More importantly, there is the magnetic declination, described in a link from your link. Explaining how that would make sense on a flat earth is stunningly difficult. The vertical bar magnet idea fails rather spectacularly.
I agree that the premise should be flipped:
The OP shouldn’t have to prove the Earth is round. This is well documented, our technological society functions well with this assumption.
No, the burden of proof is on the flat-Earthers. Let them try to convince you. If they can’t, they’ll have to find a way to do it. Just ask simple questions requiring simple answers…
- Where is the center of the earth?
- How can you fly from Japan to California without overflying Europe or the Atlantic?
- How does GPS work, in your opinion?
- If gravity doesn’t exist, then explain how we’re not falling off the Earth?
Etc.
What is NOT convincing is to come up with more and more complex, convoluted explanations for what should be simple. If that’s the direction they’re heading, you can cut them off, saying “sorry, I don’t buy it, there’s a simpler explanation already.” Let them go into a tizzy, you don’t have to.
The north pole.
Because the earth looks like this.
Like Loran-C.
Gravity does exist. It pulls down.
(Just playing devil’s advocate here…)
If the Earth is flat, why are the other planets spherical? Are we special?
In the flat earth, a flight from Sydney to Buenes Aires would be optimized to fly over the North Pole, but this doesn’t happen. (Playing Devil’s prosecutor.) Are all the airlines in on the conspiracy?
Then your problem is the sun’s size in relation to an observer’s position.
An observer A directly under the sun at noon, say, can measure the width of the sun in degrees with a solar telescope. At the same time, on some other part of the planet, another observer B can also measure the width of the sun in degrees. Their results will differ. It will differ for observers C, D, E, F, et al, as the sun is close enough the angles are easily measurable.
In addition, if this particular flat earther asserts that the sun isn’t a sphere, then observer B will not see a round sun, but an ellipse.
Oh, so the whole world is just a big version of “The Truman show”? Well, I never knew that, how stupid i must be.
I mentioned him before, but check out CoolHardLogic’s video series on flattards. He very simply demonstrates the inanity of a flat earth position, and it’s presented in an easy to follow format, and some of the stuff you can do yourself (though it would involve some travel, but hey, no one said proving a global conspiracy wouldn’t involve a road trip).
If you ask about this, it appears to get ignored. See discussion at this link, scroll down to reply #20, in which a participant posts screenshots of the Sydney/Johannesburg flight track from www.flightradar24.com, illustrating a great-circle route (with distance and time) that agrees with what one would expect from a spherical earth.
Nobody responds.
If a flat-earther were to respond, my guess is that yes, they’d claim conspiracy. See my post upthread: to flat-earthers, flat earth is an incontrovertible universal constant, and all observations that conflict with it are either flawed or fraud.
Exactly! And you can point out a counterexample or fallacy with each one, which the flat-earthers need to explain.
Again, they need to come up with convincing proof, if they want to be believed “scientifically.”
I read somewhere that gravity is an illusion, that the pizza/blister Earth is accelerating upward and when you fall, it is just the Earth catching up to you. Into what it is accelerating is unclear, because my impression is that FECTs believe that the pizza Earth and sparkly sky dome is the whole of reality: there is no unthinkably vast universe out there.
Which I would find an incredibly depressing notion. The idea that we are an imperceptible mote in the immenseness of reality, amounting to nothing, bothers some people, but the apposite idea seems worse, to me.
Mainly they want to feel important, by convincing themselves that they know something we don’t. They aren’t really looking to convince the rest of us.
Right, they’d probably just say “I’ve never been on that flight, have you?! How do you know that tracking information is real??”
Old comedy routine—
“Dear Mr. Answer Man: If the world is round, why don’t people on the other side fall off?”
“Your question betrays a common misconception. People are falling off all the time.”
One thing I liked about the Discworld books was the adventure at the ocean along the edge of the world (can’t remember the book, one of the early ones with the Traveller?) where the guy built the machine to travel over the edge to see what lay beyond, and the residents on the edge had rope lines across the lip to catch debris for useful items.
Or if you were on that flight, well, you weren’t the pilot, were you?
Relevant to flat earthers’ thought processes and the reason nothing you could ever do will convince them the earth is spherical:
The ability of flat-earthers to hand-wave away those pesky facts is impressive. Just last night I was watching YouTube video where the channel-owner read an e-mail from a guy who claimed to have visited the Antarctic Wall. Of course, all verifiable information had been elided for “privacy reasons.”
I just watched about two thirds of that video, and it leaves me with an enormous question. The narrative states that the reporter is under threat from foreign governments, so he has to keep a low profile.
So, if the world were in fact flat, and all these globalist conspirators are working together (a dubious notion in the first place, based on the inability of large international groups to actually collaborate) to dupe us into believing in a ball Earth, what exactly do the globalists gain by perpetrating the fiction?
The reason I’ve heard from various flat-earthers is basically the one given here: