I can't for the life of me find where it's been posted anywhere here, but I'm sure as a science teacher none of us need to write you an extensive explanation as to why that does exactly the opposite, eh?
I had muted that conversation shortly after explaining that. Twitter isn't very good for extended discussions with multiple people where your 140 characters is reduced to about 60. All I could squeeze in were these three points:
What is the question? I see a cable map.
It's economic. Very long cable is expensive.
Hard to maintain in Antarctic ocean.
The basic clam is that if the Earth were a globe, then there would be cables between Australia, South Africa, and South America.
The reason there are not is that cables go where the people, the content, and the money is. The only reason why people in Chile would benefit from a direct internet cable to New Zealand would be if they were accessing servers in that country, or if they were doing some kind of peer-to-peer connection, like Skype or phone calls. All those things work fine (but slower) going the longer route via California & Hawaii, but really there does not seem to be any evidence of a need that would make commercial sense.
Most of the cable maps are schematic, here's a more realistic one showing the actual cable routes in detail:
And here's what it looks like on a hypothetical flat Earth:
A $400 million undersea cable carrying huge amounts of electronic data from around the globe will come ashore in Northland, with an undisclosed Bream Bay site chosen as the landing point for the development.
Hawaiki Cable -- backed by its major New Zealand investor Sinclair Investments Group (SIL) -- confirmed yesterday it would forge ahead with the New Zealand link of its international submarine cable project landing in Whangarei.
Northland regional economic development agency Northland Inc says it is thrilled with the news. The cable could be operating by 2017 and will be the second fibre-optic cable network and third physical cable linking New Zealand with the rest of the world.
It will be able to carry vast quantities of electronic data between Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the west coast of the United States directly, but will open up connections globally.
There's simply no compelling economic reason to spend a billion dollars on a cable from New Zealand to South America when the very limited internet traffic between the two regions can get there via other means. It's similar to the reasons why we choose to build bridges and tunnels where we do.
I say a billion because construction and maintenance costs will be much higher in that remote region of the world.
Of course its quite possible that such cables WILL be built in the future, when there's a compelling economic reason to do so, for example the the SAex cable is currently under construction, edging south a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAex
Most Internet traffic is server based - it's generally streaming do and from a large datacenter. The internet giants like Facebook, Youtube, Amazon Google, and Netflix have data centers that serve the local needs. People in New Zealand don't access data centers in Chile. They use the fastest one, which is generally the closest.
For example, Amazon has several major data centers around the world. Amazon has it's shopping business, but also has a huge business in renting out server space for cloud computing and site hosting, as well as their streaming video and music services. This map shows the eight largest data centers, with the red lines showing where that data center is fastest. Thus all of Africa uses the UK center, and most of South America uses the Sao Paulo data center.
On a flat earth the South Atlantic Express cable will be thousands of miles longer than it should be. That means even more people will be drawn into the ancient conspiracy to hide the true shape of the earth.
It only serves to prove how powerful the conspiracy is.
In a way it's an example of Greylandra's cable experiment, that would actually work. Instead of distance above the earth's surface, we're measuring the earth's surface with a cable of known length.
In a way it's an example of Greylandra's cable experiment, that would actually work. Instead of distance above the earth's surface, we're measuring the earth's surface with a cable of known length.
So all the flat earthers would need is a submarine and a ruler, and they could measure the cable for themselves?
If they can't believe that space agencies send satellites into orbit - among a thousand other things - how will they believe a cable laying company that says its cable was 4000-miles long, rather than 6000?
Yeah, it's not exactly a practical experiment. You have to trust that the the maps are accurate, and who made the maps?
I was wondering if there might be some way a practical experiment could be done with pinging - i.e. measuring the response time between servers on different continents.
Example pining from my desktop
Code:
My router, just 100 feet away:
PING 192.168.15.1 (192.168.15.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.15.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.394 ms
Somewhere in the US
PING cnn.com (151.101.128.73): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 151.101.128.73: icmp_seq=0 ttl=53 time=24.383 ms
Probably in the UK
PING newswww.bbc.net.uk (212.58.246.81): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 212.58.246.81: icmp_seq=0 ttl=44 time=159.144 ms
Also probably UK
PING hosting.co.uk (37.61.233.117): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 37.61.233.117: icmp_seq=0 ttl=43 time=168.403 ms
Australia:
PING digitalpacific.com.au (202.130.44.27): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 202.130.44.27: icmp_seq=0 ttl=46 time=175.957 ms
China:
PING sinohosting.net (43.240.244.12): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 43.240.244.12: icmp_seq=0 ttl=46 time=185.918 ms
However it's rather difficult to know exactly where a server is, and exactly how it gets there. You can use traceroute to see steps along the way, for example:
Code:
bigmac:~ mick$ traceroute openhost.co.nz
traceroute to openhost.co.nz (119.47.118.9), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.15.1 (192.168.15.1) 0.653 ms 0.316 ms 0.322 ms
2 192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254) 0.975 ms 0.788 ms 0.717 ms
3 [My IP address].lightspeed.frokca.sbcglobal.net () 18.871 ms 18.803 ms 20.659 ms
4 75.29.64.146 (75.29.64.146) 19.180 ms 18.793 ms 18.848 ms
5 12.83.77.137 (12.83.77.137) 19.422 ms
12.83.77.145 (12.83.77.145) 20.090 ms
12.83.77.137 (12.83.77.137) 22.042 ms
6 12.122.114.29 (12.122.114.29) 24.637 ms 24.512 ms 24.248 ms
7 192.205.32.98 (192.205.32.98) 25.798 ms 23.732 ms 24.886 ms
8 xe-1-2-3.cr1-lax2.ip4.gtt.net (89.149.187.110) 34.273 ms
xe-7-0-3.cr1-lax2.ip4.gtt.net (141.136.107.206) 32.747 ms
xe-7-0-0.cr1-lax2.ip4.gtt.net (141.136.110.10) 33.627 ms
9 ip4.gtt.net (173.205.42.34) 32.511 ms 31.711 ms 31.548 ms
10 bundle-150.cor01.lax01.ca.vocus.net (49.255.255.8) 157.980 ms 158.430 ms 157.950 ms
11 bundle-200.cor01.alb01.akl.vocus.net.nz (114.31.202.44) 156.094 ms 155.713 ms 155.743 ms
12 ten-2-3-0.bdr01.alb01.akl.vocus.net.nz (114.31.202.35) 155.767 ms 156.029 ms
ten-1-0-0.bdr01.alb01.akl.vocus.net.nz (114.31.202.39) 157.833 ms
13 ip-61.87.45.175.vocus.net.au (175.45.87.61) 157.074 ms 156.978 ms 156.901 ms
14 119.47.127.137 (119.47.127.137) 157.455 ms 157.492 ms 156.948 ms
15 www.openhost.co.nz (119.47.118.9) 157.114 ms 157.670 ms 157.140 ms
You can see it's mostly bouncing around SBC/AT&T in the US at 20 to 34ms distance, then gets on the gtt.net backbone, then does the big hop to vocus.net in Australia/NZ at around 155ms. If that's largely due to the distance you can do a very rough estimate of 120ms extra travel time. That's enough time for a laser beam to travel 22,000 miles in a vacuum, but cable signals travel slower, and there are repeater units that boost the signal (and I suspect introduce an additional delay).
Ultimately I think there are too many variables for this to be a useful illustration.