My nephew has a friend who is a flat earther and he is very serious and very passionate about it. His friend also believes that the Moon landings were faked, that 9/11 was an inside job and a controlled demolition and that Sandy Hook was a completely faked event, that no children were killed that day, all were actors and pretty much every conspiracy theory out there ….and we’ve got some of them here too.
Try as my nephew can to provide him with proof the Earth is a sphere and does orbit the Sun, nothing he says makes any difference because his friend will always answer with “that’s what they want you to believe”, that all the data, the pictures, the history books, etc. is all faked. When my nephew asked him about being able to see the curvature of the Earth while traveling in a jet at high altitude, his friend’s answer is that commercial and military airplanes have windows are “fisheye” lenses thus only appearing to make the Earth look like a sphere. UG!!!
But just the other night I saw proof that the Earth is not flat.
On Friday at around 5:30 PM I went out to the grocery store to pick up a couple of things. As I was driving south along a road coming down from ridge, I saw a rather large white fireball streak across the southern sky, moving left to right, about 15 degrees above the horizon. I lost sight of it behind some trees just as it appeared to break up.
Wanting to confirm that what I saw was what I thought it was, a meteor, when I got home from the store I found this website.
https://www.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/event/2017/4582
Note that the sightings were limited to the east coast of the US, as far north as NY and as far south as NC and as far west as western MD and western VA but nowhere else. Not west of western MD and VA, not further north of NY, not in the mid-west, mid-south, western states, west coast, nor in Europe, Asia, etc….
Also note that the further south and east the observers were, the higher the reported elevation of the fireball was relative to their position, the farther north and west, the lower the elevation.
Those independent observations are only possible if the Earth is spherical. If the Earth was a flat disk, then the fireball should have been visible to everyone on Earth at the same time and at the same elevation.
Was Galileo in on this? Did Columbus know he was destined to fail?
Of course there are many other things that prove the Earth is spherical and not flat. And contrary to what some people where taught as children, no Columbus wasn’t the only person who thought the Earth wasn’t flat at the time, it was widely understood to be spherical by most.
And you don’t even have to go back to Copernicus or Galileo. The ancient Greek astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene who was born in 276 BC figured it out with an experiment measuring the angle of shadows cast by the same sized towers in different locations on the summer solstice.
Using this experiment, Eratosthenes was the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth, which he did by applying a measuring system using stadia, a standard unit of measure during that time period. His calculation was remarkably accurate. He was also the first to calculate the tilt of the Earth's axis (again with remarkable accuracy). Additionally, he may have accurately calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun and invented the leap day. He created the first map of the world, incorporating parallels and meridians based on the available geographic knowledge of his era.