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Flat Earth Theory / Re: YAFED - Yet Another Flat Earth Debate
« on: March 27, 2014, 09:24:44 PM »As I understand it, the distortion is caused by turning the lines of longitude into vertical lines, which makes sense. On earth this isn't the case.
Distortion is caused more by stretching to the north and sound and less just by making longitude lines from crossing to parallel. When navigators calculate a great circle route they take into account the so called meridional parts which measures how much distance is between any given latitude on the Mercator map to the actual on the curvature of the Earth.
Even with theoretic perfect visibility one couldn't see infinitely far. There is a vanishing point at which any structure would be too small to be seen, not to mention the difficulty of sightlines with elevation changes / obstructions.
And that's why I mentioned binoculars. Any magnifying medium could suffice to observe farther than the naked eye. Between Portugal and New York is Atlantic Ocean so no obstructions whatsoever; just my good telescope... go to your balcony and say hello, I am looking at you.
Perhaps they were designed under the assumption of a spherical earth, but I don't think that makes them dependent. The lines of longitude more or less follow the magnetic field lines of the earth. That's their value, not the implied shape they give the earth.
There is no assumption, round Earth is a fact. Mercator was a serious scientist and his primary concern was the safety of navigating around the world. The lines of longitude do not follow those of the magnetic field because True North Pole and Magnetic North Pole do not match, not to mention that magnetic poles are moving and/or shifting. And they don't give the shape of the earth.
AFAIK there are also other kinds of coordinates such as UTM, not only lat/long in degrees, minutes etc.
Observationally, it doesn't matter if the sun is moving or the earth is moving. The ancient Greeks long understood that the earth is stationary and the idea of a heliocentric cosmos was nearly universally rejected until the 16th century - and even then it took a while to gain widespread acceptance. Aside: Tycho Brahe's geo-heliocentric system as well is a fascinating beast, take a look at it sometime.
Long before Copernicus there was an ancient greek, Aristarchus of Samos (310 BCE – c. 230 BCE) who understood that Earth was moving around the sun, so its false to think that "all" ancient greeks knew about a geocentric system. He probably didn't have enough influence or maybe, his studies disappeared with the fire in Alexandria's library.
Even still, time zones are something we created, and even the 24-hour day is something we made up, by observationally tracking the sun's position in the sky. Whether the sun or earth is the one moving doesn't matter, time zones still work the same way.
Man has created a lot of things, including, but not limited to other bullshit, the Flat Earth Theory. The world had few problems and no poverty, so just because he had to kill his boredom somehow, he came up with these bollocks.
Time Zones were created to help man track his time. There are also recent studies that other timekeeping models can exist, while deprecating time zones, have UTC only globally, etc.