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But here's the problem with this logic; I've never been presented with any credible arguments that suggest Earth is not round, and in fact have been able to use
by TameAntelope 5y ago
But here's the problem with this logic; I've never been presented with any credible arguments that suggest Earth is not round, and in fact have been able to use this knowledge of Earth's roundness to understand and accurately predict facts in my real life on a semi-regular basis.
* When I see my flight plan, I understand why it's curved.
* When I see clouds that a radar says should be a certain distance away, I understand what makes me able to see them.
* Where weather is moving, how it's moving, and why certain weather patterns even exist at all.
* When I see a landmass on water I can accurately guess how far away it is, and I can understand why moving even a small amount upwards lets me see so much more (and why it was such an advantage on ships to have a vantage point only 20 to 30 feet up in the air).
* How stars move in the night sky is predictable.
* Why the "north" star exists and is accurate as a directional indicator.
* Where constellations are, and how they're different depending on what latitude I'm currently observing the night sky from.
* The fact that tides exist, and how they work.
* I understand how and what satellites are, when I can see them, and I can predict when I'm going to lose signal from them given certain circumstances.
* Every other planet I've observed is round. The moon is round. The sun is round.
None of this works if Earth isn't round, and that's just off the top of my head. The point here is that so many things stop making sense if you don't accept the fact that the Earth is round, and so you're constantly failing to predict or understand a whole host of problems that, yes, do come up in my daily life.
This isn't about "happening to pick the right set of beliefs", it's about matching what you're told with what you're observing and noting a singular and profound consistency across disciplines, uniformly converging on one single, basic fact; the Earth is round.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago> * When I see my flight plan, I understand why it's curved. Just came off the plane yesterday. I remember the earth on the flight map was perfectly flat. The path was weirdly curved though...
- kitd 5y agoYeah lol. Flat-earthers should be suing airlines for flying them further than needed. Make them put their money where their mouth is.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smukherjee19 5y agoThe path is curved because that's the straight line over the surface of a sphere, and if you project that straight line over to the Earth on a flat screen, it'll look curved. EDIT: Wait, didn't get the sarcasm, my bad. :P
- aeternum 5y agoThe problem is these can all be refuted without too much trouble: 1) Flight plans only look curved because you are using a map projection that assumes a spherical globe. If you use the right flat earth map you will find that flight paths follow straight lines. 2) Clouds and distances still exist in a flat earth and the clouds float above the earth. This is why they are detectable by radar. 3) Weather patterns exist on the flat earth because the sun moves across it and heats it unevenly. 4) An ant on a perfectly flat desk can also see much more from an elevated vantage point. Are you claiming desks are also spherical? 5) No one is claiming the stars nor the flat earth is stationary. Both can rotate around various axes and the resulting movement can be predicted. 6) The north star sits slightly above the plane of the flat earth and far to the north so that it appears north from any vantage point on the earth. This is just because of its distance. 7) The constellations differ depending on latitude because of the refraction of the atmosphere. This bends the light rays. 8) Tides are caused by the pull of the moon as it traverses above the flat earth and attracts the water in the ocean. 9) The other planets are also flat and only appear round because they are tidally locked with respect to the earth.
- TameAntelope 5y agoThis is a good comment, because it illustrates exactly what I'm talking about w/r/t predictability. If what you've written here can help you accurately predict the answers to questions you don't know, then you might be onto something. However, there is no predictive value in any of what you've written here, so while they may be, to some, "refutations", they are not in any way useful. If there were actually any flat earthers who cared about reason, because of the lack of predictive value (not to mention the contradictory/unprovable nature of what you've written here), they would not remain flat earthers for very long.
- hvidgaard 5y agoI usually propose a rather simple, albeit not cheap, experiment for this. 1. Find a sufficiently large "shallow" body of water. 2. Build a number a number of masts/poles in a straight line, all with an identical height over the water. Now when standing at the shore and looking at the masts I predicts one of two things. a. you can see all masts in their entirety with a telescope, or b. you can see less and less of the masts the further away they are. There are actual places with power lines that satisfy this requirement. For b. you can use high school math to reason about the curvature needed to explain the results. There is no such sound logic (to my knowledge) explaining this for a flat surface.