Welcome to the latest issue of The Qi of Self-Sovereignty. The newsletter exploring what it means to be free in an increasingly not-so-free world.

Whether you're looking to locate your authentic self or investigate sovereignty, you're in the right place! In each punchy issue, I share a powerful quote alongside thought-provoking content that makes you go hmm...

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Thought-Provoking Quote:

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” — Psalms 19:1

We live in a world built on faith. And I am not talking about religious faith, but scientific faith.

We trust that the Earth spins because we were told it does.

We trust that the stars are light-years away because someone measured them.

We trust our models and textbooks because, well, everyone else does too.

And maybe they’re right. But I think it’s healthy, even necessary, to pause once in a while and ask: how do we actually know what we know?

I use the phrase “scientific faith” because, if we’re honest, very few of us have ever tested these things ourselves. Have you ever measured the Earth’s curve or verified its speed? Probably not. Most of us take it on trust that someone, somewhere, has done the math.

Additionally, if you think about it, there are really only two kinds of scientific ideas: those that have already been proven false, and those that have not yet been proven false. Given enough time and new information, even our most mainstream of “truths” often turn out not to be the full story.

For centuries, doctors thought blood was just blood—one person’s could replace another’s. It wasn’t until we discovered blood types in the early 1900s that transfusions stopped being deadly guesswork.

Decades later, we were told that fat makes you fat, sparking a global craze for low-fat everything. Yet as fat vanished from our foods, sugar and refined carbs took its place, and obesity rates soared. After all, when farmers want to fatten cattle quickly, they don’t feed them fat; they feed them grains.

And until the 1950s, we had no idea that DNA carried life’s blueprint.

Anyways, you get the picture…

It’s for these reasons that curiosity matters. Questioning the world around us isn’t rebellion; it’s the essence of discovery. It’s how progress happens.

But there’s one topic that seems strangely off-limits. The moment you even ask questions about it, people start labelling you as a conspiracy theorist. 

So let me be clear from the start:

I am not a flat earther. I don’t believe the Earth is flat. But I am increasingly more curious about the traditional heliocentric model—the idea that we supposedly live on a spinning ball orbiting the sun in a vast galaxy.

I’m not questioning it to be contrarian. I’m questioning it because I believe curiosity is how we align our understanding—our internal map of reality—with the actual world we live in. If something doesn’t seem to make sense, I want to know why.

I’m not a scientist, an astronomer, or an astrophysicist. I’m just a curious human being trying to make sense of this place we all call home. And when something feels inconsistent, I think it’s worth slowing down and exploring the “why.”

With all that said, I currently have more questions than answers, so I’m looking for anyone who might help fill in the gaps. If you happen to have understanding, data, experience, or anything that brings clarity, I am all ears.

Let’s dive in…

A curiosity about motion, star trails, and parallax

By the standard model, we’re all moving—a lot—and in several directions at once:

• Earth spins on its axis at about 1,670 km/h at the equator.
• Earth orbits the Sun at roughly 107,200 km/h.
• The Sun (with us in tow) orbits the Milky Way at around 828,000 km/h.
• And our Local Group/Milky Way is drifting through the cosmos at about 2,230,000 km/h.

That’s four layers of motion happening simultaneously. If all of that is true (and I’m not saying it isn’t), here’s what doesn’t intuitively click for me:

Star-trail time lapses

Below is a long-exposure photograph of the night sky. For anyone unfamiliar, a long exposure is when a camera’s shutter stays open for an extended period. Instead of capturing a single instant, it records the path of light over time.

When you point a camera up at the night sky and take a long exposure, the stars don’t stay as fixed dots. They appear as smooth, curved trails, sweeping in perfect arcs around a central point—the celestial pole. Those arcs visually confirm that the Earth is rotating on its axis.

But here’s what doesn’t make sense to me: If all of the above motions are true, if Earth is spinning, orbiting the Sun, the Sun is orbiting the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself is hurtling through space, shouldn’t those combined movements create irregular, disjointed, or non-uniform star trails over long exposures?

In other words, if we’re simultaneously moving in multiple directions at tremendous speeds, how do we still get such clean, consistent circular paths night after night? Wouldn’t there be at least a subtle “wobble” or curvature shift in those trails as these motions overlap?

Parallax & ancient alignments

Another thing that doesn’t quite add up for me is how stable the stars appear, given the incredible speeds and motions we just talked about.

We have countless ancient monuments and artifacts, from the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge to the Mayan temples and the Georgia Guidestones, that are aligned with remarkable precision to specific stars, constellations, or celestial events. These alignments were designed thousands of years ago, and yet, when you look up at the same patches of sky today, those same stars appear to sit in exactly the same positions.

If Earth is rotating, orbiting the Sun, the Sun is orbiting the Milky Way, and the entire galaxy is hurtling through space—all at tremendous speeds—you’d think those alignments would have drifted, even slightly. Stars should no longer line up with those ancient markers in quite the same way. Over centuries or millennia, you’d expect at least some degree of shift, even if subtle, as our viewpoint changes through space.

The concept that comes to mind is the parallax effect. Parallax simply means that when you move, objects at different distances appear to shift in relation to one another. It’s the same effect that helps our brains perceive depth.

To visualize it, imagine driving past a forest. As your car moves, the trees closest to you seem to zip by quickly, while the trees farther away appear to move more slowly. That difference in apparent motion is parallax: the closer objects shift more dramatically than those farther away.

If we apply that same logic to space, it seems reasonable to think that as we move through the cosmos—spinning, orbiting, and drifting—the stars, which sit at varying distances from us, would appear to shift in relation to one another over time. Even if those stars are unimaginably far away, the scale of our motion is so vast that some detectable change might be expected.

And yet, from the perspective of an ordinary observer standing on Earth, the night sky looks unchanging. Constellations hold their familiar shapes, and ancient star alignments remain precise thousands of years later.

This puzzles me. So my genuine question is:

How do these multiple, large velocities square with the clean circular star trails we record in long exposures—and with the apparent steadiness of some historical star alignments—without a noticeable parallax effect to the naked eye? What am I missing in terms of reference frames, scales, or measurement limits?

Moving on…

A curiosity about rotation, gravity, and weight

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is how rotation interacts with gravity.

We’re told that the Earth spins around its central axis once every 24 hours, at roughly 1,670 kilometres per hour at the equator and almost zero at the poles. That’s because at the poles, you’re essentially sitting right on the axis of rotation, while at the equator, you’re at the outer edge of the spin.

Now, according to basic physics, whenever something rotates around an axis, it creates a centrifugal effect—the outward pull you feel when you spin in a chair or when water presses against the sides of a bucket that’s being swung in a circle. That outward force increases the faster you spin, and it, in theory, opposes gravity.

So here’s where my curiosity kicks in: If gravity is pulling everything toward the center, and the spin is trying to fling everything outward, those two forces are competing. And since the spin speed changes depending on where you are in relation to the equator, shouldn’t your weight change too?

At the poles, where there’s virtually no spin, gravity would be acting alone. But at the equator, where we’re supposedly moving at over 1,670 km/h, the centrifugal force should be working its hardest to counteract gravity.

Yet, when we step on a scale, whether we’re at the equator or the poles, our weight doesn’t seem to change. There’s no noticeable difference.

Furthermore, if this balance between gravity and motion is real, we might expect to notice it in other gravity-driven systems—such as bubbles rising in water. If centrifugal force is truly strongest at the equator and weakest at the poles, you’d expect bubbles in water near the equator to rise slightly faster than bubbles at the poles, since the outward force would, in theory, be helping counteract gravity. But no such variation has ever been observed. Bubbles rise at the same rate, no matter where on Earth you are. That consistency adds another layer to my curiosity about how these competing forces actually interact in the real world.

Side Note: Gravity itself doesn’t quite add up for me either. We’re told that mass attracts mass, but we’ve never been able to demonstrate that on a smaller scale. If you soak a tennis ball in water and spin it, the water doesn’t stay stuck to the surface; it sprays off in every direction—the centrifugal effect. Yet on a planetary scale, we’re told the opposite happens: that the water clings to the surface of Earth because of, well, gravity. This makes me wonder at what size an object is before the gravitational pull becomes noticeable and overpowers the spin?

Anyways, back to the topic at hand, my question is: If centrifugal force increases near the equator while gravity remains constant, wouldn’t there have to be at least some measurable variation in how heavy we are from place to place, or how fast bubbles rise in water?

I’m sure there’s a good explanation, I just haven’t been able to find one that fully makes sense to me.

Next up, let’s look at how air and projectiles behave.

A curiosity about the Coriolis effect and flight

We’re told that the Earth’s atmosphere rotates along with the planet itself. That, we’re told, is why an airplane flying east or west doesn’t need to dramatically adjust its speed to “keep up with” or “outrun” the spin of the Earth beneath it.

For example, if the Earth rotates at roughly 1,670 km/h at the equator, you might imagine that a plane could simply take off, hover in place, and let the ground rotate underneath it. Of course, that’s not what happens. The explanation is that the atmosphere—and everything in it—rotates together with the planet, so from our frame of reference, there’s no relative motion to “catch up” with.

But here’s where I get curious. When snipers take long-distance shots, they’re trained to account for something called the Coriolis effect—the idea that the Earth rotates slightly underneath the bullet during its flight, causing a very small sideways deviation that must be corrected for precision accuracy.

So my question is this: If the Coriolis effect (Earth's rotation) is significant enough to affect a bullet travelling a few kilometres through the air, why doesn’t it seem to noticeably affect an airplane that’s travelling thousands of kilometres and spending hours in flight? Both, as far as I know, are moving through the same air and atmosphere.

On to my final curiosity…

A curiosity about pressure, vacuums, and equilibrium

In simple terms, the laws of thermodynamics tell us that systems naturally move toward balance—heat flows from hot to cold, pressure moves from high to low, and things tend to equalize over time. Which is why it feels puzzling to imagine our pressurized atmosphere existing right next to what’s described as the near-perfect vacuum of space.

On Earth, any time you have a high-pressure area next to a low-pressure one, gas moves until the two reach equilibrium. So, intuitively, I think our atmosphere would gradually escape into space until the pressure balanced out completely.

The common explanation, of course, is that gravity holds the gases close to Earth, preventing the atmosphere from dissipating.

But, I can’t help wondering how this works in practice.

Imagine two containers—one filled with air and the other a vacuum—when you open a hole between them, the gas rushes into the empty one until the pressure evens out. So how does this principle apply on a planetary scale, where there isn’t a physical “wall” separating the atmosphere from the vacuum beyond?

Some people propose the idea of a firmament or an enclosing barrier—something hermetically sealed, meaning completely airtight, preventing any gas from escaping. Now, I’m not saying that’s what I believe, but I do find myself asking: if there’s no such seal, how exactly does the atmosphere remain intact next to the vacuum of space?

I understand that gravity supposedly plays a role, and that atmospheric density decreases with altitude until it becomes almost nonexistent, but from a purely conceptual standpoint, I still find the idea fascinating—and a little hard to picture.

Wrapping up…

I want to reiterate that asking these questions about the heliocentric model doesn’t mean I believe the Earth is flat or that modern science is wrong. I’m simply trying to understand the world, and at this point, I have more questions than answers.

If you happen to have deeper insight, experience, or data that can shed light on these topics, I’d love to hear it. Your perspective might help me and others align our internal maps more closely with the territory—the real world around us. Which is ultimately what this is about: refining the map, seeing reality more clearly, even when it challenges what I thought I knew.

Before I go, I wanted to share one image that’s always piqued my interest.

Below is the headstone of Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977), one of NASA’s founding figures. Beneath his name is a simple inscription: Psalms 19:. If you grab your bible, this passage says:

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.”

Of all the verses he could have chosen, he chose the one that mentions the firmament, a word that, depending on translation, can mean the sky, the heavens, or a kind of barrier separating Earth from what lies beyond. Whatever it meant to him, it’s an intriguing choice for the founder of the space program.

I don’t draw conclusions from it; I simply find it thought-provoking.

To end, thank you for taking the time to read, to think, and maybe to wonder alongside me. If this inspires you to look a little closer, to listen a little deeper, or to ask your own questions about this incredible world we share, I am in full support.

Thanks for taking the time to read this issue of The Qi of Self-Sovereignty. I hope you found it insightful.

I always welcome feedback and thoughts. So, do not hesitate to respond to the newsletter email, comment on the article or reach out via Twitter.

Seb