Hello everybody,
just got curious about how big earth is in terms of square miles. FE have a flat disk with a radius of 12250 miles as announced on this web site. Well, pi*radius*radius results in 471435247 square miles.
Contrasting that we the RE folks : the mean diameter of the globe is 3960 miles. The surface area of a sphere is calculated by 4*pi*radius*radius = 197969797 square miles.
Ratio : 2.4 approximately.
Curiously enough, the distance from North to South pole for the round earth is pi*radius = 12440 miles matching the radius of the FE actually, there i a good reason why the two are almost equal, if you know some math. But it is comforting to know the FE and RE folks agree to distances on earth as long as we are measuring in the North-South direction.
Back to the surface area. The size of the property I am living on is known rather accurately and so is that of my neighbors. Adding them all up gives the size of my county, the sum of counties gives the size of my state and the sum of the states gives us the square miles of the good old USA : 3797000 square miles. You can do a rough check on that by travelling east-west and north to south using mapquest and multiplying : as I said a rough estimate.
In the same fashion we can verify the surface area of all the other continents of course with the exception of Antarctica. There all our methods of detecting the shape and measuring the land areas fail.
With the area covered by the oceans the story is not quite as easy. Nevertheless, they have been navigated upon and measured for a few hundred years by now over and over again and many ships are on the high seas as you read this. Before the age of GPS we have been relying on maps of the oceans which showed with sufficient accuracy not only the directions but also distances. And were the maps proved to be inaccurate and led to a disaster they were quickly improved upon - for a few hundred years by now.
Given all of that I just cannot see that the size of the flat earth, radius of 12250 miles, can be correct, not even approximately. What do you think ?