😀 I haven't IQ tested her. As a note I'm what she considers a smart engineery computer guy, but she can beat me at almost every game of Scrabble (like 400 vs 250). She can beat me at Tetris every time. She has played this 1010! android game for 3 years straight and not died once. Which is incredible to me. So she has reasoning skills and planning, and some abstract shape solving ability that is very tuned.

But she has zero science background, grew up Catholic, where god did everything, so she never thought critically about the humans on a planet situation.

But she doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to things outside of her realm. So maybe it is an attention issue not an intelligence issue. i.e. she saw this red car go by and said thats nice and a bit different looking. I said yeah it's our neighbours down the street She said I've never noticed it, how do you know its the same car? So I said: it's had the front emblem taken off and re painted. Suspension is lowered, there is a performance parts logo on driver rear quarter window, it has smooth rims without a lot of cutouts, and a black subtle wing added on the tail. When she asked how I knew all that I said because we see it everyday on our evening walk together. For her she's walked by it 100s of times without remembering it ever being parked on our street.

Well I had to explain it as if it were a kids class. We didn't get into deep theory , constants, equations type stuff. Just overall concepts.

Saying earth surface was round and each country gets different day and night sequences etc, she immediate went to why aren't Australians dangling off if they are at the bottom. So we had to go over center of gravity and gravity itself.

Which led to the Sun and moon being outside the earth. And I had to talk about the immense distances and speed of light concepts. (Since she thought she could get to the sun in about 45 minutes)

Then the questions came about why, if the earth rotates for day and night, aren't people flying off. So I had to go over gravity and inertial laws. Referencing something she knew like being in a car and dropping something, it drops relative to you and doesn't fly back at 100km/h ( inertial frame of reference stuff).

She was obviously skeptical still, especially about stars being distant suns.

And then she came to the conclusion of: how did we get here, if we are tiny spec in the universe on a planet. So we touched on evolution theory.

We eventually got her kids solar system books, and watched some good documentaries on netlix about these subjects and the one about the stages the earth has gone through.

She eventually understood the concepts, but still though we were trying to trick her. Until she went skydiving and realized "the air is 3D" ( her words ). All along she saw the sky as a background 2d backdrop on the INSIDE of the snow globe earth.

I don't know how she missed this concept most of her life, I guess her circle just didn't include people that talked about science stuff, and she took her cues from what she could see...flat ground, sky seems far away, sun is tiny but looks like it hits the mountains and water.

Yes, the true flatearthers deny what they are hearing and dig in deeper

Agree, and if earth was indeed flat, these people would claim it was a sphere.

She wasn't initially at that level to comprehend the sun as an object with intense heat and super mass. She saw the sun as a lightbulb inside the earth dome.

yeah. its ridiculous. Rather than accept that there's some inaccuracies and that parts of the bible contain mistakes and say something like "but most of it is true" .... they double down, triple and quadruple down. They have to get increasingly improbable theories to explain how all this evidence isn't really real. Fossils are planted by satan, to lead people astray; there's a massive World Order whose sole job is to keep this secret for some strange reason.

like. they could just build a rocket and launch it into space and see for themselves. Or some really simple experiments involving sticks and shadows. that allowed them to determine the distance of the sun from the earth, it's circumference, and can be replicated with some lumber and fifty bucks in the gastank.

Technically, this isn't even a case of religion going crazy. The flat Earth conspiracy actually started out in the German Nazi party and were eventually pushed out because even the Nazis thought they were too crazy.

Notice how many of them mention a vague "they" as the ones maintaining the conspiracy. That's them referring to Jewish people. While this is notmal for most conspiracy theories, few directly originated from the Nazis.

If you want more detail, there's a couple episodes of Behind the Bastards explaining it. I recommend giving them a listen