[bvdbobcat]

 If you feel the earth is flat does that also make the sun and the other planets flat as well?

[StinkyOne]

If you feel the earth is flat does that also make the sun and the other planets flat as well?

They don't think the Earth is a planet, so no need for it to be round.

[3DGeek]

If you feel the earth is flat does that also make the sun and the other planets flat as well?

If the sun and moon were flat - then there are two possibilities:

1) They lay flat, parallel to the surface of the Earth.   In that case, when it is noon at some far distant place - and mid-afternoon for you - the sun would look like an ellipse and not a perfect circle as it does.   Since that doesn't happen - this cannot be the case.

2) They stand up vertically - at right angles to the surface of the Earth - well if that were the case, then we'd be seeing the Sun "edge-on" at noon...and we don't.

Hence the Flat Earth sun and moon must be spheres.

Sadly that doesn't work EITHER because the moon has distinctive surface features.   If it were hovering above some place on the equator - then someone standing far to the North would see the opposite face of the moon to someone standing far to the South...and they don't see different sides of the moon.

So neither flat nor round nor any other shape you can imagine will work.

Some or the crazier flat-earthers claim that the moon is a "hologram" projected up there by NASA - but they've seen too much StarWars - holograms don't work like that.    You have to be looking towards the source of a hologram in order to be able to see it.   Plus (I believe) people could see the moon about 6,000 years ago - long before NASA or holograms existed!

So it's all busted and the world is round.

[J-Man]

I'm beginning to notice this happening more and more as I watch closely now events unfolding for the many flat earthers. Regardless of what anyone says, this IS proof the sun is very close to us.

[mtnman]

I'm beginning to notice this happening more and more as I watch closely now events unfolding for the many flat earthers. Regardless of what anyone says, this IS proof the sun is very close to us.

No, it's simply not proof. I'm sure this has been explained multiple times so I'm not going to do it again. Here is an article that has an explanation. I'm sure you will dismiss it since it includes a picture from space. But others might find it interesting. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/02/crepuscular-rays-are-parallel

[StinkyOne]

I'm beginning to notice this happening more and more as I watch closely now events unfolding for the many flat earthers. Regardless of what anyone says, this IS proof the sun is very close to us.

This is a good teaching moment about the importance of critical thinking. On the face of it, the sun looks extremely close. If I applied no further thought, I might even believe you. There is a very obvious problem with that though. A sun that small/close wouldn't be able to illuminate such a large area. (half the world)

[Jura-Glenlivet]

We did this some time ago here https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=3106.msg77356#msg77356

I also did a simple perspective drawing of how parallel lines can look like that from 4 different views



The pink bits were going to be clouds but I never got round to finishing it (it's at work) but you can seehow it works. The yellow cylinder in the top right view is just visible in the bottom left.

[J-Man]

Amazing, three different pit bulls jump to the head of class and say no no no J-Man, it's not what you know and see, it's this. 3 completely different answers, none of which are accurate. The sun does illuminate half the flat earth and travels around in a circle. We see it everyday.

Bye bye come again, here's your doggie bones

[mtnman]

Amazing, three different pit bulls jump to the head of class and say no no no J-Man, it's not what you know and see, it's this. 3 completely different answers, none of which are accurate. The sun does illuminate half the flat earth and travels around in a circle. We see it everyday.

Bye bye come again, here's your doggie bones

Enjoying your trolling? There were not three different answers, just saying the same thing different ways. And by the way, your FE animations don't show your imagined spotlight sun illuminating half the flat Earth. Maybe almost half, but to illuminate half of the circle would require a straight line, not that odd oval shaped thing.

[StinkyOne]

Amazing, three different pit bulls jump to the head of class and say no no no J-Man, it's not what you know and see, it's this. 3 completely different answers, none of which are accurate. The sun does illuminate half the flat earth and travels around in a circle. We see it everyday.

Bye bye come again, here's your doggie bones

I never gave you an answer, I showed you that your thinking couldn't be accurate because of how small your little sun would have to be. The rays seem to emanate out from a spot that couldn't be more than a few miles wide. Good luck with that one.

[Hmmm]

bvdbobcat, you can find my simple, and crazy for the skeptics, thought here:
https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=7135.msg128035#msg128035

[3DGeek]

I'm beginning to notice this happening more and more as I watch closely now events unfolding for the many flat earthers. Regardless of what anyone says, this IS proof the sun is very close to us.

These "god rays" are one of the hardest things to get your head around.  One of the valuable things I've learned here at TFES (possibly the ONLY thing!) is why this seems so bizarre.

I agree that they are possibly the most visually compelling reason to believe in FET.

There is one very large problem with human perception - we can't judge distances to things that we don't know the size of beyond a few hundred yards.   Clouds are a classic example of that.   They are too far away for our 'stereoscopic' vision to see a shift in position from one eye to the other.  We can guess the distance to a tree or a house that's beyond our stereoscopic vision distance perception - but only because we know roughly how bit a tree or a house is.

We don't have personal "gut feel" for just how insanely big some clouds can be.  Some of them are hundreds of miles across.  By just looking at them, we don't know how far away they are because we can't use stereoscopic vision and we don't know their size.

They SEEM to be much closer than the horizon - but they aren't.  Clouds can be visible for hundreds of miles beyond the horizon.

The truth is that those god-rays are almost parallel to the ground...as you'd expect if the sun is 93 million miles away...but they're not *quite* parallel to the ground.

So from where we see them, they are like the "train tracks" thing - they are converging in perspective.   So they do converge towards the sun - but we mistake that for an object that's nearly vertical - and not something nearly horizontal.

This is an optical illusion that's so powerful that I cannot for the life of me 'shake it'.  Just last night, my wife and I were eating out at a fancy restaurant with a view out over a large lake.   As the dessert course arrived - the sun was 15 minutes away from sunset and above a layer of cloud.   The god rays breaking through REALLY seemed compelling.

No matter what - it's not PROOF of a flat earth.  There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for them in RET...even though we have to resort to diagrams to prove it.  (Ooohhh!  Diagrams!  Scary!  The work of demons!)

[douglips]

When we look at railroad tracks going off into the distance, we know they never touch, but they seem to get closer and closer. Can we tell how far away the next station is by looking at them?