it was given a velocity, and inertia would keep it going in one direction (a tangent to the disk). Thus, the walls would be required to counter this centripetal/centrifugal force. However, what WOULD happen is that the water would bunch up against this wall, and it would then flow over it, unless the ice wall itself had a lip on it. Spin a flat disk around your head with water on it. The water will certainly not remain there. But put the water in a pail? The sides of the pail keep it in.

So, don't spin the planetary disk at all. No centripetal/centrifugal force. No gravity, so the water does not all bunch up into a ball. Nothing pulling the water 'down', so it does not flow off.

OOOps, forgot about surface tension.

Surface tension would tend, just like a drop of water, to keep the water 'bunched up' so it does not slide off. Ever see the pictures from the ISS crew, drinking water, spilling it on a 'desk'? Same idea.

So your ice walls have a very reduced task. Surface tension would keep the water flat against the disk.

The cold of space would keep the walls ice, as log as they were protected from radiation, and sublimation.

So, coat the ice with a thick layer of lipids that form cell membranes. Make one end hydrophobic, one end hydrophilic. They would stay only on the surface of the ice, with the hydrophobic end facing outside and the hydrophilic end bound to the ice. In effect, you are exponentially increasing the surface tension. Since lipids can be very long polymers, the intertwined polymer lipids would form a very strong 'skin' around the ice. This would prevent sublimation.

Since water, and ice, are very good shields against radiation (it has been posited to put huge water tanks around the Martian transport craft to protect the inhabitants), and allow the hydrophobic end of the lipids to form a very reflective coating, and your problem is solved.

No centripetal/centrifugal force to 'spin' the water away, no gravity to cause it to flow 'down' (wherever 'down' is), or to the center, an ice wall protected from sublimation and radiation, kept in place by very long chain polymers, and surface tension keeping it from floating off into space.

Except, well, there is the problem of preventing ALL the water from freezing. But then, if it all froze, problem solved. It would be one huge iceberg covering the planet.

EDIT

If you DID allow gravity, your situation is greatly simplified. Spin the disk at such a speed that the gravitational pull causing the water to 'ball up' is perfectly balanced by the centripetal/centrifugal force of the spinning water. As long as the forces balanced, the water would stay on forever (assuming sublimation is taken care of).

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What if it's just "ice all the way out"? If the Earth is flat, then all of the heavens are on one side of the plane of the Earth's surface. There's no opportunity for us to look for stars or planets on the same plane, and certainly no opportunity to look "behind/below" the Earth. So -- why do we need for there to be another side of the ice wall? Maybe it's not a wall at all, but just solid ice extending infinitely in every direction, with our Earth the only break in the ice.

In that case I don't think you have to explain the ice sticking around. It simply has no place to go.

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  • $\begingroup$ An extremely imaginative solution. World of Minecraft comes to mind. $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 1:56

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