Hello all,
First, full disclosure. I honestly didn't believe there were people that believed the Earth was flat when a friend told me so. I came here and sure enough, apparently there are.
After reading this forum for about 2 hours, I am genuinely curious about something. I want to be absolutely clear, I'm not being facetious or condescending, I'm genuinely asking this because I genuinely want to know the answer. So here goes:
With the technology that's available at very reasonable prices (i.e. weather balloon and a go pro), it seems that you could simply find out for yourself with definitive certainty if the Earth was round or flat. The red bull stratos video comes to mind. So, the question: Why not just do that?
I've seen a lot of posts that pose many different proofs using math and perspective, etc. But it seems like the easiest proof would be to just send up a camera and look.
Again, I can't stress this enough. I'm asking a serious question and I'm interested in a serious answer. This is not any kind of troll or attempt to belittle your beliefs.
Thanks,
"at very reasonable prices".
Like saying: spend your money to prove I'm wrong/right. Not fair, don't you think?
Well, I do feel like when you take a position that is easily a >1% minority opinion, then the burden of proof would fall on you. Additionally, video and photographic evidence of a round earth is widely available in abundance so what is lacking is the video/photo evidence of the flat position, again it seems the burden of proof would be on you.
Imagine if I made the claim that elephants only walk on two legs, you would show me many pictures and videos of elephants walking on four legs and if my response was that all of that evidence was fake or tampered with, you would rightfully, demand my proof of my claim. I think that's the same thing right?
They don't even believe those of us in the Southern Hemisphere when we tell them we cannot see Polaris !!
An observable fact which they either ignore, or refuse to believe.
And even though the Himawari8 photos are NOT composite... one taken every 10 minutes from 22,000km above the equator and uploaded to the internet in real time, they still claim they are apparently all CGI ... which would mean thousands of CGI artists and hundreds of thousands of people all over the Asia Pacific region to call in what the cloud cover looks like every 10 minutes, cos I can look out my window at any time of the day and confirm the cloud cover on the latest Himawari photo!
http://himawari8.nict.go.jp/And of course all those old astronomers that lived before NASA was even created in 1958 and who all knew the earth was a sphere ... Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, Aristotle, Plato, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, etc etc etc ... well obviously NASA must have invented a Time Machine to go back in time to bribe them all to say that the earth was a sphere ... although of course they've never really landed a man on the moon.
And then there's the 14,225 photos taken during the Apollo missions which were all taken on cameras with film which had to be processed, when CGI was not possible ... yep all taken in a studio or faked or painted in some way !!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/Then there are the flights in the Southern Hemisphere eg Sydney to Santiago or Sydney to Johannesburg ... flights which would take twice as long if the earth was flat with the north pole in the middle and the antarctic all around the edge. They deny these flights even happen.
Then there is the availability of flights, cruises and overland expeditions over Antarctica and to the South Pole, and the fact that around 40,000 tourists and researchers and support staff visit Antarctica each year ... all lies they say, Antarctica is guarded by NASA and nobody can go near the "edge". Nobody has ever seen the "ice wall" but they claim it is there !!
Then there is the fact that they can't come up with a map ... the one they have totally distorts continents and oceans the further south these countries and continents are located. This should be the easiest thing in the world to create, because IF the earth was flat then creating a map should be incredibly straightforward. The reason the Gleason Projection is so distorted is because it is a 2 dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional earth.
Then there is the sunset and sunrises at the spring and autumn equinoxes, when it is observable that every place along a particular longitude will have sunrise and sunset at the same time... but if the sun is a spotlight then it will shine a circular light on the earth, which means that the sun will NOT rise or set at the same time for any given longitude.
And then there is the outright misunderstanding that you would even expect to see curvature at sea level if you are on a massive sphere ... I have posed the question "if you were on a sphere what would you expect to see if you could see the horizon in all directions and you rotated a 360 degree circle... would you expect it to go down each side and then come back up again as you finished your 360 degree rotation? If you did you would probably be on a massive cylinder ... none of them apparently can think in 3 dimensions, or imagine the vastness of our earth.
Plus no gravity, the earth is apparently flying "up" at 9.8 m/s (not even their unit is correct as gravity is measure on the surface of the earth as 9.8 m/s
2But obviously they need some way to explain why apples fall off trees and don't fly off into the atmosphere (which they call the atmoplane!)
Then their is the total lack of predictions that can be made using the flat earth model ! As you are no doubt aware every scientific theory should be able to make predictions, but I've yet to see the flat earthers' calculations for predictions of the next total solar eclipse for any particular place on earth eg Northern America, or the transits of Venus, Mars or Mercury, or the alignment of the visible planets. They claim that we can only predict eclipses because they occur at regular intervals, but in reality they are calculated using the fact that our earth is spherical in a heliocentric solar system
http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/path_through_the_US.htmIt has been pointed out to them that they could write a paper outlining the observations, experiments, and predictions made using calculations derived from the flat earth model and their proposed theory of a flat earth and have it peer reviewed, published in a respectable scientific journal and probably win a Nobel Prize... but no... claims of "all the scientists in the world are in on the conspiracy and would not allow the paper to be published"
Then there is the big question ... why are "they" trying to "hide" the flat earth reality from us, and how many millions of people would be needed to keep the spherical earth "lie" alive
That's just what I can think of off the top of my head ...
Welcome to the craziness !! I largely blame the free availability of an "education" from the UToob College of Conspiracy and the Diplomas of Ignorance that it hands out to anyone who is gullible enough !!!!
But none of them will ever change their mind ... because that would mean admitting you were wrong... plus two "science" books - one written 2000 years ago and another written in 1881 just have to be more accurate than our current knowledge of astrophysics, much of which has been discovered using technologies which were not even invented in 1881 !!