So I'm watching this show about flat earthers while smoking a bowl, which I think is a highly appropriate activity to be engaged in while watching something like that, and I was also thinking of the parallel lines illusion where it appears that sunbeams converge on the sun, which they do but they just don't appear to be parallel (almost) while doing it, when it occured to me that if the Earth really were flat then it would appear very differently to us than it does.
I think if you had a flat surface that extended 6-10k miles in every direction, visually that would create the illusion that you were standing at the center of a very shallow bowl where the edges of the bowl came up to approximately eye-level. Further, this illusion would become more pronounced the higher your vantage point was, so if you were in a very tall building or on a mountaintop the bowl would be a lot more pronounced rising to approximately eye-level of whatever your vantage point was.
That's assuming you could even see the horizon. On a spherical Earth like what we have, at ground level the horizon is only ever about 10-20 miles away, because that's how far it is before the curve of the Earth blocks things from view. But if the earth were flat then the "horizon" would be thousands of miles away so it's not likely you could even see it through that much atmosphere. You wouldn't have a hard horizon at all, instead everything beyond a certain distance would be obscured by a purplish haze because there would be just too much air in the way.
It seems like most efforts to convince flat-Earthers rely on experements to prove the curvature of the Earth. Use laser beams, measurements and math and you can see it, but flat-Earthers aren't good at that sort of stuff so it's not convincing to them. Maybe a better approach is to devise experements that would prove the Earth to be flat, and then see them fail?
I think if you had a flat surface that extended 6-10k miles in every direction, visually that would create the illusion that you were standing at the center of a very shallow bowl where the edges of the bowl came up to approximately eye-level. Further, this illusion would become more pronounced the higher your vantage point was, so if you were in a very tall building or on a mountaintop the bowl would be a lot more pronounced rising to approximately eye-level of whatever your vantage point was.
That's assuming you could even see the horizon. On a spherical Earth like what we have, at ground level the horizon is only ever about 10-20 miles away, because that's how far it is before the curve of the Earth blocks things from view. But if the earth were flat then the "horizon" would be thousands of miles away so it's not likely you could even see it through that much atmosphere. You wouldn't have a hard horizon at all, instead everything beyond a certain distance would be obscured by a purplish haze because there would be just too much air in the way.
It seems like most efforts to convince flat-Earthers rely on experements to prove the curvature of the Earth. Use laser beams, measurements and math and you can see it, but flat-Earthers aren't good at that sort of stuff so it's not convincing to them. Maybe a better approach is to devise experements that would prove the Earth to be flat, and then see them fail?
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2xjeu5l
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