Flat Earth

Flat Earth (also known as the Flat Earth myth, the Flat Earth theory, Globe Skepticism, Globe Denial, flat-Earthism, Earth shape theory, less commonly platygeism, and intelligent geography for parodists of intelligent design) refers to the pseudoscientific belief that the Earth — which the vast, vast majority of the population imagine in their heads as this big spherical thing (or oblate spheroidal thing, pedants) — is actually a geocentric flat disk. Yes, people actually do believe this, although this belief usually involves some form of religious fundamentalism. Modern flat earthism revolves around a quasi-religious, cult-like system of gurus collaboratively grifting their marks.
==Flatlining brain activity==
===The Character of flat-earthism===
The flat Earth conspiracy cult/grift, and interaction with its proponents can be described with following concepts:
====Fractal wrongness====
If the flat-Earth model were correct, we would need to throw the majority, if not all, of our current knowledge of science clean out the window, especially physics, geology, and all of astronomy. While some fields such as medicine might not be inherently incompatible with the shape of Earth, fractally wrong flerfsFlat earthers are often referred to as flerfs, or flatties. also tend to oppose things like vaccines, COVID masks, gender studies, etc.
====Ad hoc reasoning====
When confronted, they typically have their own explanations for their views. The "evidence" they provide is ad hoc and generally pulled out of their asses. The piecemeal rebuttals do not actually work together to form any model, and they admit it.
The only aim of the rebuttals is to shift the burden of proof. The lack of model that explains the phenomena of the physical world (celestial objects, seasons, day/night cycle etc), forces everyone in the cult to memorize statements and to fake understanding. This explains why most flat earthers have a tendency to talk very similarly to each other, and often cite the same sources and arguments and repeat the same—
====Thought-terminating clichés====
Endlessly repeated statements and tautologies like "Water can't stick to a ball", "Gravity is just a theory", or "Pressurized gas needs a container" serve two meanings: The cult leaders use these as recruitment propaganda, and cult members usually scream them as a response to the cognitive dissonance they feel when challenged.
====Gish gallop====
Those the cult looks up to (the gurus running the grift) are in charge of defending the community. These gurus are faced with the impossible challenge of beating reality, and its nasty bias that favors logic, college-level math, and peer-reviewed, sound science, so the gurus resort in rhetorical tactics, especially Gish gallop. For an example see this debate between Dave Farina and Flat Earth Dave. The tactic is also imitated by the cult members fighting off their cognitive dissonance.
==== Unified conspiracy theory ====
If the flat Earth was true, hiding it would require the most elaborate conspiracy in the entire world. 
The conspiracy would employ tens of millions of people. It's obvious that we would need the involvement of every major government entity - especially (though by no means limited to) their militaries and almost 200Awesome Map of Space Agencies Around the World by Nancy Atkinson (June 26, 2012) Universe Today. space agencies. Essentially, every professional and amateur astronomer, physicist, geologist, meteorologist, rocket scientist and engineer, architect, pilot and politician in the past five hundred years would have to be in on it. All work they put out, every course, lecture, seminar, and talk, every paper and book, every project, every video, would be built on a lie. It would also mean the Moon landings never happened. Who else would have to be involved? All shipping companies, all airline companies, any transnational company that moves their goods around the world, odometer manufacturers (who would be VERY DEEPLY involved), satellite TV providers. Oh, and let's not forget about cartographers. Furthermore, all of these people need staff, tools, facilities, entire supply chain systems, and they'd be producing meaningless junk, decade after decade.
This conspiracy would also be completely pointless. Life for the vast majority of the human population would not be changed in any way if the Earth were revealed tomorrow to be a giant hockey puck instead of an oblate spheroid. What would be the point of spending all of this time, effort and money into making people think that the shape of the Earth is different? If you ask a flat earther about this you won't get much of a response. Some might claim that it is "to hide God", which is stupid: there are much simpler ways of accomplishing that, like simply suppressing religion.
Revealed flat earth would not change the local politics, at all. We have unused resources sitting around us, right now, in much less adversarial conditions than the supposed Ice Wall (Antarctica on flerf model). On the other hand, would the the Ice Wall hide behind itself a fully automated luxury communism, there would be no need to oppress this world. If the resources were truly limitless, why not bring everyone there? If on the other hand the point is to maximize global wealth disparity, why aren't people being shipped from the Ice Wall paradise to our world? In either case, millions of people would uphold this conspiracy without reaping any of its benefits, and not one of them is complaining about it. There are no flat Earth whistleblowers. No one concerned with the well-being of 3.5 billion poor people missing out on the resources. Not a single student is puzzled by and calling out the supposed indoctrination, or making noise when they finally drop the bomb: "We've been lying to you about everything your whole life." Nobody has fought the power. That is, until now.
The supposed, hundreds of years old, perfect plot, is now being exposed by a few high-school drop-outs making YouTube content. And for some reason, the co-conspiring governments don't want to deploy their literal assassination squads, like the ones in Russian and Mossad's CIA's or North Korea's . Russia has murdered hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in a pointless war over resources, but disappearing the tally count of about 200,000 flerfs (or just their cult leaders) is too big of a hassle. Finding all targets at the same time wouldn't even be too hard, given that Flat Earth Dave's app tracks and leaks the precise geolocation of every flat earther using the app, whether they've opted in to its friend-finder feature or not.
Considering all this, it really goes to show how big of a tinfoil hat you'd have to be wearing in order to block out that much of reality. Even fucking Alex Jones thinks flat earthers are ridiculous.
====Projection====
Last but not least, flat Earthers have an extreme tendency to hypocritically project everything wrong with their cult, and life, to their surroundings:
* Religion: They are not the ones relying on blind faith, it's the science that's a religion, and that's trying to hide… …God. 
* Oppression: They are not the sheep being exploited by their cult leaders, we are. 
* Individuality: They claim fierce independence, yet they parrot their leaders' thought terminating clichés.
* Orthodoxy: They're not pushing an agenda, they're just asking hard questions. Also, anyone questioning their world-view, (even gurus capable of integrity and introspection like Jeranism), is immediately branded a government shill.
* Source criticism: They're not the ones taking anything at face value, but TruthSeeker42069 knows what's up.
* Knowledge: In fact, all of science is wrong — except the part they managed to gain an intuitive grasp over during primary school. They're not too dumb to get the rest of it, "it's just where the lies begin".
* Reasoning: They don’t need to be told what’s true, they’ve got ‘common sense’, which is absolutely different from when the scientific community uses their head when building the body of knowledge.
* Testimony: They claim science is all about blindly trusting what others have written about, but the 1600 year old Bible and the cult's own lore from the 19th century are 100% reliable sources.
* Progress: Mainstream physics is a hoax — except when it's busy atoms onto to build processors that render the very videos questioning its validity.
===What the Flat Earth movement is really about===
While debunking flerfs' lies hits all the right spots of fun and not too easy, all of it fails to address the nature of the Flat Earth movement. Dan Olson's video essay In Search of a Flat Earth discusses among other things the nature of Flat Earth, and it may very well be the greatest analysis of the cult out there. You should watch it at least until Part 2.To a newcomer the video will appear overreaching, but it ages like fine wine as you get familiar with the rabbit hole, that is, as you learn to understand the cult.
Further analysis
Like Olson points out, flat Earth aims to simplify world, the complexity of which has exploded. This is reflected in what Thomas Winship, who wrote Zetetic Cosmogony (a corner-stone of flerf crankery), said: "Modern astronomical teachings affirms [—] that the stars and are worlds and suns, some of them equal in importance to our own Sun himself, and others vastly his superior; that these worlds, inhabited by sentient beings, are without number and occupy space boundless in extent and illimitable in duration" 
In other words, science threatens flerfs' narcissistic worldview of being the God's chosen being, and thus, the center of the world. Their concern is, that if the world is bigger than mankind can ever explore, then we are not the point. Ergo, the Bible is not true, and there is no God, which in turn means death will be the permanent end of the individual's experience, and that thought is scary.Each of us has 13.8 billion years more experience about being unalive, so, what's so special about death anyway?
Flat earth is a cult, and with that comes cults' power dynamics. The cult provides a simple system, where the truth is what the flat earthers make it out to be. The cult leaders state one must "empty their cup to be able to refill it", which signifies how fundamentally incompatible the belief system is, and how the cult expects entire rewriting of the individual's worldview. In the cult environment, the societal chaos is replaced by orthodoxy towards the central doctrine. As long as the doctrine is not challenged, it allows very lively discussion and brain-storming to fill the gaps, to explain why the cult's central thesis is true: simple "proofs" of why the Earth is flat, who are "they", and how and why are "they" hiding the true shape of our world.This is similar to how QAnon's drops were "decoded" by the hivemind on imageboards to maintain engagement, and to come up with suitable evidence of the conspiracy.
Thus, flat Earth provides a liberation from the school-years era of "oppression", where wrong (or just dumb) ideas, or wrong connections between ideas, were called out. This creates a breeding-ground for crankery, and repels any, and all logical people. The echo chamber that forms, functions as a walled garden for narcissistic grifters, who are naturally gravitating towards the group to leech off money and admiration from uneducated, gullible, and often desperate people. The cult's ultimate currency is not progress from logical inference, but loyalty, and in exchange for that, the marks (slang term for suckers) get to experience belonging, community, meaning, and (at long last,) a sense of superiority. The extreme anti-establishment nature of the cult rejects contradictory evidence and those stating it, which shields the central narrative. As Olson said, fact checking serves as a filter to keep counteracting forces out. This gives the grifters a carte blanche, and removes ridicule the marks' quixotic struggle would face.
The inconsistent and contradictory ideas do not matter to flerfs. The goal is not to establish the objective truth. Like QAnon, flat Earth treats facts (and lies) as game pieces to attain the real goal. As Olson points out, "flat earthers' goal is to un-explain the world, as real explanations impede with their politics". As Olson said about QAnon, "the goal is to find filler to justify support for authoritarian policies directed at people they already don't like", with the aim of making systemic issues go away by silencing those pointing them out.
As the true believer flerfs' goal is to "red pill everyone" to give them "personal sovereignty and newfound belief in God", recruitment while maintaining group cohesion becomes the top priority inside the group. Internally, group dynamics of shunning the non-believer is usually enough, but recruitment of new members requires explanations. These explanations do not seek to pass Occam's razor as a whole, but they seek the energy minimum to maximize recruitment.
On organizational level modern flat Earth was never much more than an instance of the online grift, "redpilling everyone" mainly served to maximize the number of marks, and lack of action frustrated flerfs. Because of this, Flat Earth mainly served a function in the radicalization pipeline: It was the last stepping stone of losing trust in society and its institutions. The next stone would be taking political action.
The QAnon conspiracy promised "The Storm" and "The Great Awakening", basically a fascist new world order. As fascism is more or less just "society as a cult", many flerfs believe they can thrive in it with the one resource they have an endless supply of: loyalty. After QAnon nabbed most of the flerfs, the flat Earth movement has been a shadow of its former self, consisting mostly of active members' circle-jerk webinars and conventions, and the grifters operating on whoever chose to remain in the cult, or whoever happens to stop by on their way through the radicalization pipeline.
===Relativity of wrong===
Isaac Asimov used the idea of a flat Earth in his essay The Relativity of Wrong to make a point about the progress of scientific knowledge.Answers in Science on The Relativity of Wrong He pointed out that the notion of a flat Earth is wrong, but the idea of a spherical Earth is also wrong, as the shape of the earth is better described as an oblate spheroid (because the Earth is wider than it is tall, flattening out at the poles while bulging around the Equator). Asimov went on to say how these theories aren't equally wrong (and believing such a thing as a flat Earth is "wronger than wrong") but that they do have use.
An architect working on a small building site would have no use for "Spherical Earth Theory" and would assume the ground is flat, a designer of novelty globes wouldn't need to compensate for the oblateness of the earth, but those sending satellites into orbit do (in fact the distortion has quite a dramatic effect on inclined orbits).
Modern flat earthery tends to be not even wrong, however.
==Preface to debunking==
First things first. The Earth can not be both flat and a sphere at the same time. This isn't a false dilemma — the two mutually exclude one another. Either the Earth is flat, and all of established science is completely wrong, or the flat Earth is completely wrong, and the people spreading it are cultists and/or scammers. So, which one could it be? Well, take a wild guess.
Natural sciences are not soft sciences like sociology or political science where there are different frameworks that explain the topic, with none objectively more valid than the other. Natural science deals with, and explains objective reality, and thus, it has no room for second best explanation. When something demonstrably disproves a model or theory, and offers a better one, science adopts it as the current best explanation it calls a theory. Our everyday "I have this theory that when one is tired, their nose bleeds more often" is what science calls a conjecture. No theory starts without being a conjecture at first, but it's the process of the to tell which conjecture is objectively true.
The explanations are rarely perfect, but the process ensures they only improve over time. E.g., the model of atoms in the atomic theory has evolved from of atoms being tiny particles in 1803, to the by J. J. Thompson in 1904, then to the by Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford in 1910s, followed by our modern Even the scientific method has over the centuries. This pursuit of knowledge in a way that's capable of introspection is not a problem, neither is any intermediate imperfect step towards the right direction. but some are useful.Flat Earth model is wronger than wrong, but still useful if you want to extract wealth from suckers. The real problem is those asking to take steps back because it suits their politics. 
Science doesn't pretend to get things right the first time. Before Galileo, scientists really thought Earth was flat. Over time, scientists ran into observations like precession of pendulums, that they could not explain with their current model. This created the need for a better model, and globe Earth was already a strong contender, that eventually won. Because globe Earth had to explain at least as many things as flat Earth for it to be even considered, and more to be accepted, there's nothing suspicious or strangely convenient about the globe model being able to trivially debunk everything flat Earth proponents — both old and new — say. 
Despite this, Flat Earthers still continue to misrepresent and distort the truth, using lies — either direct or by omission — and every rhetorical trick in the book. So let's burn their arguments.
== Earth==
=== The Curve ===
====But roads are flat!====
Our first facepalm. A common trope in flat earther literature is that roads, canals, etc. are built flat — not taking into account the curvature of the Earth.Architects & Engineers for Flat Earth Truth. atlanteanconspiracy.com, 13 July 2016. There are a number of issues with this:
*Surveyors ignore curvature when surveying a project with relatively short baselines because the error from ignoring curvature is minuscule. They do, however, consider curvature in creating small-scale maps.
*For a mile-long baseline, the drop will only be 8 inches. The length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with one leg of 5280 feet and the other leg of 8 inches is 5280.00004209 feet. The error in length is 0.013 millimeters. See also:
Using the exact equation for curvature drop from Advanced Earth Curvature Calculator
\text{drop} = R^{'} \cdot \left [ 1-cos \left( \frac{d}{R^{'}}\right ) \right ]
with
R^{'} = \frac{R}{1-k}
where
* d = distance, 
* R' = the refracted radius of the Earth, 
* R = the radius of Earth without refraction (6,371,000m), and
* k = refraction coefficient (0)
we get the following table:
 Curvature drop table
Distance	Drop 	Drop is in the order of
1,000 km	78.320 km 	Drive from Washington to Baltimore
100 km 	784.790 m 	Burj Khalifa
10 km 	7.848 m 	A stretch limousine
1 mi 	8.003 in 	A pencil
1 km 	7.848 cm 	A hamster
100 m 	784.806 μm	A dust mite
10 m 	7.848 μm 	Red blood cell
1 m 	78.513 nm 	Transistor size in CPU
10 cm 	707.323 pm	A molecule
59 mm 	273.191 pm	The width of water molecule (270pm)
1 cm 	7.848 pm 	The charge radius of proton
*This error is so small that if you built a road going all the way around the earth, using one mile long baselines, the total error in length would amount to 1.05 feet.
*Surveyors can measure Earth's curvature on roads using "reciprocal vertical/zenith angles". That is, measuring the zenith angles between two points. "If the earth is flat the sum of the zenith angles will be 180°", but the sum of theses angles is more than 180° and "the distance between the two points can be used to calculate the radius of the earth".
*Some construction projects actually do take into account the curvature of the earth, such as Japan's Proton Accelerator ComplexK. Mishima, N. Tani, and M. Sirakata, Survey and Alignment of J-PARC. slac.stanford.edu, 2006.Kenji Mishima and Norio Tani, Geodetic Survey Work on High Intensity Proton Accelerator Facility. IWAA2004, CERN, Geneva, 4-7 October 2004. and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).Peter Kenyon, Designing a 100km collider tunnel for CERN. tunneltalk.com, 10 December 2014.
*Some roads can be seen curving around the Earth surface, for example and the interstate 80 of the (how ironic).
*Of course, those useless projects are all just designed by people in on the conspiracy. Checkmate, losers!
====But water is always level!====
1. See above.
2. Flat earthers wrongly assume that a "level" surface is the same as a "flat" surface and they often use a dictionary entry as evidence for it. But of course, just like creationists (which they often are) misusing the word "theory", flat earthers ignore the context in which they are talking (basically physics, topology and surveying). Merriam-webster.com defines a "level" as: "conforming to the curvature of the liquid parts of the earth's surface". The thefreedictionary.com defines a "level surface" as: "(Physics) an equipotential surface at right angles at every point to the lines of force". As in civilengineeringx.com is explained: "a surface parallel to the mean spheroid of the earth is called a level surface and the line drawn on the level surface is known as a level line. Hence all points lying on a level surface are equidistant from the centre of Earth." So yeah, water is indeed level and not flat. This point has been understood for centuries and Universal Cyclopaedia from 1894 put it this way:
3. If we were to assume that water is always "level" (that is, as flat, never curving and always at the same altitude) then on a flat Earth the ocean tides would be impossible. In all parts of the world, they should rise and lower equally. This is obviously not the case. So, even on Discworld, water would still be not "level". Nevermind that flatties don't have coherent explanations for the tides. To quote Bill O'Reilly: "Tide goes in; tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that".
4. See Alfred Russell Wallace's improved replication of Bedford Level Experiment.
5. See Dan Olson's Lake Minnewanka Curve Experiment.
6. See Jesse Kozlowski's Cooper River Lake Curve Experiment.
* TLDR:
One common escape hatch that flat earthers do, is claim that "water can't bend or stick to a sphere". More on that here.
====Lego bricks prove it just looks like there's curvature!====
A video shows lego bricks showing curvature on a flat surface. The experiment was co-signed by Eric Dubay in this video.
It's immediately clear, that the photographer is extremely careful to not show the table from high altitude to not reveal the game. Also, small increases show vertical bright lines in some frames of the video which can not be explained by specular reflections from the matte chair behind the table. The conclusion, that's shared by this debunk, is that the table consists of three segments that bend, and introduce slight curve. It's also evident from the original video's green bottom highlight at this point that looks like a lazy approximation, but is actually pretty much exactly what's going on. 
When the experiment was reproduced without hiding the shape of the table, the curve suddenly disappears. Flerfs are of course free to show this again, this time without poor camera work, and with surfaces that are shown to be flat, with brick towers that are 1) proven to be equally tall, and 2) aligned to not create sideways curvature. We globers won't be holding our breaths.
==== But Kansas is flatter than a pancake! ====
Often cited (e.g. Eric Dubay here) is a topographical paper where a geodetic survey (which is “a survey of a large land area in which corrections are made for the curvature of the earth’s surface” by the way...) was done on Kansas and established it has a flatness ratio of 0.9997 while a pancake comes in at 0.957.
Once again, flat earthers don't think big nor understand scales. Kansas is 410 miles wide, which is 1.65% of Earth's circumference, or just 5.93º of arc. Yeah... There can be pancakes less flat than that... In any case, what geologists mean by “flat” is often “smooth”, as the opposite of "relief". To compare on a bigger scale, if Earth were shrunk to bowling-ball size, Mount Everest would be about half the size of a grain of salt (0.15 mm).
====But the horizon is always at eye level!====
Rather, it looks like it is. Ignoring for a moment the fact that an eye-level horizon would have to rise two meters over the distance between itself and the observer, the thing about Earth is it's actually quite big (no, seriously!).
There are two kinds of the horizon: Astronomical horizon (90° from the plumb line) AKA eye-level, and true horizon (the line where sky meets Earth or the ocean). Because the Earth is a sphere, the true horizon always lies below the astronomical horizon. The angle between them is the dip of the horizon. The higher the observer, the larger the dip of the horizon.
Actually, if you're ever out at sea, you can quite easily notice the dip. Fix a long object to point toward the horizon, and then look along it the other way. You'll notice the object points slightly above the opposite horizon, demonstrating that it really is slightly below eye level.
Indeed, from a height of 3 metres above sea level, assuming an Earth radius of 6371 km, the horizon is about 0° 3′ 20″ (0.0556° if you don't speak arcminutes) below eye level.If you really care, the declination from a height h above a circle with radius R is \cos^{-1} \tfrac{R}{R+h}
If we are at a significant altitude from the surface (like on top of a mountain or on an airplane) we can observe the dip of the horizon with a precise instrument like a theodoliteFlerfs agree agree theodolites are accurate. (or even a bottle of water for crying out loud!).Dip of the Horizon FlatEarth.ws.
Flat earthers like Eric Dubay like to share drawings where a hose level shows its surface at the level of true horizon. Let's see how well that plays out in real life:
====So where's the curvature?====
A lot of flat earthers attempt to disprove the globe model by using pictures taken from high above the earth with a flat horizon, thereby "proving" that the earth is flat: after all, if the earth is round you should see the curvature of the earth.
The problem, once again, is that Earth is really big, at least compared to us tiny human beings. The pictures that flat earthers tend to provide as evidence are "only" captured from high altitude balloons that are barely, if at all, even considered to be in "outer space" (and in some cases, possibly even lower than that). Such heights are almost negligible compared to the radius of Earth, which is why the horizon still appears mostly flat.
However when we provide pictures of a curved horizon, they make unfounded claims like that the gear used to take the picture warps the horizon, causing it to look curved. Throwing their logic right back in their face by claiming that their pictures are the faked ones typically results in — as when this is done to any conspiracy theorist — the old Windows error ding emanating form their cranium.
Perhaps the best (and oldest) way to prove there is a curvature is the fact we can't see distant objects, since if the earth were truly flat, a sufficiently advanced telescope ought to be able to see all the way to from Alaska. Instead, what actually happens, is we fail to see the lower parts of distant objects like buildings or mountains, and we see ships sailing into the distance disappear hull-first (the observation that first tipped off the ancients themselves). But don't get started on that track in a debate, otherwise, you're going to spend your whole afternoon talking about perspective, light refracting from air, the parallax effect, mirages or GoPro cameras, or how even something as basic as a video of a ship disappearing bottom-first beneath the horizon is supposedly faked (many of these excuses have already been addressed in sections above). 
A typical flerf "gotcha" is claiming that it is contradictory to hold both:
#Earth is too big for us to see the curvature, but
#We can see ships go over the curvature. 
Of course, there's no contradiction between these two statements, just an equivocation fallacy and a misunderstanding between direct and indirect observations.
Really, the fact that there even is a horizon to begin with should prove the earth to be round by itself, since on a flat Earth there wouldn't be a distinct line of sight dividing the sky from the ground (or sea for that matter).
Eric Dubay has claimed: "If a ship's hull is 10 feet above the water, it will disappear from the innated eye at 6 miles. This has nothing to do with the supposed curvature of the Earth, and everything to do with the common law of perspective." This begs the question, why is the stern/stem edge of the hull, that's closer to the observer than the ship's bridge, disappearing first? Shouldn't the thing that's closest to the observer remain visible the longest? Only on globe Earth model does the hull disappear first, because it's not about the resolvability of distant objects, but about the obstruction imposed by the curve.
Dubay has also claimed that flat Earth will also have distant people disappear feet first. So here's some 4K footage from the Bonneville salt flats to show that's not the case:
First, two videos with a bunch of people. Regardless of distance, the proportions of humans remain correct, even at long distances. Also, they absolutely aren't disappearing their feet first, as the shoes are distinctively visible on the pale, salt covered ground.
Finally some cars with trailers with protruding wheels visible. It's easy to see the wheels never disappear, everything just reduces in size due to perspective.
More footage showing the curve:
Flat Earth debunker Bobby Shafto was able to photograph and measure the curvature of the horizon using a flat plank as a reference like suggested centuries ago. By magnifying the results vertically Shafto exaggerate the actual curve of the horizon in contrast with the planks, which remained flat. Since the horizon was in the center frame the curve can't be the product of lens distortion.
This same effect can be done even in commercial aeroplanes.
File:ExplorerII-Stevens-Anderson-Balloon-image.jpg|The first photograph showing a curve on Earth’s horizon, taken on 1935 at 22 km (72,395 feet).
File:First photo from space.jpg|First photo of Earth from space taken by the V-2 No. 13 rocket in 1946 at 65 miles. Despite the camera narrow field of view, Earth’s curvature is slightly visible.
File:Small Steps Panorama.jpg|First panoramic picture of Earth taken by the V-2 No. 13 rocket in 1947 from altitude greater than 100 miles in space.
File:Flying through the sunrise - Flickr - Lenny K Photography.jpg|Cabin window views of aircraft (roughly between 30,000 and 42,000 feet). A mild curvature is visible.
File:NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement Mission.jpg|Thunderstorms over South Carolina as observed from NASA’s ER-2 aircraft flying at 65,000 feet. A mild curvature can be seen.
File:Earth's Curvature at 29,394 metres.jpg|Panoramic picture of the Earth's curvature combining 18 images taken at 29,3 km (96.128 feet).
File:Picture taken at aprox. 100,000 feet above Oregon by Justin Hamel and Chris Thompson.jpg|Picture taken at approximately 30 km (100,000 feet) above Oregon using a .
File:File RITCHIE-1 high-altitude balloon, Rochester Institute of Technology (5699591395).png|Photo taken from a high-altitude balloon at 53,5 km (33,2 miles) edited to correct fisheye lens distortion. The centre of the frame is indicated, where there is less distortion.
File:Armadillo Stiga rocket high altitude launch to nearspace (3.14).jpg| Armadillo Aerospace Stiga footage at nearly 140.000 feet (34,7 km) above sea level. 
File:High Altitude Balloon Flight - Over 117K Feet (line) 3.png|High-altitude balloon footage at 117.000 feet (35,6 km). The centre of the frame is indicated, where there is less distortion.
File:Barcelona, Spain - Flickr - NASA Goddard Photo and Video.jpg|Iberian Peninsula viewed at night from the International Space Station (ISS)
File:Aurora Borealis.jpg|Aurora Borealis over Quebec, Canada viewed from the ISS
File:Aurora Australis From ISS.JPG|Aurora Australis viewed from the ISS
File:STS115 Atlantis undock ISS edit2.jpg|Space Shuttle Atlantis viewed from the ISS
File:ISS with the Canadarm2.jpg|ISS viewed from Space Shuttle Endeavour
All these are non-NASA, non-fish eye videos where the curvature is visible (and some are even from flat earthers...):
* Show me the Curvature... Here it is and don't blame the window - read comments before posting. (13 km / 8 miles) 
* The Horizon is not at Eye Level. Flying West over water with clear skies. (14 km / 9 miles) 
* James May Witnesses Curvature of Earth | James May: On The Moon | Earth Lab (21 km / 13 miles) 
* Sending The Rock to Space! | Full Footage (27 km / 17 miles) 
* TestingTheGlobe's Second High-Altitude Balloon Launch (30 km / 19 miles) 
* HIGH ALTITUDE BALLOON PROJECT (31 km / 19 miles) 
* Alpina AlpinerX Sent Into Space (33 km / 20 miles)
* Sunrise high altitude balloon to the edge of space over Texas (34 km / 21 miles)
* High Altitude Balloon 15 (Infrared Camera) (35 km / 22 miles)
* High Altitude Balloon 18 (Infrared Camera) (35 km / 22 miles)
* Qu8k - BALLS 20 - Carmack Prize Attempt - High Altitude Rocket On-board Video (37 km / 23 miles)
* High-altitude balloon flight to 38.5 km msl with a 2-axis gimbal (38 km / 23 miles)
* MAGE: Full uncut 127,000 feet / 38km high altitude balloon flight (38 km / 24 miles) (38 km / 23 miles)
* MAGE II - What shape is the Earth? (38 km / 24 miles)
* Above Earth - Successful Amateur Rocket Launch (90 km / 56 miles)
* GoFast Rocket Proves the Earth is Round?! (117 km / 73 miles)
* THE EARTH - FROM 76 MILES UP (122 km / 76 miles) 
* Watch Virgin Galactic VSS Unity's Full Flight! (Mission Recap) 
* Watch Virgin Galactic soar to suborbital space for 5th time in amazing views 
====But the distance of horizon is determined on clear weather by the power of our vision!====
This comes from Eric Dubay.
So, here is some 4K drone footage from a very clear day in Fiji. Notice that—
# From the ground it can be observed the drone is moving backwards, increasing distance to the horizon.
# The drone is gaining altitude, while rising up. This also slightly grows the distance to the sea's surface at the horizon.Think Pythagorean theorem where hypotenuse grows as height leg grows.
# From the ground it can be seen that more objects appear to left and right of the field of view, thus, the drone is not optically zooming.
# Since the drone is moving backwards, and since it's not optically zooming, there's nothing that would make it see further. 
# Therefore, by Dubay's logic, the horizon should be retreating.
And yet, the video shows, that as the drone gains altitude, the space between the furthest cliffs on left, and the horizon, quadruples.
This is only explained if the drone brings more sea into vision from behind the curve.
====The sunset can be re-experienced by gaining altitude====
The Flat Earth model states that the sunset results from the Sun moving away from us. Yet, we can easily bring the Sun back into view by going only higher:
Flat Earthers claim the reason we can see further as we rise higher, is because the change in perspective increases the angular size of the objects on the ground. This completely fails to explain the Sun re-appearing. In the flat Earth model, the Sun is obviously always higher than the drone, thus, increasing altitude would actually reduce the angular size. If you don't believe us, try filming the bottom of your table, and raise the camera slowly: do you see more of that bottom?
====But you can zoom the set Sun back into view!====
Eric Dubay shared a video that gives the impression that Sun can be zoomed back into view, but the high precipitation level is creating some extreme blooming. The video fails because it did not use a solar filter to remove the bloom. This is of course objectively false anyway, as demonstrated by Wolfie6020 with — once the flerfs' go-to DSLR — the Nikon P900:
Below is the side-by-side comparison of the original footage.
====Mountains cast shadows to clouds only on a globe====
A photo taken by Reddit user PCloadletter26, shows a sunrise, that casts shadow to the clouds. If the Earth was flat, the Sun would never be above the cloudss.
In his rant, Eric Dubay tries to claim the that the sunlight was reflected from the Earth's surface to clouds. The photo is taken from 47°14'51"N 122°26'07"W. This begs the question, what is causing the specular reflections? The nearest body of water due East, is Lake Michigan at 1700 miles (2,700 km).
In one illustration (bottom left) Dubay tried to claim that the shadow could be drawn to the clouds by a Sun that's above the mountaintop. This makes no sense, as in that case the Sun would just light the cloud. The shadow would only be cast to the ground. The light behind the mountain does not hit the mountain before it transits through the cloud so there won't be a shadow in the cloud either. Dubay then constructed a massive strawman about sunrise casting a growing upside down shadow that doesn't break shape as the Sun gets higher. This is bullshit of course, as seen in the video below:
==== So why is distant object X visible when it shouldn't be? ====
According to Flat earthers, there are distant objects (like buildings or mountains) that shouldn't be visible because they would be hidden under the horizon due to the curvature,Of course, on a flat Earth even Mount Everest should be visible from any location (needless to say, it isn't). yet they are (some of them party visible, like half of it under the horizon... We wonder why). 
Perhaps this might be the best shot flat earthers have used to disprove a globe. Unfortunately, since these are verifiable claims, they can be examined and always fall apart because they often either fail to use the correct formula or miss important factors in their "calculations".
The basic formula: Flat earthers often use the formula "8 inches per mile squared". 
Eric Dubay has lied this formula has been provided by globe earthers as something that "represents reality". In reality, this formula is copy-pasted from Rowbotham's Zetetic Astronomy (Chapter 2, under Introduction). It is derived from the theorem of Pythagoras by taking a tangent line of 1 mile on a circle of radius 3963 miles. The drop would be about 0.000126 miles or 7.98 inches.https://mathcentral.uregina.ca/qq/database/qq.09.97/dyck2.html However, Rowbotham's formula describes a parabola, not a circular surface, thus it has an error rate of less than 1% up until 800 miles."Comparison of Rowbotham's formula and the correct formula". Via online-python.com 
A more accurate formula from earthcurvature.com:
::h = r * (1 - cos a) 
where (h) is the drop in curvature over a distance (d) where (a) is the arc angle of the distance (0.009° * (d)) and (r) is Earth's radius. While technically not entirely inaccurate, these two formulas fail in two things.
#As it was stated in the latter, it measures the straight drop of the curvature over a determined distance rather than the height of an object hidden by the curvature, which is bigger since they "tilt" over distance (this is visually represented on the chart in the right made by a flat earther “using AutoCAD 2016 with 15-Digit precision”, where the red lines are what the real obscured object height);
#Most importantly, this formula ignores the observer's height. 
An even more accurate formula used in omnicalculator.com considers this factor:
::a = √[(r + h)² - r²] 
where (a) is the distance to the horizon, (h) is the observer's height at sea level; and (r) is Earth's radius. With this in mind, let's do a comparison of these three formulas. At a literal altitude of sea level (that is literally 0 feet) we should have at 10 miles:
* according to the "8 inches per mile squared" = 0,01262 mi (66.67 ft) of hidden height;
* according to "earthcurvature.com" = 0.01263 mi (66.69 ft) of hidden height;
* and according to "omnicalculator.com" = 0,0126302 mi (66,688 ft) of hidden height.
As you can see, these formulas get very similar results. However, we don't live lying down on the ground at the beach. So we need to assume some observer's height—higher than 0 at least. If we take into account 100 feet for the observer's altitude, then, according to "omnicalculator.com," the hidden height is now 0 because anything at 10 miles is visible since the horizon should be 12.25 miles away.
The most crucial factor that flat earthers often ignore is the observer's height, which makes a huge difference. The higher you are the further you see. This is the reason why ancient sailors climbed the masts of a ship to see boats and lighthouses in the distance, or why the Sun sets later the higher you are (two phenomena that flat earthers can't explain). 
Sometimes flat earthers do take the observer's height into account and still use this point. This is, of course, a form of a desperate "black swan" case argument, "an exception to the rule" (the fact that this is exception and not the rule pretty much suggests a flat Earth is non-sense), which ultimately fails because *surprise surprise* there is another big factor they missed... (*drumroll*): , which can make light rays curve with a radius seven times the Earth's surface. This happens when light hits a pocket of cold air or a hot draft of rising air, bending the light from the object that would usually hit the ground, going around the Earth's surface and reaching to the observer's eye. This cases can be easily distinguished because they look incredibly distorted. 
[[File:Distance record.png|thumb|right|One example flat earthers use is the current longest line of sight photograph record. The photo of Pic Gaspard by Mark Bret from July 16, 2016.Bret, Mark (August 3, 2016). "443 KM | Finestrelles, Pyrenees – Pic Gaspard, Alps" Via beyondrange.wordpress.com Flat earthers like Eric Dubay have claimed this distance is not possible, because the Earth's curvature comes in the way. While technically true, what they don't disclose, is the author specializes in photography that intentionally waits for perfect refractive conditions to make such photos possible.Bret, Mark. "Visibility facts - Refraction" Via beyondrange.wordpress.com.]]
File:Blackswan1.webp ‎ | (Picture 1) Flat Earth "Black Swam" meme.
File:Blackswan2.webp ‎ | (Picture 2) Same oil rigs on a clearer day.
The photo of the oil platforms (Picture 1) is the most popular example of the "black swan" argument that flat-earthers use. In a nutshell: There are two oil rigs at 9.41 miles and 6.21 miles away, but the horizon appears behind both rigs. This picture was taken at an altitude of 1 feet. According to the calculations from above, the distance to the horizon should have been 2.72 miles, and the oil platforms shouldn't be completely visible. Conclusion: Earth ain't ball. Checkmate globers!
First, two glaring problems that even Answers in Genesis have noticed (yeah... AiG... we kid you not)Answers in Genesis. (February 5, 2021) The Black Swan: Evidence the Earth Is Flat? are that: 
# If we took the flat Earth mantra of "trusting our senses" then we can see that oil rig on the left looks... to put it bluntly... VERY FUCKED UP! Just look at those incredibly distorted and crooked cranes on the platform! Not to mention how blurry the picture is in general. On a clearer day, we can see how these oil rigs actually look like (Picture 2). Unsurprisingly, is what the spherical Earth predicts.
# The existence of "black swans", no matter how many they are, doesn't disprove the overwhelming majority of "white swans". As noticed before, this "black swan" phenomenon on a flat Earth wouldn't be the exception but the rule. The fact that even the original flat-Earther who took both pictures admitted that (Picture 2) is more common than (Picture 1) doesn't help their case.
Now, getting more technical. The photo (Picture 1) is clearly an extreme example of atmospheric refraction. Contrary to flat Earth opinion, this is nothing but a "black swan" in modern physics but a well-understood phenomenon since the times of Gauss and beyond. As mentioned above, air refraction can bend the light of distant objects, making them go around the horizon and reach further than normal conditions. Mick West and Walter Bislin have taken this important factor into account in more sophisticated calculations for their simulations. In this case, as Walter explains, in (Picture 1) there is "temperature inversion", a layer of cool air between warmer air which increases the refraction coefficient (k). "This is the cause of the different strechings and compressions and the waves in straight structures like the cranes. A positive temperature gradient above the ground (cool ground, warm air above) causes additional . This is the reason why no distinct horizon is visible".
In a spectacular Shyamalan's plot twist style, some flat-Earthers have claimed that it is actually (Picture 2) the refracted picture! Why? Because the oil rigs are under the horizon! And we can't trust our senses for that... Ignoring this brilliant excuse, flat-Earthers have tried to invent new fancy physics to explain that picture (like "atmospheric magnification") but never test it. However, Mick and Walter have tested and shown in their simulations that for (Picture 2) to happen on a flat Earth due to refraction there must be a negative temperature gradient of "−15°C per 100 m throughout the whole atmosphere", which "is physically impossible" (especially on a sunny day like in the picture).
One final nail in this black swan coffin: Bob the Science Guy has also shown that even in (Picture 1) about 15 feet are missing for the left oil rig and 5.5 feet for the right oil rig, which is expected on a spherical Earth.See also BlueMarbleScience. Sleeping Warrior Still Can't Science!
RIP Flat Earth "Black Swan"
TLDR; most flat earthers' examples:
* Use wrong distances,
* Forget the observer's height,
* Ignore the effects of atmospheric refraction,
* Cherry-pick footage,
* Confuse the distant objects for others (like mountains for clouds... seriously),https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQd9DVfoSQ&ab_channel=SciManDan or
* Have no way to verify the information for their picture evidence (and sometimes there isn't even a picture, just a trust me bro).
In the end, debunking every example flatties can throw at you can feel like a whack a mole game. When one "calculation" is disproven, two more appear (see Gish Gallop). This process can be very exhausting. So, if you happen to be arguing with some flattie right now, we highly recommend you Walter Bislin's online curvature simulator, which accounts for all these factors (eg. target inclination, observer's height and atmospheric refraction). See bellow:
The correct hidden height formula
The last thing that's missing from the formulas above is, as we already said, the atmospheric refraction. According to FlatEarth.ws, this is accounted for in the following Walter Bislin's formulas:
If the distance along Earth's surface is known:
h_h = \frac{R}{\cos[\frac{s}{R}-\arccos(\frac{R}{R+h_o})]}-R
If the line of sight distance is known:
h_h = \sqrt{ \left[d-\sqrt{(R+h_o)^2-R^2} \right]^2 + R^2-R }
where 
* h_h= is hidden height
* d= line of sight distance between observer and object
* s= distance between observer and object along Earth's surface
* h_o= height of the object from Earth's surface
* R = \frac{\text{Earth's radius without refraction}}{\text{Refraction coefficient*}}
*The depends on the atmospheric condition, which commonly is around between 0.13 and 0.17.
Use this weapon wisely.
==== So why isn't distant object X leaning away from us? ====
The further a distant object, like a building, is away from us, the more it leans due to Earth's curvature. However, as it has been mentioned before, the Earth is REALLY BIG and flat earthers can't understand scales. That's why many of them think any distant building should look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In reality, for any object to be tilted just ONE DEGREE by the curvature of Earth it should be around 69 MILES away (*nice*). For an example of the math, see Dan Olson debunk Alaska's leaning Mt. McKinley.
====But the radio waves can travel too far!====
In his Feb. 5, 2025 crank video Eric Dubay discussed Sept. 1930 radio transmission from to Sydney, Australia. Dubay claimed high transmission power and sophisticated antennas alone, allowed radio signals to travel the 12,000 mile distance.Dubay doesn't check his facts, it's actually 10,800 miles. Dubay then turned his crankery to 11 and spouted this insanity: 
Dubay provided no evidence his language model had even produced the answer. However, as explained by page 15 of this paper,
Dubay is basically lying his ass off, and at the same time, shifting blame to a language model for getting it wrong, if he even used one. This is why academics never rely on language models when checking facts.
The technique of bouncing radio signals off the ionosphere is called a and it's been used since the 1920s. Also, having reserached Marconi, Dubay should have learned, that 
===Shape===
====So why did Neil DeGrasse Tyson say the earth was pear shaped?====
This argument from authority is used often by flat earthers to claim that the scientific community is lying. Neil deGrasse Tyson has been quoted saying, "Earth is not only oblate — wider at the equator than pole-to-pole, but pear shaped — slightly wider just south of the equator.""Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter". Twitter.
But in reality, Tyson was describing the fact that just as the earth is technically not an exact sphere, it is also not technically an exact oblate spheroid either. For most purposes, it is perfectly fine to think of the earth as a sphere (or an oblate spheroid, or a pear-shaped oblate spheroid), but in some contexts, such as when searching for oil deposits, it becomes important to account for even tinier gravitational anomalies.Detailed gravity, magnetics successful in exploring Azerbaijan onshore areas. Oil and Gas Journal In such cases, a world map called a is used.
The reason the earth appears as perfectly spherical in most photos is that the difference is extremely small.Charles Q. Choi (12 April 2007). "Strange but True: Earth Is Not Round". Scientific American. Just for scaling, if we could grab the entire Earth with our hand it'd be as round as a billiard ball (although not a good one). Nevertheless, careful pixel measurements of images from space show that Earth's equatorial diameter is about 0.3% wider than its polar diameter."If the earth is a oblate spheroid why isn't this evident in NASA images from space?". Quora.
====So why did Neil DeGrasse Tyson say "stuff is flat" regarding Red Bull Stratos?====
Yes, Tyson said in regards to 's jump that: "At that height, you don't see, you don't see the curvature of the earth [...]. You just don't. That stuff is flat!". He pointed to a 20" inflatable beach ball that Felix Baumgartner would have been about 2mm above the surface of this globe.
In reality, Neil DeGrasse Tyson was wrong. A curvature would still be visible at 38.9694 kilometres (24.2145 mi). To be fair, the curve wouldn't be very big, but it would still be there. And there are even pictures of it, and Felix himself has gone on record declaring he saw Earth's curvature. In other words, the fact that Neil was wrong doesn't help your case flatties. It's ironic that they now trust Neil's words and not Felix's, right?
The most common reply from flat Earthers like Eric Dubay is that in the Red Bull Stratos jump GoPro cameras with fish eye lenses were used, thus distorting the horizon. Instead, we should look at the camera inside the cabin, where moments before Felix jumped the horizon was visibly flat when he opened the shuttle door.
Firstly, while it is true Red Bull used GoPro cameras, flat Earthers forget this footage can be easily corrected with editing software. And guess what happens? The curvature is still there. Granted, it is very very very small, but it's still there. Flat Earthers sometimes try to cheat by "correcting" the footage until the horizon looks flat instead of adjusting for the camera settings. The problem for them is that now everything but the horizon is distorted.https://flatearth.ws/felix-baumgartner#more-3668
File:Gopro-released-new-hd-footage-of-felix-baumgartners-space-jump-its-insane.webp|Red Bull's picture of Felix Baumgartner's before the jump.
File:Baumgartner real jump corrected.jpg|Red Bull's picture corrected (defished).
File:Metabunk 2019-05-15 14-58-18.jpg|Close up of the mild curvature.
Secondly, Dubay is basically cheating, again, expecting to see the Earth's curvature in the shuttle door because it is literally cropped by it. Unfortunately for Dubay, there was also a window next to the door shuttle and if we look the horizon in both the window and the shuttle, a tiny curve is visible. A tiny one, but a curve anyway.
File:Felix Baumgartners sonic boom captured from the ground.jpg|Red Bull's picture of Felix Baumgartner's opening the door shuttle.
File:Felix says he saw the CURVATURE of the EARTH during red bull space jump.jpg|Hightlights of the horizon in the window and door. It's not flat.
===Gravity===
====Gravity does not exist====
right|315px|thumb|Photo of a reactor with plasma (ionized gas) inside a vacuum tube. A force holds the plasma next to a vacuum, electromagnetism in this case. No barrier needed. A similar thing happens with the atmosphere and gravity. PS: This is an analogy. Gravity IS NOT electromagnetism (See: Electric Universe).
Yes, flat earthers are gravity deniers, and for a good reason: it would make their world collapse into a sphere and the trajectory of falling objects would become increasingly tilted inwards in the "Southern latitudes" (i.e. if we keep travelling to the edge). Hence, they must attribute falling to other causes.
* Density and buoyancy: 
The most wrong explanation they have come to, is that things fall due to density and buoyancy, which is as good as saying that they fall due to colour. Density is the amount of mass within a volume, it's not even a force and cannot even cause acceleration as a result; and buoyancy is indeed a force but requires gravity on its very formula, so that's a non-starter. Alternatively, considering that acceleration towards the ground is a function of density is at odds with empirical evidence: a feather and a bowling ball reach the ground at the same time in the vacuum.Bowling ball and feathers dropped at the same time in a giant vacuum chamber, ABC 11 Without air resistance, everything experiences the exact same acceleration when it falls. Also notable is the fact that they rarely explain why being denser should make an object move at all, let alone why it should always do so in the same specific direction. 
Eric Dubay's "explanation" was: "There is and that defines the direction." This explanation is a non-starter. Due to the pressure gradient, the pressure below the object is slightly higher than above it, and thus the higher pressure actually pushes the object up, not down. This is why objects less dense than air, such as helium balloons, are pushed up (buoyancy beats gravity). Also, Dubay's explanation was circular: it failed to explain why the air that supposedly pushes objects down, gets itself pushed down to create the pressure gradient (Hint, Eric: the cause starts with g). Even worse, his answer failed to explain the one thing it was supposed to explain: Why THAT direction in particular? 
As for the vacuum, Dubay claimed the "infinite density difference between an object and vacuum causes the object to fall down", which is weird, because he just said it was the air that was pushing stuff down. How does nothing push stuff? Or, why is stuff always running away from nothing into the direction where dirt lives? Dubay and flerfs fail to acknowledge that density is a property of a physical object, it doesn't create a force that has an inherent direction. Flerfs also fail to realize that if this was the case, and density does make things fall, then the Sun, Moon, and stars would all come crashing down to Earth. But don't worry, those objects are held in the sky by M A G I C K.
* Everything accelerates "up": 
The Flat Earth Society has proposed that gravity is the result of the earth accelerating at ~9.81 m·s-2 in the "upwards" direction. However, this fails to account for the variation of gravitational acceleration across the surface of the earth from the mass distribution within. E.g., during The Final Experiment (see below), Critical Think's weight experiment showed close to four gram deviation when weighing a 1kg mass first in Brisbane, Australia, and then in Union Glacier, Antarctica. There's also no explanation as to what energy keeps this acceleration going, as said required energy tends towards infinity the longer it goes on. All celestial bodies would have to be comoving as well, to avoid Doppler shift and all the other quirks of relativistic motion.
* Electromagnetism: 
Some flat earthers, such as the YouTube channel GlobeBusters,Response to Globebusters - The Earth Still Isn't Flat by Professor Dave Explains (May 22, 2019) YouTube. have suggested that it is the electromagnetic force that causes people to fall to the Earth. This is quite similar to hypotheses posited by Electric Universe cranks. This runs into multiple problems, however. For one, if it was the electromagnetic force pulling objects to the ground, then objects of different charges would react differently to this force – for instance, neutrally charged objects would not be affected by the electromagnetic charge of the Earth. Another fact that casts doubt on this suggestion is the fact that the acceleration due to gravity g is constant for all objects in a vacuum at sea level, regardless of mass. However, this would not be the case if the electromagnetic force was the force that pulled objects towards the Earth. Let us consider that, the electric force exerted on an object of charge q that is within an electric field E is:
F = qE
It can be shown that the electric field of a uniformly charged flat disk (which is what flatheads think the shape of the Earth is) is dependent solely on the distance from the disk z, the surface charge density σ, and the radius of the disk R.Electric Field of Line Charge by C. R. Nave, HyperPhysics, Georgia State University. The important thing to note here is that the electric field is not dependent on the mass m of the object.
Newton's Second Law states that a=Fnet/m, where a is the acceleration of the object, m is the mass of the object, and F is the force exerted on the object. Thus, it stands to reason that if the electromagnetic force was the force that pulled objects towards the Earth, the acceleration of an object in free fall would be ae = Fe / m. Thus, we would get:
a = qE / m
However, this would mean that that acceleration of an object in free fall would depend on the mass, even in a vacuum. This is blatantly false, as we know from experiments dropping objects in vacuum chambers that the acceleration of all objects in free fall in a vacuum is the same regardless of the object's mass.Bowling ball and feathers dropped at same time in giant vacuum chamber, ABC 11 Thus, the electromagnetic force cannot possibly be the force pulling objects to the Earth.
From Newton's law of universal gravitation Fg = Gmearthmobj/r2 for an object on the Earth. Since g = Fg / mobj, mobj would cancel out in our law of universal gravitation, and thus g = Gmearth / r2 is a constant at sea level that is not dependent on the mass of the object. Thus, the acceleration due to gravity is the same for all objects at sea level.
Gravity exists, however, and flerfs like Dubay claim it hasn't been shown on Earth. This is a lie. In fact, it has been shown in countless repetitions of the Cavendish Experiment.
====So why don't people on the Southern Hemisphere fall off?====
We kid you not, flatheads actually use this argument enough — believe it or not — to warrant us mentioning it. (1850-1935), returning from a trip to Australia, stated in a sworn affidavit that the people there did not hang by their heels. QED: The Earth cannot be a globe. It truly says a lot about the level of education of flatheads that use this argument, because this is something that most people get taught in freaking kindergarten.
The reason people in the southern hemisphere don't fly off into space in the direction defined by the Earth's south pole is the same reason people in the northern hemisphere don't fly off into space in the direction defined by Earth's north pole. "South" does not equal "down" any more than "north" does. Even in the flerf' own model, south means "towards the rim of the pizza land", and north means "towards its center". "Down" means "in the direction gravity is pulling," and thus "up" and "down" are meaningless concepts outside of the context of some object's gravity well. What is "down" for someone at the south pole is "up" for someone at the north pole. Most maps and globes are just printed with north always facing the top because it's easier for everyone using them if the four cardinal reference points always go in the same direction, and they just picked north because the trend was started by those egocentric pricks that were historical Europeans.
Maybe the most stupid and simple way to make them understand the idiocy of their "argument" is to pick up a ball and ask them what part of it is "up" (or "down"). If they do point to any part of it, just turn the ball "upside down" and ask them again. Now what flatties? You have only two options. Either "up" (or "down") is the part you pointed out first, even though it's now inverted (thus admitting "up" or "down" as absolute concepts are arbitrary); or what you pointed out first as "up" is now "down" and vice versa (thus proving "up" or "down" are relative concepts, to the ground in this case). If it is the former, then that begs the question why is that place "up" (or "down") and things must fall towards it. And if it is the latter, then, do you guys imagine there's ground under a spherical Earth? What?
The confusion might result from flerfs' inability to see the world from other peoples' point of view, or, from their limited spatial reasoning skills. One way to think about this, flerfs, is to realize that your experience about being upside down might be strongly associated with say, past playground experiences: 1) you felt the thing you were hanging from with your legs, and you felt your hair and clothes hanging, 2) you felt blood packing to your head, and 3) you saw things around you upside down. None of those are present on southern hemisphere. Earth is pulling you towards itself so you can stand. Its is pulling blood away from your head, and everything else is being pulled down too, so they're in the right orientation and don't seem upside down. Try to imagine yourself to the other side of a globe, and think about how everything's being pulled towards Earth and how it's masking your ability to reason about your position in the space's inertial frame of reference.
====So why don't rivers flow uphill?====
Yes. Same argument as before. 
Yes, really, they actually say this."If Earth is spherical, the Nile River would have to flow uphill to compensate for the curvature of Earth. Is this proof that the Earth cannot be spherical?". Quora.
Yes. Your mind isn't playing tricks on you, we just got done taking the time to explain this to people who, evidentially, don't get it. TWICE. 
Yes. Rivers don't flow UP hill.
Yes. All rivers flow DOWNhill and rivers (like the Nile River) do flow NORTH because, as Bert & Ernie say:
====So how can water stick to a spinning ball?====
This is a surprisingly common question, and reveals how unwilling flatties are to do a single mathematical calculation. On a rotating sphere, all points in a longitude have the same angular velocity, but as the latitude tends to 0, the tangential velocity increases to its maximum, and so does the centrifugal force. A point on the equator travels 40,075 km (Earth's circumference) in 86,164 s (a sidereal day), yielding a linear speed of 0.465 km/s, or 1,674 km per hour! Everything should fly into space, right? No.
Centrifugal acceleration can be derived to be: a = ω²
where r is the radius and ω is the angular velocity. With an equatorial radius of m = 6.3781×106 and rotational period of 86,164 seconds (ω = 7.292×10-5 s-1), an object at the equator must be accelerated 0.0339 ms-2 downwards to stay on Earth. Although gravity varies from place to place, this is far exceeded by the approximate 9.81 ms-2 provided by gravity.
For anything to fly upwards, either gravity would need to be 1/290 of what it is currently, or a (sidereal) day would have to be shorter than 5066 seconds (1 hour, 24 minutes and 26 seconds) long.
But really, perhaps the best way to demonstrate the stupidity of this one is to ask the flathead to dunk themselves in water and then spin in a circle at the rate of one revolution per 24 hours.
====How can Earth pull such massive oceans?====
Earth's gravitational field is not a strongman trying to hold on to everything. Earth's gravitational field is closer to a hole (In fact it's modeled as such). A hole doesn't have to do a lot of work for stuff to fall into it. What comes too close to it, will fall into the hole. After that, it takes a space rocket to climb out of that hole. Now, all of Earth's water is chilling in that gravity hole, so it's not going anywhere.
Another way to view this is this: Each water molecule is tiny, and weights about 0.0000000000000000000000299158 grams. Thus, each water molecule will experience about 0.0000000000000000000000002935 Newtons of pull due to gravity. There's roughly 46292400000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 water molecules on Earth. But again, Earth's gravity because is more of a hole than strongman holding on to them. If you want a strongman analogy, Earth has basically infinite tiny tiny hands that never get tired, holding on to one tiny water molecule each.
====How can Moon override Earth's gravity and create tides?====
This question comes from none other than Eric Dubay.
The simple answer is, because the Moon has quite a bit of mass too, 1.2% of Earth's mass.Dobrijevic, Daisy; Sharp, Tim (Feb. 7, 2022). "How big is the moon?". Via space.com Earth may be much heavier, but that doesn't mean Moon and Earth do not exert gravitational force to one another. Moon's gravity is just smaller. 
All pairs of object in space have a shared center of gravity (called ) that can be calculated. As shown by Dr. Becky here, the Earth-Moon barycenter is so close to Earth, it's actually inside of it — 4,671km from Earth's geocenter towards the Moon (~3/4 way from the center to Earth's crust).
Note that the center of mass does not have to be inside an object. When Jack and Rose spun around holding hands on Titanic, the center of gravity was somewhere between them. The same can happen between two objects in space. Thus, the barycenter itself does not necessarily pull anything towards itself on its own, but it makes it easier to think about how both the Earth and the Moon affect things they pull. 
Because water is a liquid, its molecules can move relatively freely. Because of this, the water molecules find their level around the barycenter. This causes the bulge on the Moon's side, that on open ocean is about one meter high. 
Tidal forces pushing large amounts of ocean water to narrow passages at the coastline will make the tides locally often much higher than the open ocean bulge. At the surface of the bulge, the gravitational pull of the Moon and Earth cancel out, and thus a limit is set to bulge height.
Because Earth's own center of mass rotates around the barycentre, it's again, like Jack spinning with Rose on the lower decks. This centrifugal force causes the water to bulge on the opposite side of the globe. The height of the bulge is defined by the distance where gravity is cancelled out by the centrifugal force.
==== So why do lakes not have tides? ====
Asked Dubay. They do. It's just much less water, so the effect is hard to see. Even the Great Lakes have tides of about 5cm (2 in)
NOAA "Do the Great Lakes have tides? ". Via noaa.gov.
====But tides are caused by the gentle and gradual rise and fall of the earth from the bosom of the mighty deep!====
Claims Dubay. So much for the flerfs' stationary ground. Anyway, since there's exactly zero evidence of this, it's up to Dubay to go to the nearest seaside shore, and use an accelerometer or seismograph during the tide to show there's an earthquake everywhere that we can't see or feel. If needed, here is Sabine Hossenfelder explaining how a spring can be used to detect the shoreline rocks accelerating up or down with the tides, no matter the frame of reference.
====How can Earth drag atmosphere along but birds and bugs can fly? Why can Humans jump despite air pressure?====
We can't believe this needs to be explained but just in case Dubay is serious with these, here we go.
Large birds are quite heavy, so gravity affects them more. As can bee seen here, an Albatross will have to work hard to take off. A Common Loon will work even harder. Some large birds have stronger muscles and wings which makes it easier for them, e.g., the Andean Condor. The smaller Peregrine Falcon is the fastest bird out there.
Large bugs, like the Goliath Beetle struggles with taking off. Small bugs, on the other hand, have small muscles and wings, but as they're also very lightweight, gravity doesn't affect them as much. Small bugs can accelerate, and fly at ridiculous speeds, the record holder being the 12mg heavy Horse Fly, that accelerates at about 25G, and that has top speed of 145km/h.
Air moves with the Earth because it has If you do not know what that is, see this video. The viscosity of air is what causes air resistance, that sets limits to how fast we can ride our bicycle. The viscosity of olive oil is 56.2 mPa·s, that of water is 1.0016 mPa·s, and air's is 0.0000185 mPa·s. 
Earth can't of course get the air to spin up immediately. You can test this with a glass of water. Try rotating a pen in the water one full circle, and you'll see water just circle around the pen. Next, try ten full circles. and witness the small whirlpool. This can also be done by rotating the liquid from its edges. See here for an example. Air which is like liquid, a fluid, will do that too, just, at slower acceleration because of its lower viscosity. 
Because the Earth, its atmosphere, all bugs, and all birds have same angle speed around Earth's geo center, there is no relative movement between them. Thus, Earth's rotation doesn't affect birds or bugs flying. Winds are air currents that result from temperature differences, and those do indeed affect flying things, sometimes quite a bit.
Humans can fight off gravity with relative ease for brief moments. This is because the muscles have small amounts of their main fuel, that enables explosive movements like jumping. When ATP runs out, we make more from our stores. More energy is fed to this system from the body's glycogen stores. Too strenuous exercise, or running out of glycogen while e.g. cycling up-hill, will make gravity quite real.
The pressure of air will not affect it's viscosity nearly as much as temperature does. Compare e.g. fridge cold honey with the one left on a table overnight. Next, increase the air pressure inside the honey bottle by squeezing it hard from the sides and cap, turn the bottle upside down, and see how much that affects how the honey can move through the air.
As for pressure preventing jumping, the pressure is all around us, so it's not preventing jumping more than air resistance will. An extremely high pressure air would be really cold, and liquid form. Air is 70% Nitrogen, the -196°C of which has 1/30 the viscosity of room temperature water. We can still move in water that's liquid although running in it is difficult. Moving in liquid nitrogen would be 30 times easier than moving in water, if it didn't instantly freeze us to death.
In reality, the air around us is helping us jump, by a little bit: Since humans are roughly as dense as water, a 100kg individual will displace roughly 0.1 m³ of air. Air has density of 1.2kg/m³, so that individual will displace 0.12kg = 120 g of air. The air creates a buoyant force (that's why helium balls go up), which makes the individual 120g lighter.
====But how can long jump be longer than the height to which I can jump?====
Eric Dubay wonders. Gravity does not inhibit your ability to move around Earth's core. The answer is, it only inhibits moving away from the core. You can jump up or up and forward. A long jumper jumps further when they gain momentum for jump by building up speed. At the jump face, the forward directed inertia moves the jumper forward, and the jump motion pushes the athlete forward and up, so it increases two speed components. The long jumper will be in the air exactly as long as determined by the vertical speed component that the jumper has when their feet stop touching the ground. The formula for that airtime is (excluding air resistance) t = 2v / g where v is the vertical lift-off speed in meters per second and g is the acceleration due to gravity (9.81m/s²). E.g., if the time of flight is say 1.2 seconds, and the long jumper's total horizontal movement speed is 8 m/s, then the distance covered during the jump will be 8 m/s ✕ 1.2s = 9.6 meters. Dubay could really have benefited from taking high school physics class.
====How can a pressurized atmosphere exist next to a vacuum?====
Flat earthers, like creationists (which they often are) love to misrepresent the second law of thermodynamics, claiming that Earth's atmosphere violates it if it is not contained by some "dome". What they're asking is basically why the Earth's pressurized atmosphere doesn't equalize with the vacuum of space without a protective barrier. 
We'll answer this question with another question: where's the barrier between high-pressure sea-level air and low-pressure mountaintop air? As height increases, air pressure and concentration decreases, approaching zero after a certain height. Meaning, even if the earth was flat, the atmosphere would have to end at some point.
This is due to the scientific illiteracy of flat earthers who can only imagine the vacuum on space as a literal vacuum cleaner. It does not “suck” the air. Flat earthers associate the word “suck” with “vacuums” but it’s a misnomer. That’s not what actual vacuums do. That’s what vacuum cleaners do. What they really do is use a centrifugal pump to create a pressure differential, and the higher pressure air in the room then expands to fill the empty space through the hose, at very high speed. However, gravity pulls the air back down, so we can breathe air.Misconception about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. flatearth.ws. As the Earth traverses its orbit, the atmospheric particles around the Earth reach a where the compression resistance of air cancels out the compression force of gravity. Gravitation pulls the atmosphere in so the amount of gasses that Earth on the trailing side of its orbit remains minimal.
It's odd. Nobody with even a microgram of sanity would deny that things fall, not even flatheads. But all of a sudden, when atmospheric pressure and the vacuum of space are being discussed, that "things fall" aspect of reality suddenly doesn't exist to flatheads.
====But there are no experiments showing pressure gradients can be created====
Barks Dubay.
We are standing on it. Another can not be made on Earth as our planet will obviously interere with its gravity. An experiment such as this requires performing it in space, and the flerfs deny it exists and thus, any and all data is CGI. So, nothing but another Kafka trap. To flerfs: Show us how to conduct the experiment in a way that has a reasonable chance of success.
====But they fake the ISS footage with Zero-G planes!====
Dubay, who claimed this, used a graph by the Zero-G company, that shows the Zero-G phase of the plane lasts for 25 seconds, during which the plane climbs from 32,000ft to 33,000ft. That's 1000ft of climb for 12.5 seconds and drop for another 12.5 seconds. You can continue to drop as long as you like until you die.
The Zero-G phase happens when Earth's gravity pulls the plane down at exactly the same rate as its passengers, effectively canceling their weight. During this time, the plane continues upward until it hits the peak of its arc. At mid-point of the 25 second experience, the plane will start to fall. At that point its speed is 0m/s. After the fall part of the zero-G, 12.5 seconds later, the plane will be losing altitude at 12.5s ✕ 9.81m/s^2 = 122.6m/s.
 
According to the graph Dubay showed, the plane is at 32,000 feet, or 9,750 meter altitude at that point.
 
We can do some basic physics and get the ISS footage filming time before everyone dies in a horrible plane crash: 
t = 25s + √(2h/g) = 25s + √(2✕9750m / 9.81m/s²) = 25s + 44.5s = 69.5s
So just shy of 1 minutes 10 seconds to film the footage. So, here is a just under SIX MINUTES LONG, continuous shot from the ISS. Here is some more if you feel like it.
 
"Why not just climb higher with the plane?" 
OK. We can calculate the height of the fall to that would allocate 5 minutes of continuous filming time while falling:
 
h = ½gt² = ½ ✕ 9.81m/s² ✕ (300s)² = 441.5 km.
441.5 km is… …the flying altitude of the ISS. So. If we could fly a plane that high to fake the footage, why not put a fucking space station there while we're at it?
====The long ISS shots used wire harnesses and green screens!====
Debunking this relies exclusively on analyzing video footage, so we're going to hand it over to Dave McKeegan, who did absolutely fantastic job debunking crank claims about the original clips.
====How is that gravity can cause planets to revolve elliptical orbits around a single center of attraction?====
This questions comes from Eric Dubay. Thank you Eric for your question. We do not have an answer ready for you, but please stay on the line. Someone will be with you shortly.
====But if someone digs through the Earth, they will come out the other side with their feet up!====
This lovely thought experiment comes from Dubay.
Suppose two people start digging at the same time. They dig to the center of Earth, and by the time they reach the geocenter, their feet sill still face each other. They shake hands and climb out the opposing guy's hole. The gravity immediately starts to pull them towards the geocenter. Why would they climb out of the 3,963 miles (6,378 kilometers) deep hole in the ground, feet first? Dubay apparently trusts the reader to have zero spacial reasoning skills to realize, that to climb up, i.e. outwards from the center of Earth, humans usually orient themselves head towards the direction of travel, and feet towards where they're coming from: the geocenter. So again, if you climb down the hole that goes through the Earth, at the center you'll feel like you're in space or Zero-G. You then grab onto the ladders. Initially it feels like you don't weigh anything, and slowly as you walk up, gravity gets stronger as more of Earth is behind you pulling you down, and less of Earth is in front of you, pulling you up.
===Magnetism===
====If the Earth was flat, compasses at the Antarctica would have their needle point to North, through the Earth.====
Claims Dubay who clearly doesn't know how magnets or the Earth's magnetic fields work. Like the image on the right shows, the magnetic field protudes almost vertically at the poles. This means that on southern hemisphere, it would be the south pointing needle that points down. Which, as this video shows, it does.
===Rotation===
====Why do cannon balls fired East not have more range, and those fired West, less range? ====
Classic Dubay, missing out on 400 years of scientific progress.
That actually happens, from the PoV of inertial frame of reference. If you don't know what that is, watch this brief tutorial by Dave Farina. Basically, if you could hover above Earth without being influenced by it at all, and put markers that hover in the air and stay in the inertial frame of reference, the cannon ball would fly further East when fired East, and vice versa.
Imagine a train with glass walls, going on tracks that go from East to West. The train is traveling East. You're on that train, facing the front (where the locomotive is). Before you is a wast basket, 3m away. Right at the moment when you pass a marked telephone pole outside the train, you throw a ball into the basket. Let's say it takes exactly 1 second for the ball to hit the basket.
Then you repeat the experiment. This time, you are facing towards the back of the train, and the basket is again 3m in front of you. 
You throw the ball at the telephone pole mark, and 1 second later the ball hits the basket.
To you the experience was the same. The ball traveled 3 m in one second.
But to a person looking at your actions from outside of the train, from South of the tracks, i.e. they're facing north and the train travels from West (left) to East (right).
Exactly one second after they see you throw that ball, they will also see it hit the ground. In the first example, because the train is going East and the ball is thrown East, the ball is moving East faster than the train. So one second later it will land on the train's floor, and at that moment the bystander stops the time, and they go draw a chalk line above the track tie that's below the ball.
In the next experiment, to the bystander, the ball that's thrown West will still move East, but slightly slower. The moment it hits the floor the bystander again stops the time. This time the ball has not moved as fast as the ball in the first example, so it will not have traveled as far in one second time. The bystander will draw the chalk line to different track tie. 
So, even though you threw the ball exactly 3 meters in both cases, the marks on the track ties are different.
Now, replace the train with Earth, and bystander by guy hovering in space untouchable by Earth's forces, observing. Also, replace you throwing the ball with cannon firing a cannonball. Same exact principle. 
To the bystander, the cannonball will fly further when it's fired East, because the Earth's rotation gives it more speed. But since the cannon and target are fixed to the ground, the target is floating away from the cannon at the same speed, so flying East does not give advantage in the battlefield. Similarly, if the cannon is fired West, to the inertial observer, the West moving cannon ball is actually moving East, but slightly slower than the target that's moving East faster. 
The frame of reference will always appear still to the observer. If you'd attach a Go-Pro to the target, it would look like the cannon ball is flying towards it from the distance. On the other hand,
if the Go-Pro is attached to the cannon ball to make it the observer, it would look like the world is flying towards the ball. This feels really weird and that's normal, we're used to seeing we're not the center of the world, and we move in our world, rather than us moving Earth around by walking still. Why then would it be the case Earth is still, and not a massive cruise ship going around the Sun?
Dubay also misrepresented the case by implying revolving Earth would not influence cannons. Dubay effectively lies by omission, by not being transparent about the fact, that Earth's rotation, and the resulting Coriolis force was known to influence cannon shots' accuracy in the 17th century. See the image on the right.
====Why do cannonballs shot towards the zenith fall to the same place and not Westwards?====
In his video Eric Dubay talks about experiments that have tried to prove Earth's rotation by firing cannons towards the zenith. According to Dubay, the cannon balls with their on average 28 seconds time of flight land "within few feet of the cannon, sometimes back to the muzzle." He then states that If Earth was a globe, its orbital velocity of 600-700 mph at the testing latitude of England and America, where the tests have been performed, the cannonball should fall 8,400 feet behind [West] of the cannon."
Dubay does not cite exact experiments. According to this paper, the most famous experiments by and took place in late spring of 1638 in the surroundings of Paris — not England or America.
The experiments failed to prove Earth was rotating. However, Galileo's famous of which you can watch a tl;dr video here, explained why that was the case with motion. Basically, when the cannon was fired up, the cannonball retains its tangential velocity. 
However, as explained here, due to Coriolis force, there will be a small deviation. A 10 second fall time would cause 10cm deviation. Another estimate estimates that with zero drag, the Coriolis force at the equator would lead to 8m deviation, but notes that air resistance would reduce it substantially. The cannonball thus will definitely not fall 8,400 feet West, like Dubay claims.
==== But the Coriolis effect is fake! ====
The effect is real, but some equatorial tourist traps have grifters performing crank demonstrations of it. Tubs do not demonstrate the Coriolis effect, they only show which way the chaotic system caused the whirlpool to form. The real Coriolis force affects winds, and the winds affect the ocean currents. 
For a brief explanation what the Coriolis Effect is, see this video. The Coriolis force is the result from Earth's rotation, so naturally, flerfs will deny it exists at all. Some will argue it is not a real force, and they're right in that it is what's known as a However, that doesn't make it, or its cause, any less real.
Showing the Coriolis effect from the ground is next to impossible, because even the largest tornadoes sometimes rotate in the Commercial airplanes don't fly near the storms, so the option remaining is satellites. Weather satellite feeds show the cyclones rotating counter-clockwise on northern hemisphere, and clockwise on southern hemisphere, proving Coriolis effect without breaking a sweat. As always, flatties deny those feeds as CGI, because of course they do.Note: Saying something is CGI does not prove it's CGI anymore than saying "Bible is the true word of God", makes it the true word of God.
==== But gyroscopes do not show 15° per hour drift! ====
Says Eric Dubay, claiming there are no videos that show it. So, here's a video that shows it. But perhaps if Flat earthers would themselves splurge on an ultramodern ring laser gyroscope and get the true results? Well that was $20,000 well spent.
====But with 24 hours per Earth's rotation, it would be daylight during night hours six months from now! ====
Claims Eric Dubay.
First, we must define some terms and constants
Earth will rotate 360° around its axis in one the length of which is approximately 86164.0905 seconds, or, 23.9344696 hours, or, 23 h 56 min 4.0905 seconds. This means Earth will rotate 360° / 86164.0905 s = 0.004178075° / second.
Suppose on day 1 we see the Sun at zenith at mid day, 12:00:00 to be precise. We then measure the angle of the Sun on day 2, exactly 23 h 56 min 4.0905 seconds later, i.e., the moment Earth has turned full 360°. We look at the stars, and see we have indeed made precisely one revolution around our axis. But what we will also observe, is that the Sun on the sky appears, from our perspective, to have only rotated 359.0144° from where it was. This is because Earth revolves around the Sun and after one 360° revolution, Earth will have moved from it's original position, and in the new position, Sun won't shine from the same angle anymore. From our perspective, that means we have to wait for the Sun to move another 0.9856° which takes 0.9856° / 0.004178075°/s = 235.89811097 seconds, or, 3 minutes and 55.899 seconds. After the time has passed, the Sun will again be exactly at zenith. 
The total time it took to accomplish this, is called a solar day. According to The length of solar day is not exactly 24 hours = 86400 seconds, but depending on the season, due to Earth's elliptical orbit where the speed varies a bit, the solar day can be can be 21 seconds less, or 29 seconds more than 86400 seconds.
What time of day will it be exactly on the opposite side of the Sun, i.e. after 180° revolution, and how high will the Sun be?
Let's suppose it's January 1st, the time is 12:00:00, and the Sun is exactly at zenith.
Earth rotates 360° around the Sun in one sidereal year, the length of which is 31558150.0 seconds, or, 8766.15278 hours, or, 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 10.0 seconds.AIAA "How long is a year". Via aiaa.org
As the sidereal year takes exactly 31558150.0 seconds for 360° revolution, half of that (180°) will take 31558150.0 / 2 = 15779075.0 seconds. Quick math shows us 15779075.0 seconds is 182 solar days, 15 hours, 4 minutes, and 35 seconds. When that time has passed, the date is July the 2nd, and the time is 03:04:35 AM. So indeed, at the exact moment Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun, it will be early morning.
What about the position of the Sun? The Sun will have crossed the zenith point 182 times. In addition to that, it's been 15 hours, 4 minutes and 35 seconds, i.e. 54275.0 seconds since the last time it was at zenith. Since again, the Sun moves 0.004178075° / second, the Sun will have moved 226.765° from zenith, so if you'd face North, with zenith at position 12 of a clock-face, the Sun would shine from direction of roughly 4 o'clock, moving counter clockwise towards sunrise in the East. I.e., it will be roughly first light of dawn. The question is---
Who cares?
We humans never discuss things like "What are your plans on the exact opposite side of the Sun?", or, "So where are you 182 days and 15 hours from now?". The absolute position or the moment we reach it never matters to us. We live by our solar day calendar, which means, we get up at seven in January when it's still dark, and we get up at seven in July, and pay no special attention to the Sun being higher.
As we live our 24 hour cycle, the nearest zenith on the other side of the Sun will instead happen 8 hours, 55 minutes and 25.0 seconds, or, 32125.0 seconds later than we had assumed. During that zenith, total of 15779075.0 + 32125.0 = 15811200.0 seconds will have passed, and that means the Earth will have orbited 15811200.0s / 31558150.0s * 360° = 180.366466°.
In other words, what happens is, we go on about our daily life without caring too much about the fact it's random time like four past three in the morning when when we pass the 180° mark. We also don't care the closest solar mid day six months later is a random angle such as 180.366466° 
After one sidereal year, i.e. 31558150.0 seconds, it will be 31558150.0 / 86400 = 365.25636 solar days later, which means the time will be 0.25636 days, or, 6 hours 09 minutes 09.5 seconds later. This means our calendar for 365 days was just over six hours too short.
But surely that accumulates error and causes drift of seasons!
It does. Too short calendar means January is drifting towards previous fall. In other words, during our 365 solar day calendar year, Earth doesn't quite make the trip around the Sun. Four years later, the Earth is about 24 hours behind schedule. This allows us to re-align our calendar, by adding one day (February 29) to it, during which we give time to Earth to catch up with its orbital position from four years prior. And this is why we have 
Congratulations! Flerf cultists can no longer scam you with simple calendar math.
===Climate===
====So why does negligible increase in distance towards the Sun cause such temperature difference at the poles?====
Another great question from Eric Dubay. The absorbs negligible amount of Sun's radiation, so it's not the distance that defines the amount of Sun's radiation. It's the angle at which the sunlight reaches Earth, as explained by Dave Farina here. One would think flerfs know about this since its in their own story too.
====So why isn't climate, flora and fauna on North Pole and Iceland not similar to Antarctica?====
Asks Eric Dubay. Antarctica is a continent. Polar cap is a big floating block of ice with snow on top. Water acts as a heat reserve during winter, and it warms less during summer. Also, the carries warm sea water from the Gulf of Mexico towards the polar cap which further warms it. Iceland is land, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, and near the Gulf Stream, so it gets to enjoy a bearable climate and some flora and fauna.
North Pole has no plants, because plants like to grow in soil, which ice isn't, and animals do not read brochures about where else the globe has similar conditions, and make arrangements to move there. Why would Polar bears evolve on the Antarctica just because it's cold there?
====So why is there a "dome" in Antarctica?====
Some flat earthers have attempted to cite the 1958 Encyclopedia Americana which states that there is "a dome 13,000 feet high" in Antarctica. And yes! There are domes in Antarctica! ... and "I do not think it means what you think it means"...See , , 
===Navigation===
==== But pilots use Flat Earth maps for navigation! ====
Of course, pilots are taught and trained to navigate on spherical Earth
Software used by pilots for planning flight routes such as ForeFlight, SimBrief, or SkyVector don't use the "flat earth map" (in fact, they use a globe). 
and they openly admit Flat Earth is stupid
 
(especially when they are not harassed by flat-earthers).
 
Flat earther's "proof" of pilots using a "Flat Earth map" for navigation is showing how flight paths on their map make "more sense" than some other . This argument completely ignores:
# The logic (shortest path between origin and destination) behind orbiting Earth's center (which only make sense on a globe), which e.g., the Mercator projection shows as an arc.A "straight line" on a flat is, in fact, not the shortest path, but a path of constant bearing relative to true north, called a loxodrome (or ). For long flights, this deviation from a "straight line" becomes quite notable; transcontinental flights often go near or through the polar regions, since that's the shortest route on a spherical Earth.Cartography Guide - Map Projections Axis Maps.Cox, J. (June 24, 2013) Ask the Captain: Why don't planes fly in a 'straight-line?'. USA Today. Retrieved December 12, 2017.
# The market behind airline flights (there are fewer long-distance direct flights because they are expensive, especially in the southern hemisphere, where only 10–12% of the global population live, so there's low demand). 
The argument also backfires for flight routes in the southern hemisphere, because while a globe's latitude rings constrict approaching the pole, the Flat Earth stretches them longer near the rim, thus making those routes longer than they are. 
This also applies to sailing navigation. Ships also follow such routes when they can, but of course, they have to adjust for land barriers, ocean currents and so on. All this is constant disproof of a flat Earth, since if Earth was flat these routes would be longer and take more travel time.No one is stopping the flerfs from walking and measuring e.g. the east-west direction length of Australia, and proving the length is much more than the claimed 5,100km. People and it's not like the flerfs who aren't participating in more meaningful things in society, don't have all the time in the world. 
Of course, that's what They want you to think. The only real flat-earther responses to this are just flat-out denial, or assertion that every single pilot, ship captain, and so on is part of the massive conspiracy and faking all these itineraries and end up wasting tons of fuel and mileage.The meaning of "straight line" depends on the type of map. Projections involve trade-offs to preserve different features. — resembling a fish-eye lens — instead shows great circle routes as straight, but only from the center; everything else is distorted. Flat earthers copied the shape of landmasses from an azimuthal equidistant map centered on the North Pole and — since they deny there's a globe to project from — deny there's any distortion.
==== But all maps of the world are flat! ====
Like, yeah. Maps are printed on a paper. No shit. However, it is well known that all world maps are technically wrong. Why? Because all maps are a of a three-dimensional world (a globe) into a bi-dimensional piece of paper. That lost third dimension is manifested in severe cuts and distortions. If we take the famous we see that Greenland is as big as Africa while the latter is around 14 times bigger than the former! Even the most common "flat Earth map" is another projection of a globe called in which it stretches along the southern hemisphere, thus making Australia twice as wider than it actually and turns Antarctica into a literal ice wall. These severe distortions especially affect flight routes as mentioned before. For this reason, no world map has a unified of their distances like the rest of the maps do for smaller local regions.
The fact that no accurate scaled map of the whole world exits (and can't ever exist) debunks it by itself (See also the failed project). In the end, cartography would be trivially easy on a flat Earth. All we would have needed to do to make a world map is to group different local maps with the same scale and stick them together. Consider for example the , a series of very accurate (1:1,000,000 scale) actually used for air navigation before GPS existed.Operational Navigational Charts Lines of longitude flare out approaching the equator from either pole. If the charts were stitched together, as youtuber Planarwalk did, their edges would meet to form a convex curve surface. You know. Like a globe (see video).
====But there is no North-South direction circumnavigation!====
Claims Eric Dubay. did just that in 1979-1982.
====But planes never fly through Antarctica even though it's a shorter route!====
In his video Dubay misrepresents the problems Antarctica poses to flights, as a conspiratorial excuse of saying it's "cold". He does not consider the logistical problems of rescue missions. Should a plane make an emergency landing to Antarctica, it most likely does that because of poor weather. Saving people in up to -80°C temperatures, with strom winds increases the effect of wind chill to catastrophic levels. Locating the crashed plane in Antarctica is not trivial either, as it is larger than the entire US.
Then there's the rescue mission. A plane that crashes into sea can be rescued by a boat. There's no runways where to land on the Antarctica (outside places like the Union Glacier camp.) Helicopters like Airbus H225 have range of roughly 830 miles. That's not enough. For longer range extraction missions, the US army developed the but those are grounded because they seem to drop on their own due to design flaws even with clear skies, let alone a whiteout with its high winds and ridiculously cold temperatures.
====There are direct flights between Australia and Southern America====
Flat earthers do not have an actual map with scale. Their best approximation is the of the globe Earth. Under this map, the distance from Santiago, Chile to Sydney, Australia is roughly 5.3 times longer than the US is wide (2,800 miles), i.e., 14,840 miles. Flat earthers like Eric Dubay say the route makes sense. Excluding the fact one can't see land during the direct flight, Dubay misses the point that the is the Boeing 777-200LR with range of "only" 10,809 miles. Thus, flat Earthers claim there are no direct flights from Australia to South America.
Dubay also claimed long haul planes can hide their path by travel much faster than the advertised speed, especially during long haul flights. However, air resistance increases as a square of the headwind. Going twice as fast would cut flight time in half, but it would burn four times the fuel, cutting the haul distance by 50%.
As seen here, there are direct flights. If you need convincing, here's a time-lapse of flight from Santiago, Chile, to Sydney, Australia.
Flat earther Jeranism tried to explain Sydney to Santiago route was possible with the southern however, as Dave Farina points out, the jet stream does not solve the planes being able to cover the distance in both directions. There is some effect from the wind, in that the flight time from Sydney to Santiago is 12h 35 min, and from Sydney to Santiago is 14h 40 min. But that's again, not enough time to cover the almost 15,000 mile route, let alone the conspiracy hiding route across the Pacific Ocean.
Thus, these flights can only be explained if the Earth is a globe: In the globe model, the distance from Santiago's airport to the one in Sydney, is just 7060.3 miles.
==The Moon==
===The Moon only works on a globe===
====Three-dimensional Moon hovering above Earth would reveal its backside====
In the Flat Earth model, the Moon revolves above the Earth. The ranges from +28.72° to -28.72°. Thus, as the Moon transits over the flat Earth, people from different places around the equator could observe different sides of the Moon at any given time. Furthermore, on the equator, people could observe the Moon's leading, bottom, and trailing sides as it passes over them, with every subsequent frame showing more from one side, and less another. But we never see the back of the Moon.
File:Moon angles.jpg|As shown by Dave Farina here, people observing the Moon from multiple angles at any given time would not see the same face of the Moon.
File:Moon far side.jpg|150px|If the Earth was flat, we could observe the Moon's far side once it has passed over us.
====Vertical pizza-Moon would be be flat from its side====
Flat earthers deal with the issue of only one Moon's face being visible, by stating the Moon is a flat disc, like a pizza. This hasn't changed their position about where the Moon orbits. It's still hovering above Earth.
In his video Eric Dubay claims that two people standing on the opposite sides of the equator can observe the same face of the Moon at the same time, when it's facing the camera perpendicular to the observers. This is ludicrous. Even if the Moon had two identical faces, it's obvious that when a flat disc is viewed from its sides, it looks like pizza viewed from its side.
Also, even if the Moon was far enough to only see its front face, the problem would be, that a person looking at the Moon from northern hemisphere, would see the Moon in the same orientation as someone viewing the Moon from the southern hemisphere. This is not what we see.
====The Moon's orientation is upside down on southern hemisphere====
Instead, people on the southern hemisphere see the Moon upside down compared to people living on the northern hemisphere.
Full Moon Luc Viatour.jpg ‎ | Full Moon seen from Hamois, Belgium.
Super Moon November 18, 2016 (cropped).jpg | Full Moon seen from Sydney, Australia.
The Flat Earth model must explain this somehow.
====A two-dimensional Moon in the firmament would appear elliptic when viewed from an angle====
To fix the Moon as a pizza viewed from side, flat earthers have to prevent anyone from viewing the thin side of the Moon. So they have exactly one orientation to put the pizza-Moon: horizontal, face towards the ground. This also allows explaining why the Moon is visible upside down when viewed from opposing hemispheres. In his video Eric Dubay demonstrates this with an illustration, where a picture of the Moon has been taped to the ceiling. The Moon will flip its orientation when it's viewed from opposite ends of the room. 
File:Orientación de la Luna.jpg|Globe Earth's Moon is a sphere that looks like a circle from all viewing directions.
File:Dubay moon room.jpg|Flat Earth's Moon is a disc that looks like an ellipse from all directions but from directly below.
This is however, a laughably bad explanation. In Dubay's model, the Moon will appear as a circle only when the observer is directly below the Moon looking straight up. In every other scenario, i.e. when observing the Moon from an angle, it will appear elliptical. Look no further than Dubay's own illustration above, or take Dubay's advice and tape a picture of the Moon to the ceiling and see for yourself. If you're feeling lazy you can just hover a dinner plate over your head. 
The bottom line is this: Perspective forces a disc-shaped Moon to appear elliptical when viewed from an angle, which directly contradicts our everyday experience of Moon always appearing on the sky as a perfect circle.
But wait, there's more.
====The Moon's orientation depends on its latitude====
The Moon doesn't have only two positions. It's orientation varies, and interestingly the angle depends directly on the latitude. Since latitude lines are determined by spherical mathematics, flat Earthers can not explain it with trigonometry that operates on Moon above the Pizza land.
Diurnal motion from GSO.svg ‎ | 
Diurnal motion by latitude.svg ‎ | 
Diagrams showing the orientation of the Moon at different latitudes of the Earth.
Below is an example that can be reproduced with images taken from anywhere on the Globe:
We can easily show the Moon's angle depends only on the latitude. 
First, we'll first grab a screenshot of the Moon from two timelapses from two known locations:
* Timelapse from Santa Cruz, CA, USA (latitude 36.974117).
* Timelapse from Newcastle, Australia (latitude -32.916668).
An image editor will show the Santa Cruz horizon is tilted 0.544° counter-clockwise, so we correct it first. 
We then tilt the photos according to their latitudes: 
* Santa Cruz by 36.97° counter-clockwise since it's on northern hemisphere, and 
* Newcastle by 32.92° clockwise, since it's on southern hemisphere. 
And would you look at that:
Flat Earth doesn't have a model to explain why the latitude determines the Moon's orientation reliably, so they have another explanation:
====The Moon's face spins as it revolves above Earth!====
The reason why The Moon is sometimes seen upside down is according to Dubay, that the Moon spins around its axis as it transits over the night sky.Well, well. A flerf explanation that needs celestial objects to revolve around a point, while at the same time revolving around its own axis.
This
is
an
absolutely
ridiculous
claim.
Were
it
the
case,
all
these
time-lapses
these
individual
words
link
to,
should
show
at
least
a
little
bit
of
spin.
===Miscellaneous arguments===
====But the Moon's face should show a little bit of parallax when viewed from different sides of the globe!====
Reasons Dubay absolutely correctly. This is exactly what happens. Here is a GIF from NASA showing the Moon's face taken at the same exact moment in Tokyo and Houston on March 7, 2023:
====So why is the Moon the same apparent size as the Sun?====
They're not. That's why an is a thing. The angular diameter of the Sun varies between 0.527° and 0.545°. The angular size of the Moon varies between 0.489° and 0.568°. So they are close, but not the same. If the Earth were flat, the Sun would be the same size at the same time of day, but analemmas do not show that.
====But there are eclipses where both the Moon and the Sun are visible so it can't be Earth's shadow that eclipses the Moon!====
Yes, these are called and it happens with every eclipse. It just requires that the observer happens to stand in a spot perpendicular to the Sun-Earth-Moon syzygy, i.e. where-ever it's sunrise or sunset during the eclipse. Those people can then see both objects because atmospheric refraction bends the light from behind the curve.
 
Dubay has claimed the refraction can't bend Earth's shadow over the Moon. This is willful misinterpretation if not straight up deceit on Dubay's part. The light around things bends. Shadow is absence of light, so shadow does not bend.
 
During the lunar eclipse, the atmospheric refraction causes lights to bend from the edges of the Earth, and the light that bends the least, is red, as it's in the lowest visible wavelength. The rainbow also bends the red light the least so it's on top. Red light doesn't bend enough around Earth to avoid Moon, so it hits the Moon coloring it red. See this video for more information. The Moon will reflect the red light it receives, and as the reflected light travels towards Earth, some of it is again bent over the horizon. Thus the observer will see the Moon higher than it is. For an illustration, see here.
 
Dubay also lies some more by saying the Selenelion should be visible 180° around Earth — basically from the Sun's zenith point during the total lunar eclipse. Again, it can only be seen at the points that are 90° from the lunar eclipse.
Finally Dubay misrepresents the "8 inches per mile squared" formula — the crudest approximation available, that doesn't take into account refraction, and that works poorly on longer distances such as the radius of Earth — as an applicable formula to evaluate the Selenelion, which results purely from refraction. For the formula that takes into account refraction, see Exact Equation for the Hidden Height here.
====Oh the spherical Moon is tidal locked? How convenient!====
Another claim from guess who, is that it's a NASA conspiracy that the Moon just happens to rotate at the exact rate it revolves, and that's why we never see the opposing side. Sprinkling conspiracy dust over a normal astronomical things doesn't make the conspiracies. The fact is, given enough time, every object in the sky orbiting one another will become tidally locked. The mechanism is explained The Moon is slowing Earth's spin in a rate that extends day by 0.0017 seconds every 100 years. If the Sun didn't swallow earth in 5 billion years time, Earth would stop spinning because of the Moon, and thus be also tidally locked, in 50 billion years time.
====Reflective Moon would show a shiny point reflection!====
Dubay has claimed the Moon can't be reflective, because then it would only reflect sunlight from a single point on the sphere. This assumes a perfect, mirror polished planet, which it obviously isn't. There is another type of reflection called where the light is scattered at many angles due to the rough surface. The overwhelming majority of surfaces are such. The more matte the object, the more diffused the light reflecting off of it is. Light doesn't have to bounce off surfaces like a mirror so that we can see them. Everything that reflects light can be seen. That's how vision works.
====But the Moon is self-luminescent!====
Dubay also co-signed Bible's claim that the Moon is self-luminescent, which is obviously not the case, as a self-luminescent surface would not show shadows exclusively on the same sides of the craters from which direction the Moon is lit up.
====But the Moon is transparent!====
Flerfs often claim the Sun is transparent because you can't see all of it all the time. The lit up part of the Moon is always on the side of Sun. The part of Moon that doesn't get light cast upon it, stays in the shadow. What remains in the shadow receives very little or no light from the Sun, and because the Moon is blocking the stars, those lights do not come through either. Because of this, that part of the Moon is roughly as black as space. Nothing is discriminating the shadow of the Moon from the nonexistent light coming from deep space, so both get colored blue because blue light waves from the Sun get scattered more than other colors. Some parts of the Moon's surface will scatter some light, and so those parts appear to hover in the sky-blue.
Eric Dubay has claimed the Moon sometimes shows stars through it. This is laughably bad. Firstly, the sky is full of stars, why is only one visible? If this is the case, Why aren't flerfs posting hundreds of videos showing this every time the Moon is visible and it's not full Moon? A much more plausible explanation is a hot pixel, or a satellite the solar panel of which is reflecting light from the Sun. This happens all the time.
====But the moonlight is cold!====
Dubay tried to describe moonlight as pale and cold, and based this on the idea that when its concentrated with a lens, it doesn't exhibit the slightest sign of heat. 
As explained by Henk Schuring here, like Earth, the Moon receives about 340W/m², and it reflects from that roughly 8%, or, 27W/m². That energy emits in all directions, and once it reaches Earth, approximately 0.00044 W/m² is left. The Moon lights up in thermal camera videos too, so the heat coming from the Moon is not nothing, like Dubay claims.
The flerfs have claimed moonlight actually cools Earth. They did an experiment about this which showed lower temperatures under moonlight, than under a canopy. However, as explained by Dave Farina here, and demonstrated by GreaterSapien here, the experiment was a faulty party trick as it did not control for other effects by making similar temperature comparisons during the eclipse. The issue with the experiment was, it didn't account for the fact the canopy was trapping warm air, that's lighter, under itself.
To argue his case, Eric Dubay — for perhaps the first time in his life — cited an actual journal, The Lancet, that in 1856 published an article titled "Morbid Phenomena of Lunar Light". Dubay however conveniently left out the fact, that on the first page of the article, right column, line 7, it says the distance of the Moon is 240,000 miles. So clearly something is wrong with that article. Most of the articles published in early decades of The Lancet were checked by the editor, Thomas Wakley, who was surgeon, not a physicist. Thus, perhaps it was not such a bad idea journals standardized peer-reviewing published articles in the 1950s? One would think so, especially given that Dubay blatantly lied about The Lancet having peer review at the time. For the record, Eric, The Lancet introduced peer-review in 1976.
Dubay also misrepresented the required control, by claiming the control would need to be done on the same day. The point is to measure the temperature under the shade and outside the shade, and do that during both a full Moon and eclipse. The control checks, that it's the moonlight that explains the temperature difference between shade and non-shade.
To summarize, the moonlight has no cooling effect, and it's warming effect is so small it's only detectable with purpose-built instruments. As Answers in Genesis (yeah, AiGs... the bar is very low for flatties) concludes: "the claim that moonlight cools objects exposed to it [...] defies all that we know about the nature of light and energy. Furthermore, this claim has nothing to do with flat-earth cosmology, and easily could be jettisoned by flat-earthers without jeopardizing their model." Dr. Danny R. Faulkner Testing a Flat-Earth Prediction: Is the Moon’s Light Cooling? Answers Research Journal 12 (2019): 1–11.
==The Sun==
====The Sun's apparent size stays almost constant year-round in analemmas====
An is a diagram that shows the position of a celestial object on the sky at the same time of the day, every n days. The diagram can be created as a composite image that combines individual photos of the Sun at the same time over a year. The movement of the Sun in the analemma is caused by the Earth tilting on its axis, shifting the position of the observer relative to the sun.
In the flat Earth model With a little bit of math we learn that the Sun moving from one tropic to the other, would change the angular size of the Sun by 45.23%.
However, as can clearly be seen from the timelapses, the Sun remains fairly the same size over the course of a year. This alone debunks the flat Earth model.
In reality, the Sun's diameter is 865,000 miles,NASA. "Our Sun: Facts". Via nasa.gov. and it's closest distance (perihelion) is and farthest distance (aphelion) is This results in the size change of roughly 3.85%, which is consistent with the observations of small changes in Sun's size in the composite images.
1. The is
\theta = 2 \times \arctan\left(\frac{d}{2h}\right) 
Where d is diameter of the Sun (32 miles) and h is distance from the observer to the Sun.
2. The distances:
d_{\text{close}} = 3000 \, \text{miles} (directly above one tropic)
d_{\text{far}} = \sqrt{3000^2 + 3222^2} \approx 4402 \, \text{miles} (directly above the opposite tropic 3222 miles away.)
3. Angular size difference:
\theta_{\text{close}} \approx 2 \times \arctan\left(\frac{32}{2 \times 3000}\right) \approx 0.61^\circ (closest point)
\theta_{\text{far}} \approx 2 \times \arctan\left(\frac{32}{2 \times 4402}\right) \approx 0.42^\circ (farthest point)
4. Difference in angular size between 0.61° and 0.42° is roughly
 \frac{0.61 - 0.42}{0.42} \times 100 \approx 45.23\% 
1. The is
\theta = 2 \times \arctan\left(\frac{d}{2h}\right)
2. The Sun's angular size at perihelion:
\theta_{\text{peri}} \approx 2 \times \arctan\left(\frac{865{,}000}{2 \times 91{,}400{,}000}\right) \approx 0.54^\circ
3. The Sun's angular size at aphelion:
\theta_{\text{aphe}} \approx 2 \times \arctan\left(\frac{865{,}000}{2 \times 94{,}500{,}000}\right) \approx 0.52^\circ
4. Angular size change is
\frac{\theta_{\text{peri}} - \theta_{\text{aphe}}}{\theta_{\text{aphe}}} \times 100 \approx \frac{0.54^\circ - 0.52^\circ}{0.52^\circ} \times 100 \approx 3.85\%
Dubay has claimed there are analemmas that have varying size Suns, but he was only able to provide a CGI rendering that was used as concept art to produce the logo and branding for Fiesta Americana hotels. This can easily be told from 1) the low pixel scenery at the bottom of the image with obvious touch up marks and 2) from the fact the analemma's Suns are smallest during July when Earth is furthest away from the Sun,Dubay knows this. and during late June and early July, the Sun is at its highest on the sky. Ideograma's analemma has Suns largest in the front, and smallest in the back, just like the hotel logo. In reality, this never happens.
The second image was a heavily compressed image of this raw file, thaw shows individual Suns vary from roughly 24 to 30 pixels, nowhere near the expected 24 to 35 pixels required for 45% scale differences that the trigonometry proved would be expected. It's also the case the smaller suns are all more hazy, meaning they were photographed through clouds.
The third analemma by Steve Irvine also shows the especially winter months' photos as blurry. As Irvine himself tells about the project in his home page "This winter was cloudy as well. Keppel Henge is surrounded by the Great Lakes — lakes so huge that they generate their own weather systems — and lake effect clouds are common during the winter months." Every noticeably smaller Sun in the photo is a hazy one, i.e. they're photographed through some cloud coverage.
Dubay also claimed SciManDan's analemma was CGI because of overlap of the Sun over with the Dec. 22, taken during winter when the tree doesn't have leaves, and because the July 5. Sun was above the building's edge. What Dubay failed to realize was analemmas are taken by repeatedly placing the camera to the same spot month after month. The place will never be exactly the same, and if the single photo of the background was taken on any other day, the frames will with overwhelming probability not align perfectly.
====But Scientists have changed their answer about the distance to the Sun!====
Lies Eric Dubay by omission. The world is complex, and the tools to make observations evolve over time, and so, the accuracy of our knowledge improves. The article "How Did We Find the Distance to the Sun?" by Morgan Rehnberg gives a good explanation on why it was so hard. In the 2nd century BCE, The Greek astronomer Hipparchus invented parallax, and he calculated the distance to Moon with an accuracy of 7%. As shown here, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus used used nothing but basic trigonometry to calculate the size of Earth, Moon, and Sun, as well as their distances. The error was large, but the exact angle to Sun during half-moon could not be determined with the tools of the period. Over time the accuracy improved by almost 250x. The next improvement had to wait until 1761, when the very rare occurrence of Venus transiting between Earth and the Sun would happen again. Bob the Science Guy explains the topic here, and the resulting distance to the Sun was off only by 3%. Radar was wasn't invented before 1935, and since it was a military thing, it was kept in secret until the WW2 ended. became a thing in the 1960s, and it has then been used to improve on the measurements. Michael Toon has linked to multiple papers here if you want a deep dive.
Still, unfortunately modern science can't possibly compete with the flat Earth model where there is only one definitive truth of the Sun's altitude being 2,400 several thousand 6000 3,110 less than 4000 5000-7000 miles.Flerfs claim to have a functioning method to calculate the distance of the Sun with basic trigonometry, but so far nobody's figured out how to run the numbers. Or, perhaps the highest flying determine Sun's altitude to be at most 280,000 feet (53 miles), as—
==== The Sun is inside the clouds! ====
In the search for any proof of a local small local sun, flat earthers have encountered pictures and videos where the Sun appears to go through some clouds while also being partially covered by other clouds. This therefore proves the Sun must be as low as those clouds and inside them! Yes... They are serious about this.
Some clouds are thicker than others, thus, some clouds let more sunlight go through them. Thus, the illusion of the Sun being inside a cloud. Once again, flat earthers are confused by the Sun glare and camera exposure. 
But even without analyzing these pictures, with just an itty bitty tiny amount of critical thinking, we can bring some more glaring problems than the Sun itself: 
# According to this claim the Sun would be approximately 10, at most 53 miles up. This contradicts with popular altitude estimates of 3,000 miles.
# At such small altitudes, why hasn't anything crashed to it? Do pilots swing and miss it on their routes?
# And, lastly, if the Sun is inside those clouds, WHY DOESN'T IT EVAPORATE THEM INSTANTLY? IS THE SUN COLD???
==== But the Sun is right above the clouds! ====
In his video Eric Dubay tries to imply the Sun is close and that it hovers right above the clouds, casting a spotlight down. This immediately begs the question, why is the Sun, that's supposed to be shining only down like a spotlight, shining really fucking brightly, 90° to the side, where the high altitude balloon films it? If the clouds are made of water, why are they glowing orange like molten steel? Again, why aren't they evaporating instantly?
The phenomenon is actually just a specular reflection that appears when the cloud coverage is smooth enough to create a hazy point reflection of the distant sun. Also a bit further down the video, the spot has disappeared, because the clouds are no longer reflecting the sunlight the same way to the camera. The sun is still bright, and neither its, or the clouds' altitude has time to vary greatly during the roughly two hour lifetime of a weather balloon, so it's obviously not a low orbiting Sun.
====But there's no 24 hour Sun in Antarctica!====
There is. See The Final Experiment.
==The Stars==
====But star trail photography proves that the earth doesn't move!====
Although the theory isn't necessarily geocentrist (as one can technically still adopt a heliocentric worldview while holding to a belief in a flat Earth), flat earthers almost always fall into that camp.
One particular claim is that long-duration star trail photographs do not show any movement of the stars other than that caused by the Earth's rotation, the flat earther's reasoning being that, if the Earth is moving so fast around the Sun, the stars should appear smudged. This claim is symptomatic of all flat earthers' false assumptions about the distance between us and celestial objects, or their inability or lack of willingness to perform basic math. This is most likely because and astro-trigonometry are exact sciences, which only work in a spherical environment.P.E. Robinson (23 March 2003). "Introductory Astronomy: Parallax, the Parsec, and Distances". YouTube. 
For example, let's consider a star trail photograph of the nearest star is taken for 12 hours on a 10,000-pixel-wide camera. The Earth would travel about 1,287,000 km during that time. The nearest naked-eye visible star is Alpha Centauri, which is 4.34 light-years (41 trillion kilometers) away. The star would appear to move 0.018 pixels.Round earthers are just trying to pull the wool over the eyes of thinking people with math!
The stars in Flat earth model run into all sorts of problems:
* Only a subset of stars is visible, anywhere: There are 2 points to capture star trails and see a star that appears to not move in the sky. These are the famous Polaris in the north and Sigma Octantis in the south. All the stars in the sky rotate around these 2 points which are completely opposite of each other. These are called the Northern and Southern circumpolar stars. Both star trails are made of different constellations. It makes no sense that the northern night sky reveals another 180 degrees worth of stars "due to perspective" as one moves towards southern latitudes.
* Northern stars' trails would appear elliptical: Due to the perspective, star trail photography on northern hemisphere would have circular paths only below north pole. The further from the north pole one moves, the more elliptical the star trails would become. Still, flerfs have zero issue claiming the stars just rotate on different axis depending on latitude, and provide no explanation how that's possible. Or some, like Eric Dubay lie with images that have been stretched to make them appear elliptical. For comparison, here are originals: top left, middle left, bottom left, top right, middle right, and bottom right (video, see 00:11).
* Flat Earth south is in all directions: A person looking at Sigma Octantis from South America would have to be looking in the opposite direction of a person looking at the same star in Australia.
* Southern star trails don't work: The flat Earthers claim the reason Sigma Octantis shows up in all directions, is it takes turns in where it appears. As night time moves around the pizza land, the stars follow it. In other words, in the flat Earth model, Sigma Octantis orbits the north pole. This completely debunks the flat earth model, as the southern sky star trails show Sigma Octantis remains relatively still.
* Star trails switch direction on southern hemisphere: While star trails in the northern hemisphere show that stars revolve around Polaris counterclockwise, in the southern hemisphere they revolve around Sigma Octantis clockwise. Also, if the camera is looking at the celestial equator, the stars move in parallel straight lines. All of this can be easily explained by the rotation on a round Earth, but it is impossible in a flat Earth "dome". (Even Answers in Genesis admits this much!Flat Earth-Star Trails by Danny R. Faulkner (October 12, 2016) Answers in Genesis (archived from June 9, 2021).)
*Equatorial mounts are needed: Contrary to what flerfs like Dubay quoting William Carpenter have claimed, astronomers have to compensate for the curvature of the earth in the form of and have done so since the late 1700s. Equatorial mounts are used for in which the axis of rotation of the telescope is aligned with the axis of rotation of the Earth, and rotated in the opposite direction to eliminate apparent movement. On a flat Earth, the polar axis would always be directly perpendicular to the plane of the planet - but a round Earth requires it to be tilted at an angle equal to the latitude of the observer. See Dave McKeegan's video for more in depth explanation why equatorial mounts make zero sense on a flat Earth.
* Stellar parallax exists: Over longer time periods astronomers can observe the apparent movement of nearby stars caused by Earth's orbit around the Sun, though it is quite small. Still, stellar parallax would not exist at all if Earth was the flat immovable place flerfs claim it is. In astronomy, the is defined as the distance where a star will appear to move back and forth by one arc-second over the course of a year, meaning they measure the precise differences in angles needed to aim a telescope directly at certain star while Earth is on either side of the Sun during its full orbit (for example aiming on the summer solstice and winter solstice and calculating the parallax based on those minute differences). While light-years are what the public generally thinks in when thinking of astronomical differences are are far, far more widely used in popular science publications, parsecs are the preferred unit of distance by astronomers due the ease of making calculations with them, acting as a sort of a metric light-year (coincidentally, the ratio between the length of a foot and meter (1:3.28) is almost the same as between the light-year and parsec (1:3.26)).
====But Polaris can be seen from the Tropic of Capricorn!====
Cries Eric Dubay. To Quote Astronomy magazine's article on the topic:
So Dubay is just blatantly lying. The burden of proof is on him, and he's free to travel to southern hemisphere to make history by being the first one ever to document Polaris from the Tropic of Capricorn.
====But all stars gradually decline when moving away from the North pole!====
Says Eric Dubay. Let's see what really happens, first on a hemispherical dome (perfect sphere cut in half), and then a flattened one. In all cases, the observation will be done from the edge of the firmament.
Hemispherical dome
Let's assume the pizza land's radius, i.e. distance from north pole to firmament is
20,000 km. If Polaris is attached to the firmament, it will be visible at 
\theta = tan^{-1} \frac{\text{height of Polaris}}{\text{distance from north pole}} = tan^{-1} \frac{20,000km}{20,000km}= 45^{\circ} angle. It will not disappear.
The distance at which Polaris would appear to be at 10° above the horizon, is d = \frac{20,000}{tan(10^{\circ})} = 113,400km
The distance at which Polaris would appear to be at 1 arc-minute above the horizon, is d = \frac{20,000}{tan(\frac{1}{60}^{\circ})} = 68,730,000 km
Flattened firmament
But perhaps God doesn't have to care about structural integrity, and the peak of the firmament with Polaris glued to it, is right above the Sun, at 3,000 miles, or 4,828 km. Now, Polaris will be seen at
\theta = tan^{-1} \frac{\text{height of Polaris}}{\text{distance from north pole}} = tan^{-1} \frac{4,828km}{20,000km}= 13.63^{\circ} angle. It will not disappear.
The distance at which Polaris would appear to be at 10° above the horizon, is d = \frac{4,828km}{tan(10^{\circ})} = 27,400km, which is outside the firmament.
The distance at which Polaris would appear to be at 1 arc-minute above the horizon, is d = \frac{4,828km}{tan(\frac{1}{60}^{\circ})} = 16,600,000 km which is 43 times further away than the Moon in the globe model.
If you think this problem can be made to go away, by saying the firmament is much larger, then that only raises polaris, and it should appear higher on all latitudes.
==== But Sigma Octantis can not be seen with publicly available telescopes! ====
Claims Eric Dubay. has apparent magnitude of 5.47. The of stars in dark suburban areas is about 5. Thus, Sigma Octantis is barely visible with naked eye. As explained here, the star can be photographed with roughly 30 second exposure time. Also, telescopes not only zoom in, they also gather more light than the human eye, making objects brighter. Thus, Sigma Octantis that's already barely visible with our tiny pupils, absolutely can be seen with a store bought telescope.
==Celestial Mechanics==
====So why can't we feel Earth's rotation affecting us?====
The centrifugal acceleration is a force that reduces how heavy gravity makes us feel by 1/290. If the Earth suddenly decided to double its spinning speed, a 70kg person would feel themselves 1.39%, or just under 1kg lighter. Because the earth spins at constant angular speed, we don't feel changes in the force it wants to eject us.
The lateral g-forces an individual feels when cornering around the axis of the Earth is the same as making an average (10m radius) turn in a car at the speed of 0.582m/s or 2.1km/h, which is the speed of a walking tortoise. That's why you don't feel it.
1. Centripetal acceleration due to Earth's rotation:
a_c = \omega^2 r where \omega = \frac{2\pi}{86400 \, \text{s}} \approx 7.272 \times 10^{-5} \, \text{rad/s} and r = 6378000 \, \text{m} :
a_c = (7.272 \times 10^{-5} \, \text{rad/s})^2 \times 6378000 \approx 0.034 \, \text{m/s}^2
2. Lateral g-force:
\text{Lateral g-force} = \frac{0.034}{9.81} \approx 0.00346 \, g
3. Equivalent speed in a car turn:
For a car turn with r = 10 \, \text{m} :
0.00346 \times 9.81 = \frac{v^2}{10}
0.0339 = \frac{v^2}{10}, \quad v^2 = 0.339, \quad v = \sqrt{0.339} \approx 0.582 \, \text{m/s}
====So why can't we feel the cornering forces as we turn around the Sun?====
The lateral g-forces an individual feels when cornering around the Sun on Earth is the same as making an average (10m radius) turn in a car at the speed of 0.243m/s, which is the walking speed of an elderly person. That's why you don't feel it.
1. Centripetal acceleration of Earth's orbit:
a_c = \frac{v^2}{r} where v \approx 29,800 \, \text{m/s} and r \approx 1.496 \times 10^{11} \, \text{m} :
a_c = \frac{(29,800)^2}{1.496 \times 10^{11}} \approx 5.93 \times 10^{-3} \, \text{m/s}^2
2. Lateral g-force:
\text{Lateral g-force} = \frac{a_c}{9.81} = \frac{5.93 \times 10^{-3}}{9.81} \approx 6.05 \times 10^{-4} \, g 
3. Equivalent speed in a car turn:
For a car turn with r = 10 \, \text{m} :
6.05 \times 10^{-4} \times 9.81 = \frac{v^2}{10}
5.93 \times 10^{-3} = \frac{v^2}{10}, \quad v^2 = 5.93 \times 10^{-2}, \quad v = \sqrt{5.93 \times 10^{-2}} \approx 0.243 \, \text{m/s}
====So why can't we feel the cornering forces as we turn around the galaxy's center?====
The lateral g-forces an individual feels when cornering around the Milky Way (our galaxy) at the orbital speed of our Sun, is the same as making an average (10m radius) turn in a car at the speed of 50.4 \text{cm/h}, which is the speed of a slow mollusk. That's why you don't feel it.
1. Centripetal acceleration of the Sun's orbit:
a_c = \frac{v^2}{r} where v \approx 220,000 \, \text{m/s} and r \approx 2.46 \times 10^{20} \, \text{m} 
a_c = \frac{(220,000)^2}{2.46 \times 10^{20}} \approx 1.97 \times 10^{-10} \, \text{m/s}^2
2. Lateral g-force:
\text{Lateral g-force} = \frac{a_c}{9.81} = \frac{1.97 \times 10^{-10}}{9.81} \approx 2.01 \times 10^{-11} \, g
3. Equivalent speed in a car turn:
For a car turn with r = 10 \, \text{m} :
2.01 \times 10^{-11} \times 9.81 = \frac{v^2}{10}
1.97 \times 10^{-10} = \frac{v^2}{10}, \quad v^2 = 1.97 \times 10^{-9}
v = \sqrt{1.97 \times 10^{-9}} \approx 1.4 \times 10^{-5} \, \text{m/s} = 0.014 \text{cm/s}
v =0.014 \text{cm/s} \times 3600 = 50.4 \text{cm/h}
====But those values add up! We're spinning like crazy!====
Even if we assume all three speeds are perpendicular to maximize their effect, the total effect of rotation around the earth's axis, going around the Sun that's going around the Galaxy, we get the car cornering force, that matches the speed of
which is way too weak for us to properly notice it.
If you still don't believe us, try standing up and swinging your arm fast. You can feel the centripetal force pack blood into your fingers. Next, assuming your arm, when measured from the mid-point of the shoulder joint, to tip of the finger, is 30 inches, or 75cm, try rotating your other arm at a rate where one revolution takes 28 seconds. That's very close to the total cornering forces our Earth's spin around its axis, Earths orbit around the Sun, and the Sun's orbit around our galaxy, when combined, create. Can you feel the blood packing to your fingertips? No? Thought so.
====But Sundials wouldn't remain accurate due to all the movement!====
Argues Eric Dubay. Dubay claims that "Earth's, the Sun's, and the Moon's revolving, rotating, wobbling, and spiraling motions would make the Sundials inaccurate". This is an attempt to overwhelm the mind of the listener with irrelevant information.
* A is about telling the phases of the Moon, so we can ignore that as completely irrelevant.
* The Sun revolving around Milkyway does not play role at all, as sundials are about the relative movement between the Sun and the Earth. 
* Since the spiraling motion is relative motion of the Sun and Earth observed from the CMB's rest frame (i.e., if nothing in the universe affected you), we can ignore that too.
So now we're left with Sun and Earth.
* The Sun's rotation around its axis takes 27 days, but since we know Sun doesn't have dark days, can ignore that completely.
* The are about Earth's axial tilt varying between 22.1° and 24.5° (so at most 2.4° variance) which is barely noticeable. Secondly, the wobble cycle takes 41,000 years. Meaning in 43,000 CE, it will have reset itself to current position. Also, Since the axial tilt shifts 0.013° per century, and because, according to the sundial is only 3,500 years old, the total change in the axis direction has been 0.35°, barely noticeable. Installation errors of ancient sundials are likely around 0.5°-2°.
* The Earth's rotation around its axis determines the length of the solar day. Because the Moon is slowing Earth's rotation slowly, Earth's day length grows by 1.8ms every century, or, 49.3 nanoseconds per day. The system and thus the concept of seconds have existed since ancient Sumerians came up with it, 5000 years ago. The sundials have existed for 3,500 years, during which days have grown 6.3 seconds longer. During the times sundials were regularly used, they were perfectly adequate to measure time. Ancient Egyptians had average life expectancy of 25 years for males and 37 for females. So days getting 0.67 milliseconds longer during their lifetimes played no role. No hourglass has ever had that kind of resolution, and measuring things as a function of time had to wait until Galilei's pendulum experiments in the 1582. So again, historically, the sundial was practical for daily use, but in modern world, it's unable to keep track of absolute time. Scientific experiments require precise measurement. Extremely fast computer systems need to be kept in sync around the world with atomic clocks. Also, humans live on different time-zones, and the solar time a sundial tells won't be the same in two adjacent cities, let alone inside one's country.
* The largest error comes from the Earth's revolution around Sun, which when combined with the axial tilt, dictate the season. Ignoring the absolute time discussed above, if we'd still live by solar days and if we didn't care about each day getting 49 nanoseconds shorter or rely on absolute time measurement, the only thing the axial tilt would do, is affect the altitude of the Sun during the day. Due to the elliptic orbit of Earth around the Sun, , the Sun's speed in the sky varies, and thus sundials can be up to 16 minutes too fast or slow depending on the time of the year. So it's not accurate for measuring time intervals. However, since the Orbit doesn't really change, the error doesn't accumulate, except for the slowdown of Earth around in its orbit. As this Forbes article shows, the orbital speed drops by about 3 nanometers-per-second, every year. So the speed has changed by 1.05 micrometers / second since the sundial was invented. Since this is visible on Earth only as the absolute length of each season growing by nanoseconds each year, it doesn't matter. It's detectable, but not by a sundial.
Finally, as seen in this image, the gnomon of the sundial is adjusted to be parallel to Earth's rotational axis. This makes no sense on a flat Earth.
====But in absolute terms, we are going really fast, why can't we feel it?====
A commercial airplane travels at 700km/h, yet for most of the trip, it doesn't feel like it. The of the human body respond to pressure. We feel the airplane seat pushing us as we accelerate due to a force affecting us, just like in a car or a bus. During landing, we feel the forces that decelerate us: the friction from our bench that stretches our skin, and the pressure in our hands as we lean against the backside of the seat in front of us. But during flight, when the plane is moving at a constant speed, the sensation of movement disappears aside from hearing the humming of the engines.
The much bigger sense of speed we feel in a convertible with its top-down moving at constant speed comes from the breeze, i.e., the air that's not part of the closed system inside the car, which is hurtling by our ears. We also associate the sound of the car's engine (which is close to us) with speed, and we feel the vibrations coming from the tires. We also see objects around us passing through our field of view very fast.
The Earth's entire atmospheric system is revolving and moving at the same speed as the ground. For the same reason a hairdryer works normally (independently of cruising speed) inside a car with a top, wind can blow independently in Earth's closed atmospheric system while that system flies through space. The reason space doesn't cause a breeze that would a) mess up Earth's air currents, and b) help us sense the speed at which we traverse, is because space is a vacuum and the planet is thus not moving against some space wind. For this same reason, our planet does not need a firmament as a "windshield" for us to not feel space. On the side facing the prograde direction, the atmosphere remains in place as there is no space headwind compressing the air mass from above, and because the Earth is not accelerating, nothing is compressing the air mass from "below". All of the matter, including the gasses in the Earth's atmosphere have had its orbital speed ever since earth formed, 4.54 billion years ago. Furthermore, there is also no engine needed that would make a noise, and no tires are vibrating against some space road. The objects in space are so large and distant we lack any experience to estimate how fast they're moving in the absolute sense. The low angular velocity is throwing our perception off, as it makes them seem to be almost still. For the same reason we can't tell the speed of a car just by looking from its side window how our viewing angle of a mountain in the horizon changes (although if one knows the distance of the mountain and the distance of trees closer to the road they can calculate their speed exactly by measuring the parallax of the objects passing by). So with nothing to cue us about the absolute speed, no wonder we can't feel ourselves hurtling through space.
====How can Polaris maintain its alignment straight above the North Pole?====
Wonders Eric Dubay. It doesn't. Dubay makes it seem like is the chosen star to show North. It's not. The axis of Earth's rotation will always point to something. The closest star to each pole is called a 
In 3000 BC, around the time of ancient Egypt, was the North pole star. In 1000 BC, it was Alpha Ursae Minoris (Polaris) became the North pole star in roughly 500 CE. As explained by Mozibur Ullah here, In Antiquity, Polaris was not close enough to the celestial pole to be used for navigation and the whole constellation was used. In Old English it was called scip steorra, or ship star. Europeans named it Polaris in the Renaissance from the Latin Stella Polaris or pole star, when it approached the celestial pole to within a few degrees." By 3000 CE, will take Polaris' place, and the title passes to in roughly 5200 CE.
So it wasn't God who put it there to guide ships. It's just the best available pole star in our age.
====Why isn't there a 12 hour night and day everywhere?====
Strangely asked by Eric Dubay, who already knows the answer to be Earth's axial tilt, but doesn't think too highly about the fact. What's unclear is if he knows flerfs have themselves measured the tilt with a Ring Laser Gyroscope.
Funnily, Dubay disagrees with the notion that the Sun's angle of incidence would influence it's radiation dispersing into wider surface area. Assuming that's the case, Dubay's pizza-land runs into all sorts of trouble. The Sun, that supposedly orbits above the pizza-land between the tropics, passes over the tropics once a day. At the same time, the Sun, especially during Summer solstice, continuously has its shortest average distance to the center. Yet, as can be seen in Dubay's flat earth heat-map, for some reason, the area where sun passes over once a day has a tropical climate, but the Arctic is a frozen wasteland. I mean, when was the last time your stove couldn't melt an ice cube in the center, because heat wouldn't radiate there?
==Celestial objects==
==== But the asteroids are fake! ====
Because it makes very little sense heavy objects fly through the firmament (that supposedly keeps out the heavenly waters above), flat earthers do not believe asteroids are real. E.g., Mark Sargent has said they were fired by the powers be, out of boredom. As a proof of this, flat earthers have circulated images of mysterious spheres that fell from the sky, and that even made the news. The flatties claimed these are actually the thing people see when they see asteroids, and that the hollow cavity of the spheres had contained the fuel that powers the flight, and/or that burns to create an illusion of an asteroid burning during its 
The spheres turned out to be upper stage propellant bladder tanks. The ones that look like giant balls of yarn, are composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs), that wrap carbon fiber around the tank to increase it's tensile strength, while saving weight.
Hydrazine tank.jpg|An all-metal Hydrazine propellant bladder tank found in Namibia.
COPV.jpg|A ruptured COPV Hydrazine tank.
Upper stage.jpg|Agena, an upper stage used to place satellites into orbit has its Hydrazine tanks visible. Installed COPVs can be seen here.
==Astronautics==
====But Rockets do not have anything to push against in space!====
Claims Eric Dubay. 
As the third states: "If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions."
As can be seen here, it's enough to push something away from you to move forward. You don't have to push on solid mass. As can be seen in this video, ejecting gas at high speed works too.
====The ISS should be melting in 2000°C thermosphere!====
Claims Eric Dubay. High temperature does not necessarily burn you. Boiling water burns you badly in less than a second. But the same temperature steam from a kettle won't burn you in one second. At the thermosphere, there's roughly a few billion atoms / ft³. The temperature of those atoms is roughly 1000 Kelvins. So yes, hot stuff, but almost nonexistent amount of it. As per this Forbes article, "the outside of the ISS can reach temperatures as high as 250°F (121°C) on the sunny side and as low as -250°F (-157 °C) on the shady side." None of the metals Dubay listed melt at these temperatures.
==Astrophotography==
====So why are there no REAL photos of the Earth?====
There are. It's just that flat earthers can't tell the difference between a composite and a photograph.
One argument used frequently by flat earthers is that there are no real photos of the earth. E.g., Eric Dubay has claimed a Blue Marble photo shows copy-pasted segments, therefore the Earth is flat. This is downright misleading.
# As the Wikipedia says that 2001-2002 image is a composite. More precisely, a 3D rendering of composited surface & cloud data. NASA has never claimed the image is a photo taken from space.
# Why would the Illuminati, that's supposedly generating the images with CGI to hide the shape of Earth, create duplicate clouds? Also, if it's a mistake, why wouldn't they have at least ten guys hired to check every photo carefully? That would not be too expensive considering the 25.4 billion dollar budget.Dubay claims NASA's budget is a massive "black budget black hole". Funnily enough, he completely fails to mention the actual US government black budget that, e.g. in 2013, was about twice as much at 52.6 billion dollars.
# There are many photos of the Earth including photos which predate the equipment required to create fake images. For example, here is the original Blue Marble, taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. Flat earthers often confuse it with the 'fake' from 2002 . You can even see scanned 35-mm film in the Apollo image archive.Apollo Image Archive, apollo.sese.asu.edu.Blue Marble 35-mm AS17-148-22727 tothemoon.ser.asu.edu. The next true-color photo of the entire sunlit face in one shot was taken 50 years later by the DISCOVR satellite.Blue Marble 50 Years Later epic.gsfc.nasa.gov.Yulsman, Tom (Jul 21, 2015). A Spectacular View of Earth Unlike Any Seen Since 1972 Discover Magazine.
Of course, they use this argument while all their flat earth pictures are claimed to be real, despite being computer generated or edited themselves. Their argument works better against them.
Flerfs like Dubay have complained about there not being photos from the Moon, where Earth and stars are visible at the same time. The reason is, Earth can be 50 times brighter in the moon's sky than the full moon is on Earth. Also, the Sun that's illuminating the moon's surface will be very bright, and since the point of these photos has been to photograph the Moon and Earth in the same photo, i.e., two bright objects, the film speed, i.e., it's ASA/ISO sensitivity, has been selected to be relatively fast, to ensure neither the Moon or Earth are overexposed. This will mean that dimmer objects will not be visible. The only way to prevent this, is to use HDR composite images, which a) did not exist back in the day and that wasn't added to Photoshop before version CS2 released in 2005, and b) using HDR would make flerfs scream about CGI, so the whining is nothing more than arguing in bad faith by Kafka trapping.
Dubay has also claimed NASA photoshopped the word "SEX" into clouds, and Disney's Pluto (the dog) onto Pluto (the dwarf planet). The simple reason these appear, is the same as why sometimes clouds look like animals etc.: To show Dubay is a hypocritical fuckface, here is a video of him telling one can see the "rabbit or the man on the moon".
====So why do continents cover different areas in photos of the globe?====
The amount of Earth you can see actually changes the closer you move, somewhat counterintuitively, even when you can see the edges. This can not be demonstrated on a 2D surface like a computer screen, so don't test it with Google Earth. Try it with globe model or literally any ball. Draw something on it, and then look at the sphere from near and far, and witness stuff at the edges disappearing as you move closer. And before you argue that doing so changes the angular size Earth has on your face but the NASA photos have the same sized Earth each, understand that what the images of Earth taken from space show depends on the distance. However, any two images of the sphere can be scaled to be the same size on the screen, and thus, they will look different. Because both have round edges, you can't really tell how much is disappearing behind the globe model's curve. You do agree the curve is at least present in the sphere you're holding, right? RIGHT?
====So why do the Earth and Moon appear different sizes in many photos?====
Again. Same point as above. Because of perspective, different distances and focal lengths. No CGI or Photoshop is needed. Just Basic Photography 101.
==== So why are there no REAL photos of all the orbiting satellites? ====
Fun fact! Right now, as you are reading this, there are thousands of aeroplanes flying in the sky. Quick question: Do you see them? No? There you go. Still, one can falsify the flat-Earth concept on any clear night an hour or two after sunset by observing satellites in the sky with a telescope.A handy way of knowing when and where to look for them is Heavens Above or any other website or software supporting satellite tracking.
Flat earthers don't stop considering the ridiculousness of asking for a picture of all satellites from outer space. Most satellites on Earth are the size of a car, and they orbit miles away from each other. We can't barely see a car from a distance of 5km (3 miles), and satellites orbit anywhere from 160km to 2,000km (100..1,200 miles). Only big massive satellites like the International Space Station (orbiting at 418 km or 260 mi) or the Tiangong Space Station (which are the size of a football field) can be seen more clearly and there are many detailed pictures of them from Earth. Flatties will reject these satellites with excuses such as 
*The satellite hangs from a balloon! ( have balloons many times time size of the satellite above them. Why can't we see the balloon?)
*The satellite is a hologram! (Then how can they block light when they pass through the Sun and Moon?)
*The satellite is on a ballistic trajectory! (Why not just use balloons like they're sometimes using anyway? Where are the leaked images of the stack of turtles? )
Btw. "No satellites, therefore flat" is not even wrong...
====But NASA's photos of planets are fake CGI!====
Says Eric Dubay. A Nikon P1000 has pretty good 125x optical zoom. However, the 1/2.3" sensor is about the same size as the one in your iPhone. However, here's some folks who know how to use their P1000 to shoot planets, by putting it on a solid mount, and adjusting the focus to infinity:
* Saturn
* Mars
* Jupiter
Still think planets are just hazy dust in the firmament? Then dump your Nikons and buy a real telescope like astrophotographers do:
File:Mars during Opposition of 2020 - Taken with Nikon P900.jpg
File:Saturn taken with Nikon P900 - 2020-07-23.jpg
File:Jupiter and Red Spot, Ganymede (and transit), Io, Europa, and Callisto, taken with Nikon P900 - 2020-07-24.jpg
File:Astrophoto11.jpg
File:Astrophoto10.jpg
File:Giove Io & Ganimede - La meravigliosa danza dei satelliti.jpg
Very similar to NASA right?
==== So why is there no ISS footage of satellites or space debris? ====
The flat earthers have complained about the ISS live footage not showing occasional satellites or space debris flying past the camera. Firstly, the number of debris larger than 1cm is 670,000 and, the number of debris objects larger than 10cm, is 29,000.European Space Agency (ESA). "How many space debris objects are currently in orbit?". Via esa.int. As explained by Dave McKeegan in his video about satellites, the surface area of space at ISS altitude is 7.77✕10⁸ km², which makes stumbling on an object extremely rare. Practically all major space debris is being tracked, and when their trajectory brings them even close to ISS, it is considered an emergency. Space junk has also hit the ISS, and the ISS has adjusted its orbit to avoid space debris, many times.
As for satellites, when the lighting conditions are correct, satellites are trivial to see.
==The Conspiracy==
==== But NASA means "deceive" in Hebrew ====
Why do you need evidence when you can play word games, right!?
...
(*Sigh*) Anyway. Firstly, nasa or nāśā in Modern Hebrew means "to lift, carry or to take." Nāšā' does mean "to delude or deceive" but it's pronounce as "naw-shaw" because "is indicated in the transliteration by the diacritic above the s, that's called a caron" as bible scholar Dr. Dan McClellan points out.Is Satan Using NASA to Deceive Us All? by Dan McClellan (Apr 29, 2023) YouTube. That's why it's also written as "nâshâ" or "nasha". The closest word to "deceive" would be nashar which doesn't even sound like NASA. McClellan also claims this word never appears in the Bible either. And that's not to mention that NASA is an acronym, not a normal word. Keep in mind that this is supposedly a secret Satanic/masonic organization that apparently managed to fool the world's population via very elaborate conspiracies yet leaves obvious clues in its very name as to what its true intentions are. Not to mention... are bible scholars also paid by NASA too? It's also really interesting that flat earthers found a Hebrew word that sounds vaguely similar to "NASA", and decided that's where the name came from.
==== But NASA's secret documents admit the Earth is flat and non-rotating! ====
These cited NASA (apparently NASA is a trustworthy source for flat earthers now...) "secret" documents (that can easily be found on Google) often are studies and simulations from the 90-80s or even the 50s. These papers stated those assumptions to simplify their mathematical calculations (especially since they didn't have fancy computers like today) as a form of an . 
Ideal models are very useful and widespread in science (see for example an or an ). Tho technically wrong, they are accurate enough for practical purposes at that scale (see again: Relativity of wrong). 
For example, some other assumptions are "a rigid aircraft of constant mass" and a "stationary atmosphere", which neither exists.Aircrafts do bend a lot, especially on the wings, and consume their fuel during flight, so their mass decreases over time. Regarding the "stationary" atmosphere, tornados exist so... The documents might as well have assumed a and flat earthers would believe it too. Ironically, these papers also assume gravity, which (spoilers!) flatties don't believe... 
In any case, there are flight dynamics that assume spherical models too, so there isn't really a point here, just a red herring.
====But there are whistleblowers!====
In his crank video about whistleblowers Eric Dubay quote mines presents following flat Earth "whistleblowers":
* Robert Simmon 
 the creator of the 2002 image. Dubay claimed Simmon had said that "NASA's Earth images are not photographed, but in fact, photoshopped, and created completely through CGI artistry. My job is mostly taking data sets and making pictures out of them. The Earth is photoshopped, but is has to be". Similarly in another interview, he summarized: "My role is to make imagery from Earth sciences data. I turn data into pictures". The reason this is done was explained over ten years ago in a Quartz article. Briefly, NASA's earth observing satellites are in low earth or geostationary orbit, so they can't snap a photo of the entire Earth. Individual frames are combined in an image editor, creating a "flat map" to wrap it around a ball, and the gaps in sea that result from this photo are filled in. So already lying about the satellite imagery being CGI. Ironically, Simmon admitted that the "hard part" of all of this was making that "flat map" of the entire (we wonder why would that be hard on flat Earth).[Robert Simmon – AKA Mr. Blue Marble https://www.nasa.gov/people-of-nasa/robert-simmon-aka-mr-blue-marble/] So. Not a great start, Eric.
* Matthew Boylan (AKA Math Powerland)
Dubay describes Boylan as follows: "A hyper-realist painter, and vocal flat Earther, who claims to be a former NASA Operational Graphics Manager, has also blown the whistle. Saying that NASA's sole reason for existence, is to propagandize the public, and promote the false heliocentric model of the cosmos. He claims to have done various projects, photoshopping images of the Earth, stars, and planets, and has relayed anecdotes about meetings with NASA officials where they openly admitted the entire hoax, and laughed hysterically at the brainwashed zombies who unquestioningly believe their televisions."
Boylan's stand-up routine condemned NASA for creating concept art for its missions. NASA has a long list of images created by artists. Each of those is marked with "(Artist's Concept)". If Boylan thought that was lying to the public, it's on him. Having brought nothing with him as a proof of the conspiracy, leaves us with with Boylan's word. How much is that worth? Boylan seems like someone with the integrity of a man who makes fun of crippled people. 
Also, as shown by the documentary Behind the Curve, given that there's a massive feud between Boylan and Mark Sargent wrt the cult's internal power dynamics. The documentary explains, how Boylan, who titled himself "the originator", larped a pretentious artist who didn't give interviews, and who completely lost his marbles after Sargent took his place as the face of the movement. Boylan started calling Sargent a government shill. To quote Sargent: "Matt wanted to be the king of flat Earth, but he wanted to do it in his own terms." Boylan became a drama queen who rejected invitations to the cult's meetings, and who posted rants that accused Sargent of working for Warner Brothers that "has a deal with pentagon and the CIA". According to the filmmakers, Boylan refused to appear in the film without "receiving $5000, 12% of profits, creative control, a guarantee that he'd be featured in 25-50% of the film, and that Neflix support his unverified claim that Mark Sargent is secretly a Warner Brothers executive using an alias." The filmmakers continued: "We were unable to meet his demands."
This shows Boylan has been more concerned about what's in it for him, and getting back at those who try to outshine him, than collaborating and exposing the "lie". It's almost like he knows it's a grift.
In the film, Boylan claimed he was the one who originally inspired to blow the whistle. Snowden, who left his girlfriend and upper middle-class life, who actually endangered his life to reveal an actual conspiracy, who delivered documents to journalists, and who has shown he doesn't tolerate grifters, might disagree with Boylan's assessment.
* Igor Petrovitš Volk
Dubay: "In a live 2014 television interview with Bulgarian News-7, soviet cosmonaut , awarded the hero of the Soviet Union medal, said outright, that, quote: ' We have never been to space, and if somebody claims otherwise, it is not true '."
As can be seen from the full interview (with automatically generated subtitles on), the topic is existence of extraterrestial life. Both the interviewer and Petrovich clearly show they have a tongue-in-cheek, and the context of what Petrovich said, is clearly "we do not talk about what we see in space and if anyone asks, we deny even having been there". The context was not that humans have never been to space.
* Buzz Aldrin
Dubay: ", visibly inebriated in a 2015 interview with an eight-year-old girl named Zoey, at the National Book Festival in Washington DC, was asked ' Why hasn't nobody been to the moon in such a long time? ' After a pause, he answered, That's not an eight-year-old's question, that's my question. I want to know, but I think I know. Because we didn't go there, and that's the way it happened. And if it didn't happen, it's nice to know why it didn't happen, so in the future, if we want to keep doing something, we need to know why something stopped in the past that we wanted to keep it going."
The quote is accurate, but a) the emphasized word gives already disproves what Dubay is implying, and b) he's quote-mining as usual, and lies by omission. The full answer continues: 
"Umm. Money. Is a good thing. If you want to buy new things, new rockets, instead of keep doing the same thing over, then it's going to cost more money, and other things need more money too, so having achieved what the president wanted us to do,Basically, there was no funding, as the dick measuring contest between the US and USSR moved to the next thing (space stations like and ), and because there's been very few reasons to go back there, as explained here. and then what thousands, millions of people in America, and millions of people around the world" — You know when we toured around the world after we came back, the most fascinating observation as we -- was signs that said "we did it", not just us, not just America, but we, the world, different country, they felt like they were part of what we were able to do and that made us feel very good.
Last but certainly not least, were Aldrin a flat Earth whistleblower, would he have punched a "fellow activist" in the fucking face?
* Mirosław Hermaszewski
Dubay: "Even more recently, in a live 2019 television interview, the first and last Polish astronaut and national hero , 40 years after his flight to space when asked ' you have been there, is the earth really a sphere hanging in outer space? ', he shockingly replied ' Earth is flat, as some have suspected. I didn't expect this question, but I assure you it is flat. '"
As FlatEarth.ws points out:
"In the interview, he received some ridiculous questions, and he answered them with equally ridiculous answers in a joking tone, including the question at the end of the interview where he was asked if Earth is flat. The General was surprised by the question, but he decided to play along and answered “it is flat” for a hilarious ending. […] Unfortunately, as with many other cases, flat-Earthers are not aware they are being ridiculed in the interview, and take the General’s statement as serious."
As can be seen on the video, the journalist interviewing Hermaszewski asks him if he ever came across a UFO, to which Hermaszewski responds with "I can't tell you everything, especially not on camera", but he fails to keep his straight face. The next question is about the shape of the world, to which Hermaszewski replies "it's flat".To flerfs: Do you really think he would have wanted to end the interview with anything but the funniest answer possible?
====So why can't we travel to Antarctica to see the 24h Sun ourselves?====
See the next section.
==The Final Experiment==
See main article for this topic: The Final Experiment.
== The Glober Experiments ==
===The Cavendish Experiment (1797)===
See the main article on this topic: The Cavendish experiment
===Foucault's Pendulum (1851)===
See the main article on this topic: Foucault's pendulum
===Alfred Russel Wallace's Reproduction of the Bedford Level Experiment (1870)===
See main article for this topic: Alfred Russel Wallace's Reproduction (1870)
===Aether drift experiments===
====Airy's Failure (1871)====
====Michelson-Morley experiment (1887)====
====Michelson-Gale experiment (1925)====
===Jesse Kozlowski's Cooper River Lake Curve Experiment (2016)===
Jesse Kozlowski is a surveyor who has been debunking flat Earthers by basically doing his job. Kozlowski uses "reciprocal vertical/zenith angles" to prove the curvature of the Earth. In this case, by measuring with a theodolite the reciprocal angles of two different targets at 7,311 feet from each other in the Cooper River Lake with the same elevation, using the water as the level reference. On a flat Earth the angles of these targets would sum up not more than 180º, and thus there would be no reciprocal vertical/zenith angles. However, Kozlowski measured that the sum up angle of these two targets was higher than 90° with a zenith angle higher than 1º, proving the Earth a globe.
===Dan Olson's Lake Minnewanka Curve Experiment (2020)===
See main article for this topic: Lake Minnewanka Curve Experiment.
== The Flerf Experiments ==
Every once in a while, flat earthers do try to actually walk the talk, and perform experiments themselves to disprove globe and confirm their pizza land.
=== Samuel Rowbotham's Bedford Level Experiment (1838)===
See the main article on this topic: Samuel Rowbotham's Experiment (1838)
===Darryle Marble's spirit level experiment (2017)===
In 2017, Darryle Marble tried to prove the Earth flat by taking a spirit level to a plane.
At the cruising speed of 450 knots, the plane has to adjust its pitch by one degree every 8 minutes. Human pilots make less than half-a-degree corrections every few minutes. Modern autopilots make 0.1 degree corrections at the rate of roughly 10-20 adjustments per minute. These adjustments are imperceptible to human senses.Wolfie6020 (Sept. 22, 2016). "Do aircraft change attitude to follow the curvature of the Earth?". Via YouTube. In Marble's video, the spirit level's bubble absolutely does not stay still. The pitch compensation for the Earth's curvature is drowned in other disturbances from turbulence etc. 
Marble also seemed to assume the change in pitch would remain constant, because he expected to see the bubble constantly move towards the other end of the spirit level. This completely fails to understand that in the globe model, gravity is always towards the ground, i.e. the geocenter of the Earth, and thus, the spirit level, when propped to the angle that's perpendicular to the zenith, will not detect the curvature. This is because the gravity well that affects the spirit level changes constantly as the plane travels along the curvature.
So because the spirit level can not detect plane's orientation in the inertial frame of reference, and because the documented bubble movement in the video easily explains 0.1 degree autopilot corrections to pitch, this experiment fails to disprove globe.
=== Jeran Campanella's flashlight experiment (2018) ===
During the filming of the 2018 Netflix documentary Behind The Curve, Jeran Campanella, yes, the same Jeranism who later went to Antarctica with The Final Experiment group, recreated the Bedford Level Experiment with a flashlight, and he managed to prove the Earth, a globe.
=== Bob Knodel's RLG experiment (2018) ===
During the filming of the same documentary, another flat earther, Bob Knodel, bought a 20,000 USD to measure the drift caused by the Earth's rotation 360° / 24h = 15° / h. Knodel proved Earth to be, a globe.
=== Mike Hughes' rocket experiment (2018) ===
In 2018, "Mad Mike" Hughes launched himself to the sky on a home-made rocket, in the hope of documenting the non-existence of the curve.
 
Hughes reached the height of 1,875 feet which just under 5% of commercial airliners' cruising altitude (38,000ft). Needless to say, the altitude was not enough to show the curve. Still, the experiment proved beyond any doubt Hughes had the largest balls in the entire flatsphere.
Hughes died in a subsequent attempt in February 2020.Doubek, James (Feb. 23, 2020). "Daredevil 'Mad' Mike Hughes Killed In Crash Of Homemade Rocket". Via npr.org
=== David Weiss' peer-reviewed experiment (TBD)===
In February 2025, Flat Earth Dave agreed to design and take part in a rigorous, bipartisan, scientific experiment, with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, with the goal of getting it published in a peer-reviewed, accredited journal. The preliminary idea was to measure the curve with a straight flying plane's altitude, as a function of flying distance. Weiss did his best to weasel his way out of this one, but in the end, couldn't find an excuse. The experiment design meeting will take place in June and August, 2025.
Meanwhile, Michael Toon, who hosted the episode above, is reportedly searching for an extra-long measuring tape to size up Weiss' long face.
== The scoreboard ==
Adding to the experiments by flerfs 
* the two experiments done at TFE (24 hour Sun recording, and the scale measurement), and 
* the Bedford Level Experiment replication by Dan Olson, 
we get to the scoreboard.
 	Proved The Earth Flat	Proved The Earth Globe	Failed to Disprove The Globe	Failed to Disprove Flat Earth
Flerfs 	0 	2 	2 	0
Globers	0 	3 	0 	0
Total 	0 	5 	2 	0
==History==
See the main article on this topic: History of Flat Earh
==Online resurgence == 
Sadly, the flat Earth model is gaining popularity — or at least more vocal proponents — via the Internet, especially on various nutcase-enabling platforms like YouTube. The starting point for the resurgence can be considered to be flat earther Mark Sargent's first YouTube video FLAT EARTH clues Introduction he uploaded in February 2015. The central arguments of the video are about
# There existing no 360 degree camera footage from outside the ISS (there now is), 
# There being no non-composite images of Earth (there is a whole album, and another), and
# There being no straight flights from South America to Australia (there is).
Funnily enough, the video also confirms the existence of pressure gradient which proves gravity exists, and which disproves the firmament, as pressurized containers have equal pressure regardless of altitude.
Flat earth seems to be rooted in complete and active suspicion of all authority and an assumption that Mainstream Science™ is just one big, faceless monolith — spreading lies to keep the public in the dark about, er... Some nefarious end! NASA, being part of the Illuminati according to the flat earthers, is possessed of infinite money and control while at the same time being so incompetent they leave easily-spotted mistakes in their propaganda that expose the whole thing. Flat earthers like Jeranism make videos filled with a mix of Gish Gallop and creative misunderstanding, willful ignorance, and flat (hah!) denial of facts and evidence to the contrary.Carlos Diaz Ruiz, I watched hundreds of flat-Earth videos to learn how conspiracy theories spread – and what it could mean for fighting disinformation. theconversation.com, 27 June 2022.
The flat earth movement shares many of the same beliefs and goals as the Alt-right, and have even adopted Alt-right memes into their online presence. They created a variant of Pepe the Frog called "Fepe," or "Flat Earth Pepe."Aric Toler, “No Safe Spaces on the Flat Earth” – Emergent Alt-Right Inspired Flat Earth Online Communities. bellingcat.com, 7 June 2017.
===Fundamentalist endorsements===
Motives for advocating a flat over a round Earth despite evidence to the contrary vary. Many young-earth creationists who think it's 6,000 years old don't go so far as to say that it's not round.They Think the Earth is Flat? Answers in Genesis, 9 August 2008. However, there are some particularly nutty evangelical flat earthers.For example, consider the apocalyptic end times World's Last Chance group, that provides a pile of steaming flat earth bullshit wrapped in weird evangelical terminology.
Modern geocentrists make a point of distancing themselves from the flat-Earth belief. Charles K. Johnson based his flat-Earth belief on a hyper-literal interpretation of the Bible (asserting that Jesus' ascent "up" into Heaven is proof of a flat Earth, since a round Earth would have no "up" or "down").Robert J. Schadewald, The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! Says This Prophet. Science Digest, July 1980. Archived from the original at lhup.edu.
A flat-Earth movement also exists within fundamentalist Islam, based on a literal interpretation of several Qur'anic verses (see the "Religious views" section below).
While we're on the subject, a common claim by people who arrive at flatheaddery from the Religious Fundamentalism direction is that the globe is a lie propagated by the Satan-controlled media in an attempt to draw people away from the Bible. Although one would think that if Satan had that kind of power, then they'd simply ban Bibles outright.
To demonstrate the error in thinking of these people (who have apparently never heard of metaphors or hyperbole), let's look at a passage likely very near and dear to their hearts: God setting his bow in the sky after Noah's flood to celebrate his promise never to do that again. According to Hyperliteralist logic, this means that every rainbow ever (even ones produced from garden hoses) is actually all the same specific object, an actual warbow that might potentially be seized by human hands and used to fire arrows one day.
===Celebrity endorsements===
The rapper B.o.B., who has had several hits including "Nothin' on You" and "Airplanes", outed himself as a flat earther in 2016 and released a diss track called "Flatline" aimed at astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson's nephew, who is also a rapper, released a counter-diss track in response.Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson Drop the Mic in His B.o.B Rap Battle Astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss wrote in Slate such views can be useful — even if grotesque — when they can be used to check our assumptions. He proposes three clear reasons why the Earth is round: the time zones, the seasons, and the Global Positioning System.How a Celebrity’s Silly Belief in Flat Earth Can Be Useful by Lawrence Krauss
Confusing their ball game proficiency with an understanding of spheres in general, four NBA players also come out as flat earthers, including (He was joking.)
 has also endorsed flat earthery — which seems contradictory, considering she's also endorsed Hitler, whom we don't think was a flat earther.
In November 2024, another rapper, Lorenzo Dechalus (prof. ), expressed his flat earth crankery on Godfrey's podcast and offered to debate Neil deGrasse Tyson.In Godfrey We Trust Podcast (Oct. 7, 2024). "Lord Jamar Proves Flat Earth To Godfrey | Offers To Debate Neil deGrasse Tyson". Via YouTube. The heavyweight champion of astrophysics was unavailable, but, on January 15, 2025, during a 20 minute "debate" with Professor Dave, Dechalus got his ass handed back to him.Farina, Dave (Jan. 11, 2025). "Crapping All Over Flat Earther Lord Jamar Live on Godfrey's Podcast". Via YouTube.
==Christian flat Earth apologetics==
Many Biblical literalists claim the Bible disproves evolution and other scientific theories prima facie. Since there is no real debate about the shape of the Earth, these passages call Biblical literalism into question. The irony of flat earthers encouraging people to stop blindly accepting what they've been taught and do their own research has not gone unnoticed, considering that the primarily cited origin of flat earth ideas is indeed the Bible.
In numerous passages, the Bible claims that the earth is a flat disk and/or rectangular, usually implicitly. Whether or not the Bible "really" says this is often debated — but if the Bible was written by people who lived in societies who were unaware that the earth is a more or less spherical object which orbits the Sun, then we would expect this view to be reflected in their writings. Presumably, God's concern would be the salvation of their souls, so it's difficult to see why clearing up the true shape of the Earth would be important for that endeavor.
Biblical flat-Earthism is very rarely accepted. Wilbur Glenn Voliva even offered $5000 as a prize for anyone who can prove that Earth is not flat. Of course, his predictions about Earth ending in 1923, 1927, 1930, and 1935 also failed. Teaching about spherical Earth was banned in the schools of Zion, Illinois, at that time.
Former President of the United States Jimmy Carter mentioned flat earthers in passing (though he was actually speaking against mandatory teaching of creation science):Carter slams Georgia's 'evolution' proposal
===Appeals to the Bible===
What the Bible actually says about a flat Earth is clearly a matter for debate amongst Christians. But it is certainly both instructive and amusing to read how some Christians clearly see a flat Earth while other Christians attempt to dismiss their claims as poetry, dreams or something which is "obviously" not to be taken literally.
====The king seeing all the earth====
*"-11. In Daniel, the king “saw a tree of great height at the centre of the earth… reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth's farthest bounds.” Only with a flat Earth could a tall tree be visible from "the earth's farthest bounds" — this is impossible on a spherical Earth, or is the tree a rocket?
Theological rebuttal: The strength of Daniel 4:10-11 as an argument for a flat Earth is considerably reduced by the fact that this part of the Book of Daniel recounts a dream experienced by the Assyrian king of Babylon. Thus, it does not necessarily refer to an actually existing tree or make any statements about real cosmology. This interpretation would seem to indicate that biblical literalists do not even know how to read the Bible properly. This is also quote mining.
====Jesus seeing all the kingdoms====
350px|thumb|upright| Shows why you couldn't see all the kingdoms. To be fair, you can suggest that those outside of lines of sight are not kingdoms.
*: "Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain [spaceship?], and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world"
*: "And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time."
Theological rebuttal again: The strength of using Matthew and Luke as flat Earth claims is reduced by the fact that "kingdom" is a human construct. If you classify all the places on Earth that you can't see from that particular location as "not kingdoms", such as barbaric tribes and non-monarchies, it can be fitted within that description. However, how the devil knows that those places are not ruled by kings (again, the concept of "king" is also a human concept) is not exactly clear.
You could also go with the idea that Satan simply showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world over the course of a trip around the equator or in sequence, because the text does not imply that they were shown together.
Yet another possible interpretation is that only kingdoms in the then known world (southern Europe, northern Africa and western Asia) are meant, which could be seen from a point in space not far above the surface of the Earth. Take your pick, flatheads.
====The earth is a circle====
*: "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth (Earth’s orbit?), and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy (map), and spreads them out like a tent to live in."
Jews and Christians use this quote to "prove" that the Bible implies that the earth is spherical, although the word is "circular", and may refer to the perception of a 360 degree panoramic view. Some scholars point out that Isaiah never uses the Modern Hebrew word for sphere Kadur, anywhere.In His Name by E. Christopher Reyes, p. 568 It is not clear to Theists whether this is relevant, because the interpretation of the word Kadur in the Bible is disputed by Theists. This line probably does refer to a flat model of the earth, since an alternative translation is "He sits enthroned above the vault of the earth," a reference to the firmament.
The passage describes the Heavens as like a canopy, not the Earth. This interpretation would seem to indicate that Biblical literalists do not even know how to read sentences properly.
Some non-flat-earth Christians maintain that this entire text is intended to be poetic in nature, as it talks about God holding the dust of the earth in a basket. Either this, along with everything else, is meant to be a metaphorical description, or God has a really big basket.
===="Four Corners"====
* "And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners [north, south, east and west] of the earth." 
* "And after these things I saw four angels standing on four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree."
As with the Daniel quote, modern Jews and Christians, who have been educated by Science, don't take this literally; to them the events described in Revelation are a series of visions, rather than an accurate description of the world (which would indicate that you shouldn't take the Holy Bible literally). Another interpretation of this verse is that four corners of the earth don't refer to literal four corners but to cardinal directions, which is further supported by the description of the four winds which are commonly referenced by their cardinal direction. An additional consideration is that refers to the "corners of the head"; this means that either A)the authors of the Bible had no problem with using the word "corners" non-literally while discussing round things (which would give the absurd implication that they used idioms and figurative speech just like everyone else ever), or B) The Ancient Israelites had heads like Minecraft Characters (in spite of all fossil evidence to the cont-- Oh wait...). Take for example the modern idiom "The Ends of the Earth." If Isaiah or Revelation had been written today, then this would be the phrase used, and then thousands of years later fundies would take this as proof that the earth is shaped like a string or rope.
Even ignoring all the above rebuttals and debate amongst Christians about what the Bible "really" says, there's still the issue that if we are indeed meant to read the Bible this hyper-literally, then that would imply that when Jesus said we were to be "like doves," that he meant we were to grow feathers, eat mostly seed and fruit, regurgitate crop milk, and make mostly cooing noises.
The problem, of course, is that the very people who insist the Earth is flat because of (their) literal interpretation of the Bible, when pressed on the above points, retreat to a non-literal interpretation of those points, thereby undermining their whole argument that the Earth is flat because the Bible literally says it is. Essentially, they can pick and choose what parts of the Bible are hyper literal or not.
==Islamic flat Earth apologetics==
Some Islamic fundamentalists possibly believe the earth is flat, using a literal interpretation of several Qur'an verses. In fact, medieval Muslim scholars, like Christians of the same era, readily accepted Greco-Roman astronomy and used a Ptolemaic geocentric model of the universe with a spherical Earth.Ragep, F. Jamil: "Astronomy", in: Krämer, Gudrun (ed.) et al.: Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, Brill 2010."Measuring the Earth, Classical and Arabic". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2021-02-25. This would make modern Islamic flat Earth apologetics a step backwards. In 1966 the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik is rumored to have declared "The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment." However historians such as Robert Lacey believe that this quote was misinterpreted (and that Ibn Baaz was actually asserting that the Earth doesn't orbit around the Sun — but not that the earth was flat).
Mohammed Yusuf, founder of terrorist group Boko Haram, stated that the Theory of Evolution as well as spherical Earth teachings should be rejected because they are against Islam.Nigeria's 'Taliban' enigma In a 2007 TV debate, an Iraqi Astronomer, Fadil Al-Sa'd, tried hard to push the ideas that the earth is flat and Qur'anic verses also support that the Sun (also flat) is much smaller than Earth and revolves around it.Iraqi astronomer goes on TV to explain why Earth is flat
As in all cases of proof-via-scripture, it's just a question of making flat earthery fit by cherry picking your preferred translation so it fits your pre-existing beliefs.
===Appeals to the Qur'an===
:And (remember) the Day We shall cause the mountains to pass away (like clouds of dust), and you will see the earth as a levelled plain, and we shall gather them all together so as to leave not one of them behind.
The Muhsin Khan and Shakir translation seem to use "levelled plain"; other translations, apart from Yusuf Ali, which says "level stretch" rather than "levelled plain", which clearly suggests that God is f@#king punching mountains flat like the badass he is the Earth is a disc.
:Who has made earth for you like a bed (spread out); and has opened roads (ways and paths etc.) for you therein; and has sent down water (rain) from the sky. And We have brought forth with it various kinds of vegetation.
Translations again disagree on this. Like a "carpet" and like a "cradle" are also popular.
:Who has made for you the earth like a bed, and has made for you roads therein, in order that you may find your way.
Other translations of this "like a bed" indicate that it's metaphorical, with "resting place" being the most popular use. The Dr. Ghali translation still uses "cradle" in place of bed.
;
:Till, when (such a one) comes to Us, he says [to his Qarîn (Satan / devil companion)] "Would that between me and you were the distance of the two easts (or the east and west)" a worst (type of) companion (indeed)!
One presumes that this is a tacit admission that there is an absolute point marked "east" and a point marked "west" which isn't possible on a globe because it wraps around. It's not entirely possible on a flat Earth, either as there is no fixed reference. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, set on a flat disc, they use radial co-ordinates of "hubward" (meaning toward the centre) "rimward" (towards the outside) and "turnwise" and "widdershins" for clockwise and counterclockwise respectively. Analogous with east and west on a globe, there are no fixed points on this reference frame.
:Have We not made the earth as a bed, 
Only Muhsin Khan says "bed". The rest are "expanse" or variations of it. Dr Ghali continues with "cradle". One has to ask, if someone walked up to you and said that the Earth is like a bed, wouldn't one usually think they meant it was a small, warm, and comfortable thing you sleep in and which a parent lovingly prepares for their child? "Flat" is usually quite far down the list of words associated with beds, and indeed if one wanted to describe something as flat, they usually pick something much closer to two-dimensional, such as parchment.
:And after that He spread the earth;
Ironically, the flat earthers would have been better off with Dr Ghali here, as he is less ambiguous about it: "And the earth, after that He flattened it (for life)."
==The irony strikes back==
===Faking photos===
Some flat earthers, who dismiss all photographs of space as fake ― without giving any criteria for what would constitute a genuine one, other than incredulity ― have been known to use deceptive means for making their case. Essentially, they have done the very same thing that they accuse others of doing. The image at the right is among the first that one finds upon searching for “flat earth” in Google Images.
Convincing, right? Not so fast. The alleged photo cannot be found in the NASA archives, because it was done by YouTube user Danny Wilten. It just showed how the Martian landscapes captured by spatial probes could be photoshopped from one taken in Ireland, not that such a thing actually had taken place.NASA Hoax: Mars Rovers Discovered Staged at Devon Island, Canada (Video). robscholtemuseum.nl, 26 August 2016. To date, no photo of Mars has been shown to correspond to one taken on Earth,Images Show Mars Rover Photos Shot on Earth? No, Here’s Proof. True Strange Library website, 23 August 2017. which would be the relevant proof. But it also raises the question, what exactly do these space deniers expect to see on other worlds? Do they expect other rocky planets to be radically different from barren places on Earth? But more importantly, if these photos are so evidently fake, why bother lying? And even if they are fake, it doesn't necessarily mean that the earth is flat. Absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence.
===Using spherical Earth mathematics===
In his video "Flat Earth Dave's App Massive Security Breach" Michael Toon revealed he had been sent a version of Flat Earth Dave's app Flat Earth Sun & Moon Clock. The app's friend finder feature was found to determine distance of friends by using the which "determines the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes." This proves Flat Earth Dave is fully aware of the Earth being a globe. The decompiled source code also revealed a plethora of security issues that affected all of its 203,793 users.Micahel Toon (Oct. 15, 2024). "Flat Earth Dave's App Massive Security Breach". Via YouTube. These issues were also analyzed my Dave McKeegan two weeks later.McKeegan, Dave (Oct. 31, 2024). "Exposing Flat Earth Dave's Sales Pitch". Via YouTube. McKeegan showed source code from the app that uses the Earth's as one of its constants.
Another example of flatties using spherical Earth mathematics is flat earther Shane St Pierre's model, which basically an outright plagiarized copy-paste of Walter Bislins' Flat Earth Dome Model, both code and text. Flat Earth debunker JB Aerospace has not only shown in Shane's plagiarized code uses heliocentric parameters such as "RadiusEarth: 6371.0, // km" and "DistSun: 149600000.0, // km" but JPL ephmerides, which are NASA's calculations of the orbits of celestial objects based on observations that flat Earthers reject (such us spacecrafts observations), and physical models which flat Earthers also reject (like Newtonian physics). Walter not only noticed and called out Shane for doing a "flat Earth James Somerton" but he updated his simulator by adding those previous heliocentric parameters as variables, which if it were changed then "the App fails and makes wrong predictions", like with the Final Experiment for example. (See: Flat Earth Dome Model only works Based on the Heliocentric Model).
===Insecurity for you, insecurity for me===
In his Feb. 7, 2025 follow-up videoToon, Michael (Feb. 7, 2025). "Scam App Leaks All Users Data: 90 Day Disclosure". Via YouTube. Michael Toon revealed a security researcher had tried to report the app's vulnerabilities to Weiss, but the support email Weiss had given Google did not exist. Toon also showed the app claims to collect no data at all, but it clearly did collect PII. It thus violates both Google's ToS, and GDPR, especially as the server is hosted in Finland. Weiss misrepresented the publicly accessible data as "hacker who had gotten into the API, and he claimed all leaked data was publicly shared with other users" except the password. Weiss claimed they had changed everyone's passwords and notified users about the issue. Weiss called the whole thing a "nothing burger by anti-flat earth trolls". Instead of looking into mirror about his failure to deploy any, let alone Weiss blamed users, who might have re-used the password in other services. 
Next, Toon showed the application included the user's location inside every uploaded packet, even if the user did not opt-in to the app's friend finder feature, and that this information is tied to the user's name and email without their consent. He showed an e-mail by Weiss where he blamed globe earth proponent "trolls" for the data breach. Weiss claimed to have "enlisted an A-Team that had fixed the security problems, and prevented the use of the service's API. When Toon invited Weiss to join a live stream event to defend his app, Weiss responded with a cease and desist notice which basically threatened Toon with a SLAPP lawsuit. The demands were to "Cease and desist from making or promoting false statements regarding the breach", and "retract any prior statements that falsely suggest more than 100 users were compromised."
According to Toon, the following day (on Oct. 17, 2024) Weiss received complaint on X from user who had received same reset password over email. This is wrong on so many levels. The user is never supposed to receive a password over email. They should be sent a link with a rapidly expiring token that allows changing the password. As Toon commented to the user, it was only possible if the server still stored the passwords in plaintext, i.e. without any protection. Weiss later sent a new message to his users telling them their passwords were changed, but they could continue the current app session without logging back in with the new password. Toon then revealed the reason the app could do that, was the app doesn't perform password verification even upon new connections that lacks the session token. Instead, merely spoofing the user_id or the device_id of a user, was enough to login to someone else's account, read their messages, or impersonate them in the conversations. Furthermore, both the user_id and the device_id were available via the public API meaning what the server accepted as a password, was available on the server even if passwords were hashed. Another massive issue Toon highlighted, was the app's location accuracy was so high it allowed determining many users' home addresses. Weiss' "mitigation" strategy to these issues was obfuscation: he only changed the API domain name. He also put the service behind Cloudflare, which only protects from DoS attacks — a non-issue.
Finally, to highlight the absolutely batshit crazy level of lack of security, Weiss' included his personal $DOME shit-coin PRIVATE KEY in the source code of the application, that he shipped to his 200,000+ users.
On Feb. 6, 2025, after the industry-standard 90 day notice period, Toon and his team of security professionals published their findings on GitHub.
For now, all the vulnerabilities remained unfixed.
===Antisemitism===
Flat earthers have often complained that NASA had ex-Nazi collaborators working for them, such as . This was indeed true (see ) but ultimately this is a poor reductio ad Hitlerum argument in the end: "Why should I trust a space agency on its topics of expertise, if it also has antisemites in it?"Call us when NASA starts taking a position favorable to Deutsche Physik, then we'll hear you out on this one. Fortunately, almost all of those scientists are dead or retired now, so that worry is unsubstantiated. The irony is that, bizarrely, many popular flat earthers have spread some kind of antisemitic conspiracies themselves. Even Answers in Genesis (in an astounding stopped clock moment) noticed this. So if they were really worried about Nazism, they could excise the ones in their cult community.It seems that for many flat Earthers the problem with nazis is that they worked for NASA rather than they are nazis. Here are some examples:
* Edward Hendrie, who in his book The Greatest Lie on Earth: Proof That Our World Is Not a Moving Globe constantly blames Jews, "communists" and "Zionists" for everything, who "control the mass media, which they use to propagandize the people into pushing the politicians into doing their bidding against God and his anointed" (he may as well have titled his book Mein Kampf 2.0). Hendrie has also written two entire books accusing jews of replacing "God's commands with Satan's Babylonian dogma" by founding communists and rising Hitler into power (we kid you not) and ordering 9/11... He is an antivaxxer too.
* Yoga instructor Eric Dubay's infamous YouTube video 200 Proofs Earth Is Not a Spinning Ball mentions The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his 198th "proof",Rebuttals to Eric Dubay’s "200 Proofs Earth is not a Spinning Ball" FlatEarth.we. features literal "" propaganda posters and mentions the antisemitic book "Freemasonery and Judaism" of . He is also a Holocaust denier Why the Holocaust denial (July 8, 2018) Eric Dubay. who claims "Jewish-controlled mainstream media" has "painted an evil picture of Hitler" and wrote two raps about it (which it isn't a lot but it's weird he did it twice, right?):
* In Joe Rogan's podcast, the flat earther Eddie Bravo hints that there's a worldwide Jewish "globalist" conspiracy.
* TV personality and social media influencer expressed her belief in flat Earth and antisemitism many,Tila Tequila, Jew(?), Converts to Sexy Hitler Tablet Magazine. December 9, 2013. many, MANY, times.
* The Argentinian New World Order, 9/11 truther, flat earther conspiracy theorist Iru Landucci cited the (well-known antisemitic hoax) book "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in one of his conferences.
* Just had my main TikTok with all of my videos banned indefinitely. I’d like to note I was in good standing and had 0 violations. by @Kaleb5D (7:07 PM · Nov 28, 2023) Twitter (archived from 4 Dec 2023 02:54:07 UTC). Flat Earth internet influencer "Kaleb.fe" has been called out in TikTok for sharing antisemitic content. During the 2023 Israel–Hamas war Kaleb doubled down on the now antisemitic-friendly social media, owned by anti-flat Earth but antisemitic sympathizer Elon Musk, formerly known as Twitter. He stated to "wake up my fellow brothers and sisters to flat earth, after I will wake them up to the evil that is Jewry"First I will wake up my fellow brothers and sisters to flat earth, after I will wake them up to the evil that is Jewry. This religious sect literally admits that if we understood what they taught about anyone outside their religion that we would openly kill them. It’s time for us to study what they teach about those who are outside the confines of their religious teachings. Any person with a soul that reads the Talmud should publicly support antisemitism, in my opinion it is our duty to not only support antisemitism but to normalize it. by @Kaleb5D (12:40 PM · Dec 2, 2023) Twitter (archived from 4 Dec 2023 02:59:22 UTC).Sure bud. You wanna try and defend Jewry after seeing this? Be my guest. by @Kaleb5D (9:51 AM · Dec 2, 2023) Twitter (archived from 4 Dec 2023 03:03:25 UTC). by quoting Hitler and sharing BitChute's neonazi great replacement shitty documentary Europa: The Last Battle.Repost to trigger jew sympathizers. If you respect me and what I’ve done as far as exposing truth, I demand you sit and watch “Europa the last battle”. Go to http://Odysee.com and search for the documentary, and you will not only understand why I hold antisemitic views, but I guarantee you will stand in my corner of anti Jewry. by Kaleb5D (1:36 AM · Dec 3, 2023) Twitter (archived from 4 Dec 2023 03:06:07 UTC).
* Whoever this guy is.
 
In some way, this is unsurprising too, since a flat Earth would require some kind of New World Order conspiracy theory. They often land not far away from the oldest grand conspiracy in the book: the International Jewish / . After all, if a spherical Earth is fake, what else is fake? Maybe the Holocaust? Am I right B.o.B.?
==Common counterarguments that do not refute flat earther claims==
Just because the thing you're trying to prove happens to be correct doesn't necessarily mean that the "proof" you're trying to use is valid. As such, some of the arguments people use against flatheads have almost as little thought put into them as the ones the flatheads themselves use. Stay away from these arguments. Inverse stopped clocks will be handed out at the ticket booth.
===The shadow the Earth casts on the Moon is round!===
This one is more nuanced than it first appears, prohibitively so. Ordinary moon phases are caused by the Sun shining directly upon the lunar sphere from various angles: we see its horizon swivel around. Aristotle observed that during eclipses a bit of Earth gets in the way and casts a shadow on the moon that is always curved to some extent, from our perspective on Earth.
On the other hand, for a coin held in front of a flashlight (flat Earth with Sun below, moon above): oblique lighting squashes that shadow more severely before warping further onto the same spherical moon.
Contrasting eccentricities to characterize fractions of Earth's silhouette isn't worth it. Much less entertaining the flat model where an always-above Sun emits upwardly-curved light across the sky at the moon.
===Eratosthenes's shadows proved a round earth!===
Eratosthenes's experiment assumed a Sun sufficiently large and distant that its rays are near-parallel when they reach earth. Guess what happens when you swap that for a small and near sun?
===But the moon landing!===
*cough*
===Gravity would pull a disk that big into a spherical shape!===
If someone is dumb enough to deny a fact as basic and demonstrable as the shape of the Earth, then do you really think they're going to accept a concept as advanced as an intangible cosmic force that even scientists don't fully understand yet? People knew that things fell long before Newton, and those who thought to ask why came up with their own explanations. As it is, the most popular flathead explanation (that actually makes sense anyway) for spilled milk not hovering midair is that the earth is constantly accelerating upward at 9.8m/s^2.
===Proof by humor===
==Reverse Flat Earth conspiracy theory==
Another crank belief that is gaining just as much, if not more, momentum in the tubes as the flat Earth itself is its mirror image conspiracy: the Reverse Flat Earth Conspiracy Theory (lame title, but we'll think of something else later). As you may have guessed, the idea here is that the flat Earth theory isn't merely false, it's actually a fake conspiracy that was made up by the powers that be to make "genuine" truth seekers look bad.In 2017, let's put the flat Earth theory to bed Unsurprisingly, however, said clowns who make this unfounded claim often believe in other sorts of crankery that are almost as moronic as the flat Earth itself. Actually, if you haven't guessed, this is the whole point. The point is to knock down the flat Earth as "obviously" wrong to give their own form of crankery credibility. At least one conspiracy loon who rejects the flat Earth even says space itself is a hoax!44 | 'Super Earth' Discovered, 14 Light-Years Away (Fitting Day for Bullshit Space News)
In short: no, you do not get any bonus points for rejecting the flat Earth if you regurgitate other sorts of crankery and conspiracy bullshit. Looking cute like the kitten near the dinner table doesn't cut it, so don't try it.
==Helping Flerfs==
As with all grifts with a cult-like structure, there are two parties. Those making the T-shirts, and those buying them. The grifters selling the T-shirts can not be convinced to stop. Like Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." The grifters lack the skill set, job experience, and connections to maintain their current lavish lifestyle in honest jobs. They would also be giving up their They've already lost the only thing they stood to lose: their reputation. Thus, they have zero incentive to look for something better out there.
Similarly, the marks, almost never wish to learn the truth. What is actually happening is something comparable to where the flerf is actively avoiding their mental health issues, difficult life situation, or dissatisfaction in life, by escaping into a fantasy world where they are the protagonist fighting "the real powers that be". In this case, according to flerfs, the ones that have hidden free energy the Christian God, spirituality, scientific knowledge, and easy access to hidden natural resources that any average Joe can just pick like dandelions. Or not.To any flerf reading this thinking all of this is crazy: Try taking 30 days off the flat Earth world completely, and be alone with your thoughts about the state of your life and mental health. When you realize how uncomfortable you are, realize it proves the point: Flat earth is an escape and an excuse to procrastinate fixing all the things actually wrong with your life.
The cult group has usually long since replaced any real friends and family, and led to loss of job and the place in the normal society. With nothing to go back to, majority of the flerfs would rather die, than accept their entire identity is based on a lie, and return to their void of objective reality. Thus, the marks are almost never available to be convinced. Especially via internet feuds. This is evident from when flerfs are asked "What would convince you that you're wrong?", their most common answer is "Nothing". This shows their belief is unfalsifiable both from the viewpoint of arguments (impossible requests and endless goal post shifting), and from the viewpoint of faith ("Flat Earth is Gods truth, and I choose to believe, and refuse the overwhelming counter-evidence"). Scammers have known since the late 19th century, that once the mark sees the scam as something that's going to make them better off, they can not be convinced by knockers (=debunkers). They refer to this state of mind the mark has, as the fever.
As the flat earther Mark Sargent said, "flat earth is the last conspiracy people will believe". This has some truth to it, in that were it true, everyone would have to be in on it against the flat earthers. Flat earth is also the boundary between "harmless" crankery, and political radicalization: For many, the next step was QAnon.Olson, Dan (Sept. 11, 2020). "In Search of Flat Earth". Via YouTube. There are no woke flat earthers, and dedicating resources to help flerfs sends an awful message to every not-awful person that could use the help.
Flerf marks are the symptom of a failed education, social work, and mental healthcare systems, and thus at the root, the only solution starts with corrective public spending policy.
==See also==
==Further reading==
===Rebuttals of flat earth conspiracies=== 
*The Globe: How the Earth Became Round, James Hannam (Reaktion books, 2023) ISBN 9781789147582
*Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything, Kelly Weill (2022, Algonquin Books) ISBN 9781643752198
*How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason, Lee McIntyre (2022, MIT Press) ISBN 9780262545051
*Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas about Our Planet, Donald R. Prothero and Michael Shermer (2020, Red Lightning) ISBN 978-1684350612
*The Earth Is Not Flat, Gordon S. Brooks (2016, Createspace) ‎ISBN 978-1530207923
*Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, Christine Garwood (2008, Thomas Dunne books) ‎ISBN 978-0312382087
*Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Burton Russell (1997) ISBN 978-0-275-95904-3
===Scientific papers against a flat earth===
Yes. They do exist... Real scientist did in their free time what flat earthers should have done in the first place: making predictions with their models. (Spoilers: they all fail).
*
*
*
*
*
==External links==
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Anti-intellectualism
Category:Antisemitism
Category:Conspiracy theories
Category:Denialism
Category:Silly "Earth" theories
 
Category:Fundamentalism
Category:Pseudoscience
Category:Pseudoastronomy
Category:Pseudohistory
Category:QAnon
Category:Unified conspiracy theory
Category:Creationism