Proving that the Earth is not flat is trivially easy. We can watch rockets go up on live broadcasts with onboard cameras. Landings also. The footage is often uninterrupted or nearly so. This is impossible to fake.ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Wed May 21, 2025 5:04 amTo be honest, it does feel like I am debating with people who think the world is flat. I don't know how you could persuade those people that the world is in fact round, but I'd be curious to explore the flaws and contradictions in their arguments.
How would you go about doing that exactly?
The Earth appears spherical. Unlike Holocaust revisionists, someone who calls this a fake probably is deserving of the title "denier" because they deny something that is beyond reproach. A typical explanation would be that the video is CGI, but that would be impossible to pull off in a live broadcast, with thousands of in-person witnesses, with hundreds of simultaneous recordings from different angles, and at a level of fidelity that fools every viewer with no graphical artifacts.
And this is not the only thing Flat Earthers deny. They often say they can't see the curvature of the Earth, even when taking a screengrab from a flight video where the curve is actually measurable. They deny that objects which pass over the horizon are actually travelling downward, instead chalking it up to illusion.
Maps and distances are another solid proof. If you travel continuously eastward with a compass you will eventually circumnavigate the Earth. The distance travelled is 40,000 km across the center or predictably less at high and low altitudes. If the Earth was flat the distance should only increase as you travel south, but in fact southern places like Argentina and Australia are only 12,000 km apart. All such geographic facts are consistent with a sphere. This visual calculator shows how far removed the flat earth map is from reality.
But you don't need advanced technology for proof. It's said that Eratosthenes was able to calculate the Earth's circumference around 240 BC by comparing shadows in two cities at (about) the same longitude. He got it to within 3% of the real number.
Anyone in their own neighborhood who looks at the angle of shadows or celestial objects will similarly find that the angle matches their position on the sphere.
A fourth proof is constellations. The stars that can be seen from near the north pole are different from those seen from near the south pole, indicating that they face in different directions. Not only that, they also rotate in opposite directions, as expected for the top and bottom of a sphere.
So on the whole Flat Earth is deeply irrational. However, all this is merely proving them wrong. Persuading them that they are wrong may be a separate matter. When it comes to controversial or deeply-held beliefs many people do not want their minds to be changed, and this forum obviously does not hold the secret to overcoming that. If I were to venture a guess I should think the most persuasive thing you could do is answer their questions. There is no end to the questions you could put to Flat Earthers, but I would hesitate to ask those because I think it is more likely to put them on the defensive. I can tell you what would not convince them; that is ruthless censorship and reputational destruction.
Before I come to a conclusion let's consider the similar phenomenon of people denying the Apollo Moon Landings. That theory we can say is more plausible but still trivially wrong. We know this because, again, no one has found any serious errors in the science or the math. Nor has anyone found a mistake in the thousands of hours of Apollo footage. For example we don't see a single object out of place that would suggest a studio setting. Instead we see that the astronauts and the objects around them consistently move in a way that could not be replicated at Earth's surface gravity. We also know the Moon Landings were confirmed by later orbital photographs including these below from India's space program.
- photos of Apollo 11 & 12 landing sites on Moon, taken by ISRO Chandrayaan-2 orbiter.jpg (350.63 KiB) Viewed 5403 times
The vast scale of the Apollo Program could be compared to the size of Hitler's government. One might argue that if there was a conspiracy to fake landing on the Moon, it would require many thousands of people at NASA to go along with it. But it's not only that, because the motives here are different. Whereas for the Holocaust all forces oppose Nazism and ruthlessly crack down on dissent from that consensus, for the Space Race the USSR had every motive to disprove the landings yet they never made an attempt. Even neutral countries or lone scientists or even just a guy with a telescope could have gained in reputation by taking down the world's premier superpower, if any single one of them was able to find a flaw with the Moon Landings. So this would require a form of conspiracy involving nearly every astronomy-enthusiast over the last sixty years, a very delusional belief. With that in mind, I add Moon Landing deniers to Flat Earthers for the purposes of my conclusion.
So, is Flat Earth like Holocaust revisionism? It's actually a very favorable comparison. Defenders of the Holocaust narrative would love for these two spheres of thought to be similar, but the differences couldn't be more stark:
- Unlike the spherical Earth, the Holocaust has not been recorded on video, but we do have images debunking many Holocaust stories.
- Unlike the spherical Earth, the Holocaust has not been scientifically or mathematically proven, to the extent that it could be. Instead we see that components of the history have been scientifically and mathematically disproven (chemistry, cremation, population numbers).
- Unlike the spherical Earth, the Holocaust is not something observable by anyone but instead requires dependence on contemporary witnesses.
- Unlike the spherical Earth, the Holocaust requires there to have been a conspiracy of thousands of government functionaries.
