This post is designed for both flat and round earther's. You can both use it and in particular the video to show others if you ever find yourself engaged in the same arguments.

So previously I set up a non-patronising, inquisitive approach to find out what makes flat earther's believe what they do.

I have stated several times that I am under no impression that I will change the minds of anyone, or anyone will change the minds of us round earthers, but this information is here for individuals to seek out themselves, and they can think about it in their own time.

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I asked a range of questions, but at first I basically got an anecdote of a family member who worked with NASA, a youtube video of a conspiracy rapper and some links, without anybody explaining their views or providing any evidence or anything that can be reproducible or demonstrated.

This was disappointing but I eventually got a few people engaged in answering some questions, and I decided to hold off my responses until a follow up post. Discussions can freely begin in the comments here and I'll engage if such a debate happens, but I want to emphasize we should consider each other equals and one side is not more retarded than the other, for this post only.

So the first argument I want to look at was this:

Horizon

Why do they call it a horizon and not a curve-izon?

My brief answer was

late Middle English: via Old French from late Latin horizon, from Greek horizōn (kuklos ) ‘limiting (circle).’'*

There was a further dispute to this and it basically boils down to the horizon argument. No matter how you look, the earth is a flat plane. Curvature in footage is digitally altered or using a fish-eye lens.

So to counter that, I've made this video which I think is a fantastic way for all of us to really comprehend how huge earth is and what the horizon is all about.

Here is the to-scale model of the solar system mentioned in the video: http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

If you wanna skip to the meat:

• 00:00 - Humans aren't made for comprehending the massive scale of things
• 1:45 - Africa is big
• 3:25 - The Earth is still flat from the top of a building, and basically flat from the window of an airplane
• 5:19 - ISS view
• 6:10 - Zoom in curvature experiment, the roll-off of the horizon
• 7:40 - Horizon latitude to scale, from the height of an airplane
• 9:03 - The horizon compared to the actual curve of the earth, zoomed way out.

This actually answers a range of other questions I recieved from @fitinfun:

Why do tall buildings not lean away from you at a distance?

Because the angle is simple too small, the Earth is much bigger than that

Why did they not include the curve when I was taught how to do surveying and in my fieldwork for the certification?

Though I wasn't there, probably because the curvature was negligible, only relevant to sizes used with GPS technology, for example

Why do pilots not have to keep dipping the nose of the plane down as they fly?

There is barely an 8 inch correction for every mile, and even so, the atmosphere also follows the earth's curvature, which the plane is caged in, and, well, gravity.

Why do planes have to fly north when it seems like they should go straight east or west?

The complexities of political borders, wind directions and speeds and so on, are not to be underestimated.

But more to the point, this is exactly because the earth is curved.

If the earth was a flat plane, it would be quicker on this map to go in a straight line, but between both destinations there is substantial curvature, adding a lot of distance. Going up and round substantially reduces that distance. You can try this by drawing a line with your finger on a beach ball or something.

Why is Antarctica off limits to everyone?

It isn't. To the contrary, it is not owned by any nation and therefore anybody can visit it. In fact there are numerous cruises you can go on for that reason, but anybody with their own fishing boat in Argentina or New Zealand or wherever can go have a look, Nobody will stop you. In fact, around 40,000 people visit every year.

Having said that, there is reason to ban people, for ecological concerns, given that its the most pristine environment on earth, and every tourist leaves a footprint.

Moon landing

So somehow this ties in with the fake moon landing approach. One user, @jimmco says:

would not be the first thing to take a camera and make a proper recording of you, space, Moon, Earth a shuttle so everyone can see? Rotating camera all around to capture all those amazing things in motion. An guess what? After 50 years we have nothing like that

The idea here is that the whole thing was fabricated, because nobody took a photo of everything together in motion.

This is largely a moot point because for a start, flat-earther's tend to dismiss any photos as fake and digitally altered in some way, just like the moon landing, so what would be the point, and secondly, there IS footage of things in motion, including the famous 'Earth-rise' The point is, regardless of what they have done or would do, you would question its validity, and without providing evidence or science, the point cannot be properly addressed so there's no point discussing it from either side.

Additionally, there is no agenda to avoid going back, there's just been no need, no political or financial incentive. But actually, recently, China is working on sending humans to the moon in the coming years. Are they going to digitally fake everything, too? Something to think about.

My questions

@dwells, who is not an official flat earther but curious, kindly offered to answer my own questions one by one, as shown below:

I asked

If you don't believe in photographic evidence from the majority of the world, what DO you consider evidence?

The answer was essentially, he would like to see an old school polaroid shot. This is one idea, but a bad one. It's very easy to create fake polaroids if you wanted. It's 2017, after all. Additionally only a few people will get to actually hold the polaroid themselves, the rest would just see it on a computer screen and therefore can be faked. So there's essentially no evidence in the world that cannot be dismissed as fake.

I asked

If there are edges with a huge wall of ice, why has nobody been there? of the 7.4 billion people alive and 100 billion dead, how come not a single one in human history has ever managed to actually go there?

His answer was:

Your assuming no one has been to the edge. It's very plausible that people have been to the edge and the information was concealed from the public.

My argument here is that no, it's not likely at all. People disappearing and being suppressed in their vast numbers over centuries would have been noticed. Indeed the pattern of people disappearing who only a few weeks ago said they were going to see the Ice Wall would be very suspect. When the world's most powerful governments cannot hide details from a single hacker leaking all their worst secrets onto the internet for all to see, it's kind of a joke to think they can somehow hide the public knowledge from millions of individuals going to see the ice wall.

I asked

Why are all the other planets round, as can be directly observed with a telescope, ball-shadows, rotation and all?

Edit To be clear, by 'ball-shadows' I mean, a shadow that behaves like it would as a ball would i.e. the lunar cycle (which can be observed in other moons and planets)

He said:

A circle/disc is round. Ball shadow? How is a ball shadow possible? Shadows are 2D not 3D

I think we can just dismiss this because of my poor explanation, but the idea is that a disc shadow would look very different.

I asked

Where is the science that corrects mainstream science? has it been publicly available to reproduce and thus pass scientific methodology?

He said:

I haven't made any claims about fighting science with science but on that subject scientific theory can be just as faith based as a religion. Science pushes big bang and evolution but neither can be tested, verified, proved and repeated. Isn't that the basis of establishing a scientific proof, the results have to be repeatable.

Where is the science that corrects mainstream science?

This shows a basic understanding of how science works, but not entirely.

A scientific theory is based on an observation. In the case of the big bang, we observe that the Universe is very big and then we hypothesize that it's getting bigger. We test this hypothesis and as it turns out, we can directly observe and repeat this observation, the expanding nature of the Universe. This is something anyone with amateur equipment can see.

The theory postulates therefore, that if everything is uniformly moving away, if you go back in time, it would go back to a single point. That's based in logic, but rightly cannot yet be absolutely proven because we cannot actually travel back in time, but the theory based on that observation does not say 'This is the absolute truth'. It simply says 'this is 99.99% the most likely outcome.

In fact, no good science claims 100%. Many sciences work with the 5-sigma system, which simply measures the level of confidence in a result. 3-sigma, for example is a 99.73% level of confidence, and 5-sigma is 99.99994% confidence, or a 1 in 3.5 million chance that its a statistical fluctuation, or an error.

Therefore, there is no faith in science. The faith comes from us individuals, who have to by default have faith that reality is what it is. Otherwise, we can argue my toilet is actually a tooth fairy. But I need to have faith that the toilet is for pooping, in the same way I need to have faith that GPS satellites are going around the earth to help us travel.

The final question

Why? Why are the evil higher-ups hiding from us?

He said:

I am not a part of the evil highee up so I can only speculate as to why they would do that and I don't think there's any place for speculation in this discussion.

When we are using science to dismantle an argument, we should avoid speculation when possible. So why wasn't a good question to find actual answers, but a good one for everyone to think about, nonetheless.

I believe I addressed everything I received. I may have missed a couple due to steemit's messy interface, but the most important ones are here.

This is a tired, old argument, but one I've never actually bothered to address, so this is my one and only time I'll do so. Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed making!