Flat Earth Follies: 10 Point Flat Earth Meme "Not a Spinning Ball"

Flat Earth Claim

The Facts

I'll just rip through these one-by-one although many are actually related...


1. "I have never witnessed the horizon curve"

Unless you have never seen a horizon at all, it curves around you 360°, so you are just not paying attention.  Your horizon simply is a circle, that is a fact.  And if it curves around you it is simply impossible for it to also magically extend out to infinity left and right.  It just doesn't.

The horizon below is 180° of my view - the software has simply distorted the image to bend that 180° into a straight line (panorama) but the left of the image is East and the right side is West.  It curves.

The term 'horizon' even means "limiting circle".

Even if the Earth is "Flat" your horizon is a circle due to the limits of atmospheric visibility.

It's roughly equal in every direction (assuming an obscured view).

But once you figure out that, at least the edge of your horizon is a circle, and we know that viewing a circle on edge will look like an ellipse and therefore it would have a bump when you cut part of that view off with a camera.

Here you go, lens distortion corrected, and Sagitta (the bump) height explained in exacting detail.

What Flat Earthers cannot do is explain why the visible horizon is the size it is with the elevation of the observer.  However, it matches perfectly to the accepted Globe model.

2. "I have never felt the Earth spinning beneath me at 1,000 mph"

That's because you cannot feel, sense, or in any way detect speed using a local measurement.  We measure speed relative to something else.  Your GPS measures speed by looking at your positional changes over time, that information comes by comparing transmitted time signatures.  It isn't a local measurement.

The Concorde could cruise at 1,354 mph but nobody had a problem getting up and walking up and down the isles.  This is another flat Earth claim that is just facile.

We've computed the centrifugal acceleration of the Earth's rotation and found it is tiny compared to the force of Gravity and since it is a constant acceleration it merely cancels out that 0.3% portion of Gravity so we feel slightly lighter at the Equator than the Poles (not enough to be able to feel a difference but measurably so).

And we've looked at the impact this would have on planes flying and gyroscopes as well.


3. "There are no actual photographs of Earth from space."

No, you just lie and make excuses, which isn't the same as you proving the images are fakes.

And while you can (perhaps) reasonably object to modeled, composite images such as those from Suomi NPP, even though NASA very clearly explains exactly how they are made, there are a multitude of other image sources that are not made this way.

Himawari 8 and EPIC both constantly send back full frame images of the Earth.

Furthermore I have my original print from 1969 which has been in my Family since that time which was taken on flim.

And there is also the V-2 footage from 1948.

So I find this claim to just be a Flat Out lie.


4. "Water has never been shown to stick to a spinning ball"

Here is water sticking to a ball, I even rotated it with the same force as the water on the Earth experiences.  I cover all the other objections in my more detailed blog post.

5. " Planes do not constantly fly downward as to not end up in space"

Yes, actually, they do.  What you failed to do - as per usual - is calculate how much of an effect this is and bother to actually understand how planes trim for flight.

Fortunately, I have flown a plane and I have explained it in great detail in my blog post on planes.


6. "Gravity is a failed theory and was never proven with any experiments"

This is Flat Earths big lie.  Tell it often enough and they will believe it I guess.  But it is a lie and inexcusable one.

Gravity is the mutual attraction of matter.  If there was not an acceleration acting on matter then when you throw a ball upwards it would not slow it's rate of movement away from you, stop, and then fall back down, all with a constant 9.81 m/s/s that is easily verifiable and has been tested billions of times.  It's been scientifically tested hundreds of times and is constantly being retested and remeasured with greater accuracy.

Just a tiny sample of the scientific basis rendering this claim utterly without merit.

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What is a failed "hypothesis" is the claim that things fall down because of Density which I covered in the above post on water sticking to a ball and for which there absolutely is zero scientific evidence supporting.  It's utter nonsense and disproved by the simple removal of the acceleration of gravity which then causes things to not sort by density.

And the formula for the buoyant force includes the acceleration of gravity: p V g


7. "Water always finds it's level and doesn't bend (they call it sea level for a reason)"

Yeah... unfortunately Flat Earthers, once again, don't seem to have the first clue what they are talking about.  Geodetically speaking...

And this is supported in every modern geodesy book.

And yes, in carpentry or construction 'level' can also be used to mean flat.  That is simply not how the people who define what "Sea Level" is and means, use it.

And I've covered direct measurements of curvature in my post above on the 'ball'.


8. "Light cannot make a straight, vertical reflection over a curved surface"

Which you clearly never tested and demonstrate that you don't know how things work.

Unless the water is still there will be a great many angles from which the water can reflect to the viewers eye.

And here it is reflecting over the VERY CLEARLY convexly curved wave.

And here on a bridge with a large convex curve.

So you are wrong, you clearly didn't bother to test it or understand how it works and that makes you a liar.

Or did the Earth suddenly get curved into a ball?

9. "I have witnessed things from distances that I should not have been able to see if there was a curve"

No, you just don't know what you are doing.  Common failures on the part of Flat Earthers are giving false & exaggerated distances, failing to take into account the elevation of the observer, giving the wrong elevation for the observer, and using the wrong math.

I've done my own, from scratch, derivations for the equations (height obscured), explained why 8" miles squared and why it's wrong, and written my own horizon calculator.

I've covered CN Tower from Olcott, Chicago skyline from MI, Apple Pie Hill to Philadelphia, Mt. Rainer, from airplanes, the 'mountain of errors', Mount Diablo from Loomis, Mt. Rainer from Brunswick (193.8 miles), and Reunion Island from Mauritius.  Not ONE of those showed a Flat Earth.


10. "Architects and structural engineers do not take a curvature into account when designing roads, bridges or railroads"

How far is it from Dallas to Austin?

195 miles, along that path anyway.

Guess what.  You just took Earth's curvature into account.  Every map we use has this curvature taken into account already.  They flatten the maps out in small enough sections that the distortions are small.  Have you never seen how the sectional maps get more and more distorted as you go further North because you have to stretch out ever shorter distances to make them square.

The distance measurement is really the only relevant value that someone building a railroad or very long bridge would need to know and this is simply how they calculate long distances -- they plug it into a tool where geodetic engineers have already measured the curvature.  That would determine how many rails and ties and bed they would need to plan for.

Do you know how much the curvature plays into that 195 mile measurement?  Let's compare. Our angle (a) is given by 195/3959 (in radians) or 2.8221° and we can find the chord length is 2*R*sin(a/2) = 194.981 miles.   So we're talking about a difference of 100 feet over 195 miles.

You what matters MORE along that 195 miles?  All the hills. You wanna guess what the margin of error is when you are buying railroad supplies for a 195 mile run?  A heck of a lot more than 100' worth.

So you are wrong because when they compute the distances the little bit of curvature is already accounted for so they are using the curvature of the Earth indirectly.  But more importantly, nobody really needs to care about it. I addressed some other points in my post on buildings as well.

And when it does matter they do have to take into account the curvature of the Earth, such as when they built LIGO.

So more Flat Earth lies really.

Conclusion

This 'meme' fails from start to finish to such a great extend as it strikes me as someone actively being dishonest.