If the Flat Earth Theory is correct then shouldn't we be able to see across the sea, using a powerful telescope, the opposite land?
For example, shouldn't I be able to see American shores from a UK beach?
(is this question ridiculous?)
The atmosphere is not perfectly transparent.
But we can see the moon in the USA when it's vertically over the UK? Surely the atmosphere would block that too?
The atmosphere stretches about 62 miles upwards vertically (as a gradient) and tens of thousands of miles outwards horizontally (not a gradient).
Do you know this for sure are you saying this is according to your preferred model?
I'm using the traditional milage for the height of the atmosphere. If you have any issues with that number in the traditional atmosphere model, let us know.
Not really. I honestly haven't looked into it that deep. But do you accept the traditional mileage as fact? If so, why would you accept it as a fact?
Yes - even in Round Earth theory - the atmosphere has mostly faded to vacuum by around 60 miles.
The claim that the far distant parts of the Flat Earth are blocked by atmosphere DOESN'T hold water though. For this to be the reason you can't see things like mountains beyond (say) 60 miles, the atmosphere would only JUST be transparent enough to see the sun and moon when they are vertically overhead. But if the sun is overhead in (say) Europe and is just setting in the central USA (a distance of around 6,000 miles) with the sun being 3,000 miles above us (according to the TFES Wiki) then by pythagoras, the light passes along the hypotenuse of a 3,000 x 6,000 triangle a distance of 6,700 miles. Using similar triangles - the amount of atmosphere you'd be looking through (call it 'A') would be given by A/60 = 6700/3000 -- so A=134 miles.
So when the sun (
or the moon) is setting, we're looking through 134 miles of atmosphere. But FET says that the reason you can't see a mountain that's 100 miles away is because it's blocked by the atmosphere.
Doesn't make sense.
Now - I'm fairly sure someone here is going to say that the sun's rays can pass more easily through the air than light from a mountain - and that's a very fair claim.
However, we have to consider the moon - which is much dimmer than a snow-covered mountain peak. We can repeat all of the above calculations for the moon and come up with the same exact answers. So the "bright sun" idea doesn't fix this issue for FET.
To make the math come out right - so you could see the moon clearly on the horizon but NOT see mountains at 100 miles, the atmosphere would have to be no more than 20 miles deep - not 60 as claimed above (and as RET would have us believe).
But if that were the case, people would not be able to breathe on the top of mount everest...and they clearly can (albeit with difficulty) and at 40,000 feet, airplanes would have far too little air to keep them flying. Air pressure here on the ground would be VASTLY lower than it currently is.
To get an air pressure of 14.7 psi - you need 14 lbs of air sitting above every square inch of the earth's surface - but if the air tapers off to nothing at only 20 miles, the air pressure would be more like 5 psi...and it's plainly not!
So this claim that atmospheric attenuation is the reason you can't see the flat earth mountains from long distances cannot work alongside the claims that the sun and moon are only 3000 miles above the Earth.
One or the other MUST be incorrect.