The World is Flat

The World is Flat debate: Here are my rebuttals to my opponent"s claims: The reason you see the horizon as flat is because the world is so big that you cannot possibly notice its curvature. Even if you are high enough up it still gives the illusion of being flat. The Earth has a circumference of 24,901 miles. If you go 20 miles up, the apparent earth size would be: 24,901/20 = 1245.05 miles Which is still pretty big. The distance to the horizon could be: 679.6 miles away and that is being generous assuming you are 62 miles up in the air[1]. So you should see the curves right? No, actually you can"t. Where the curving part of the earth cuts off you can"t see any more since our vision goes in a straight line. If you hold your arms out in front of you and curve your fingers forward you can"t see them. You only see your knuckles. Now rotate your arms in a circle at that same height and fingers bent the same way. You still can"t seem them. Even though your fingers are curved you can"t see them. This is what happens when you see the earth. You can"t tell it is curved and appears flat. Depth perception is really hard to determine when you are at a great distance as well. The same principles apply for bodies of water in your second argument. Pilots would not fly off into outer space either. Gravity pulls them down and keeps them level. A plane does not go nearly fast enough or have enough power to escape earth"s gravity like how you described. Let"s compare this to tether ball. Think of a plane as a tether ball, gravity as the rope, and earth as the poll. If you hit the ball it will go around the pole. The rope prevents it from leaving and the ball is about the same distance from the pole all the way around once. (Obviously if it goes around enough times the rope will get shorter, but I think you can understand my analogy and what I mean by it). Tycho Brahe has not proved the Earth is flat. The only thing his study shows is that the stars are very very very far away. If you walk left of your computer, it will be on your right. If you walk right of your computer, it will be on your left. Try this with a landmark in the distance like the Statue of Liberty and you"ll have to go further. Try it with the sun and you"ll have to go much further. Do it with a star" yeah, you really can"t. The nearest stars to us excluding the Sun is the Alpha Centauri system composing of 3 suns. Note that these stars are 4.37 light years away from the earth. That means the light takes 4.37 years for the light to even reach us. Moving a small distance in comparison is going to have little effect. Don"t get me wrong 190,000,000 miles is quite the distance, but compared to the nearest sun it is nothing. You have to go 5,878,625,373,184 in order to go a light year just to put that in perspective. That is 5,878,625,373,184/190,000,000 = 30,940 times greater distance for just one lightyear. 4.37 light years is even further. Saying the Sun is 100k-200k miles from the earth does not help prove the point that the earth is round. In fact, the person you are talking about helps my case more than yours since his study shows the earth was round. If we actually were as close to the sun as you said, we would all burn up. Moving on to your shadow theory: on a cloudy day there could be little holes in clouds that light can pass through. That light would disperse at different angles in a funnel shape showing shadows at different angles. If you were observing shadows from two points on earth away from each other you could notice this. Even if what you were claiming was true minus my rebuttal, this would prove the sun is much closer. Like a couple miles. Fortunately, this isn"t the case. You can"t feel the speed of the earth spinning, because we are so small in comparison. Also the motion is in a circular pattern. The inertia is flowing in the same direction. If you are on a plane, you don"t feel yourself moving at 500 mph do you? Nope you don"t. When taking a trip from Michigan to Florida you can go straight down, but there are other flight patterns as well that can save money. Other flights need to stop at other locations in a network like appearance to not crowd any airport. If there was a flight to a single German airport from every place in the world there may be some problems with overcrowding. Also some countries are not friends with others and could cause jurisdiction problems. We are not the airlines so we won't be able to know for sure either way. I"d like to make another point on the matter. This is probably the most important one. The map you used for the round Earth is supposed to be on a globe. If you look at a globe it actually looks a lot different. Any useful flat map that is made actually has some proportional disproportions to our round earth. If you look at Antarctica on a lot of maps it will appear super large due to the disproportion of it being a flat depiction. Since people don"t really go to Antarctica it is usually good for standard traveling purposes. That map makes North America and Europe look more proportional to their accurate sizes. It wouldn"t surprise me if this was intentional to show that the United Nations want to give the impression that they are going to hear all countries input. Originally maps were made to make the US and Europe look bigger. On typical maps the US looks about the same size as Africa when in reality Africa is about three times bigger. Another thing, that map logo looks pretty cool. Much cooler than some other maps in logos. Either way, it doesn"t prove the Earth is flat. - I could make some points proving the Earth is round, but that is kind of common knowledge and I"d be repeating what everybody was taught in school and life in general. I do, however, have a couple points that could destroy your whole theory: (1)Where is the edge of the Earth that we would fall off of? If the Earth was flat, naturally there would be an edge where people would fall off of if they reached the ends of the Earth. By now you would think people would have videos or pictures of this. With social media these days it would be pretty much impossible for us not to know. (2)If you travel around the world in one direction you end up back to where you started. How can this be in a flat world? - Just out of pure curiosity is the Earth square flat, circular flat, or rectangular flat. What kind of flat is it? Sources: [1]http://blogs.discovermagazine.com...