What is it with people wanting to believe the Earth is flat? Is there some grand conspiracy to try and convince us otherwise? It seems people will go to great lengths to try and find some optical illusion that appears to disprove the evidence.
Image from flickr
On a human scale the Earth does look pretty flat, apart from landscape features that tend to get in the way. Generally you can't see far enough to notice the curvature, and that curvature is very slight when we are on a ball 12,600km across.
However, people worked out that it wasn't flat thousands of years ago. People back then were not daft and they were obsessed with the stars. They travelled fairly far north and south and noticed that the positions of the stars changed. The Pole Star (Polaris) is pretty much directly overhead if you are at the North Pole, but would be much lower near the equator and not visible at all if you go far enough south. Ancient people sailed around Africa and saw that the sun shifted from the south to the north. Neither if these seem feasible on a flat Earth.
Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth a couple of thousand years ago from the differing angle of the sun at different latitudes.
My first response to talk of a flat Earth is timezones. I've spoken to people in Australia and they will be going to bed as I get up. Flatearthers will say the sun is some sort of spotlight, but would that make it totally invisible from across the disc? It would need to give a stripe of light to cover a whole timezone from north to south, and shift with the seasons.
There are globes going back hundreds of years. Some of these even date to before the Americas were found by Europeans. Columbus and his sponsors knew he wouldn't sail off the edge.
So maybe the globe makers are behind the conspiracy. Or maybe it's satellite makers as we shouldn't need to bounce signals off things in space to get them around a flat Earth. It would have to be a massive conspiracy involving millions of people. It only takes one Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning to leak 'the truth', or one Donald Trump who cannot resist tweeting just about anything.
Then there's this guy who thinks he can prove the Earth is flat using an spirit level in a plane.
Maybe someone should explain how gravity works to him. The laws of gravity are very well understood. They would get a lot more complex to deal with a flat Earth. Is it thinner at the edge? We'd be lighter there.
I'm not a scientist and I'm not going to look up all the evidence for you. Oh, you only believe what you can directly experience? Do you trust all the medicines you use when you didn't test them yourself?
I'm not going to watch lots of videos trying to explain how I am deluded about this. Those I've seen are tedious anyway. Have these people really got nothing better to do?
Maybe they should talk to this guy. Of course the footage could be faked, but why bother?
I'm Steve, the geeky guitarist.
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