[ostrovant]

I recently went to a county fair. From the ferris wheel, I could plainly see the curvature of the earth at the top.  This is true for tall buildings as well. How can this be possible if the Earth is flat?

[juner]

I recently went to a county fair. From the ferris wheel, I could plainly see the curvature of the earth at the top.  This is true for tall buildings as well. How can this be possible if the Earth is flat?

You absolutely cannot discern curvature on a Ferris wheel or from the top of buildings. You cannot even discern it as a passenger on common commercial airliners. This is true in even the round earth model, so I am afraid your eyes are deceiving you. You'd have to be at a very high altitude and have a wide field of view to perceive curvature in the round earth model.

[TomInAustin]

I recently went to a county fair. From the ferris wheel, I could plainly see the curvature of the earth at the top.  This is true for tall buildings as well. How can this be possible if the Earth is flat?

You absolutely cannot discern curvature on a Ferris wheel or from the top of buildings. You cannot even discern it as a passenger on common commercial airliners. This is true in even the round earth model, so I am afraid your eyes are deceiving you. You'd have to be at a very high altitude and have a wide field of view to perceive curvature in the round earth model.

Very true.  One must be well over 40,000 feet to see the obvious curvature seen and reported from planes that fly above 50,000 feet. 

[3DGeek]

Curvature is a tough thing to see in a three dimensional situation because you have curvature in the left-right direction (which you'd have if FET was true) as well as in the near-far direction (which you only have with RET).   The consequences of these two things are hard to wrap your head around.

What IS noticeable in RE but not FE is that from higher altitudes, you can see much further and that the percentage of the 360 degree view that is sky gradually increases with altitude.   (Pilots call this "Horizon Depression").   The ability to see further from the height of a ferris wheel should be easily enough to be obvious - but in most situations, there is enough nearby ground clutter to make accurate visible range measurements difficult when close to the ground.

[JoeTheToe]

I recently went to a county fair. From the ferris wheel, I could plainly see the curvature of the earth at the top.  This is true for tall buildings as well. How can this be possible if the Earth is flat?

That's an optical illusion. You have to get above something like 80,000 ft. to start perceiving the earth as a sphere. (Being a subtle human perceptual thing, there's no one magic number.) But even then, you are only seeing a tiny, tiny fraction of the globe.

(Photos from planes and amateur rockets only confuse the issue - for both sides of the "debate" - with wide-angle lenses that exhibit barrel distortion. [When the horizon is above the center of the image, it looks more round. When below, it looks less round or concave.] Anytime someone from either side of the debate submits such a photo as proof, consider the possibility that they don't have a good grasp on optics, and/or are talking out of their large intestine.)

This inaccurate misconception is the flipside of the inaccurate misconcption that leads some people into accepting one or more of the FE hypotheses.

Here is a good explanation of how much of the globe you can see - and addresses one of the most common and idiotic FE "debunkings" of the globe model (e.g. "round-earthers are so incompetent that they can't even make the relative sizes of continents consistent").: