Here's an even better one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC7odtQHoPc

Given that you can produce this type of animation using only consumer-available telescopes and cameras, it's pretty hard to deny that the moon is spherical. That looks like a wobbling sphere to me.

Wonderful. Funnily enough, most flat earthers also believe the moon itself is flat. There's actually another stop-motion you can get of the moon to disprove that.

It's a not-very-well-known fact that the face of the moon kinda wobbles a bit, which allows us to see it from a very slightly different angle at different times. It wobbles enough that if you take frames from various full moons and put them together, you can see the 3d form of it in an animation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/w7otnc/ive_captured_almost_a_complete_lunar_cycle_to/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCKmZXhVvkQ

It's actually apparently pretty accessible to prove the world is round. All you need is access to a 600-ft-high view of the sea. They're not exactly EVERYWHERE but you can find it. Go and take a photo of the horizon with a normal rectilinear lens, being sure to keep the horizon as near to center-frame as you can (this is because the edges of lenses tend to have more distortion). Then, you can analyze the picture in some editor for any deviation of the horizon towards a flat line. It won't be obvious to the naked eye, but once you draw a straight line from the left of the horizon to the right, it should stand out - the middle will bulge up.

Here's a similar technique illustrated: https://mctoon.net/left-to-right-curve/

If you don't want to trust these variuos someone elses, and see it for yourself, you can do it! Or just buy a telescope and watch ships disappear past the horizon, bottom-up.

I went on a couple flat earth Discord groups and was quite unpleasantly surprised with the state of their community.

What I thought would be the case is, flat earthers were convinced that they have a better model that makes better predictions than the round earth. (I just thought they'd be wrong about those things for a variety of reasons).

What's actually the case is, most flat earthers don't have a model at all. The reason for that is simple: the ones that DO have a model have an easily falsified model. The "clever" ones have learned from that experience, and just denied having a model at all. They claim nobody knows that hte world is like, they don't have a map because nobody really knows what the continents are shaped like and arranged like.

Now normally, an agnostic position is respectable. We don't know everything, we're all ignorant of some things, so saying "I don't know" should be a respectable answer, right?

But we live in a world where you can take an air plane from just about any part of the world to just about any other part of the world. We have GPS google maps coverage of everywhere. You really expect me to believe those things are true, AND nobody knows anything about the shape and arrangement of continents?

They're not even ashamed of their lack of a model.

So instead of working on a model, they build communities where they allow "globies" to come in, but they dog pile them and then ban them on the premise of misused psychological buzzwords. They basically use these communities as funny little bullying rings, because they don't actually want to seriously investigate the shape of the planet, they just want to get revenge on the globies for their shame.

Apparently.

sure, there's no way to be certain of anything if you are very skeptical. But if you're reasonably skeptical, there could still be ways to be justifiably confident.

Recently there was an expedition to the South pole, that cost 35k per head, for flat eathers to go observe the 24 hour sun. It's called The Final Experiment.

I've devised a similar experiment that should be much cheaper than 35k. It should, in my opinion, be convincing to any honest flat earther if carried out. The plan is this:

Visit 4 destinations, 2 in the north and 2 in the south. Each hemisphere of our planet has night time vision of what's called a Celestial Pole, enough is just the part of the night sky corresponding to our axis of rotation. In the north, the celestial pole is very near to the North Star, and in the south it's very near to the Southern Cross.

So, the 4 destinations could be Canada, England, South Brazil and South Africa. Obviously they don't have to be those exact places, but they're a good example.

At each place, you set up a camera on a tripod to observe that celestial pole. You'll use that footage to create time lapses like this:

https://youtu.be/TZOg8EPJ_yk?si=Zryt1GUcldohiFpu

The reason you want 2 places in each hemisphere is to handle all possible objections. A flat earther can easily explain the celestial pole of the north. But to explain not just one, but two celestial poles in the south is actually much harder. The firmament would have to be rotating from east to west in order for the southern celestial pole to go from South Africa to Brazil - but the time lapse would show that in fact the southern celestial pole is not moving east to west, but is quite stationary.

Now of course i know this wouldn't actually convince them, but the theory crafting about it is just fun for me. This experiment would reduce the cost from 35k to something closer to 5k.

Of course, if you haven't been turned on, you wouldn't know, — unenlightened

What does any of this have to do with sexual arousal?

Yeah totally.

I came across this response to that type of experiment the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/globeskepticism/comments/1dej3ox/perspective_not_curvature/

Of course, the difference is, when you zoom in on the reddit scenario, the bottom comes back - when you zoom in on the ship in the horizon, it doesn't.

Like "scientific" skeptics about perception, also "unscientific" flat-earthers fail to distinguish between what an object may look like and its true visible shape. — jkop

Kind of like what you did when you claimed you could just see the curve

this is the image I'm thinking of

https://www.google.com/search?q=telephone+poles+over+sea+horizon+curve&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=16501dcb6f6c1178&udm=2&biw=1280&bih=559&sxsrf=ADLYWIIcaNJt_9jG3BosNMEDH2Fk0C-DlQ%3A1736530546173&ei=clqBZ52lCsaehbIPsf2l0Qc&ved=0ahUKEwidpuKy2OuKAxVGT0EAHbF-KXoQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=telephone+poles+over+sea+horizon+curve&gs_lp=EgNpbWciJnRlbGVwaG9uZSBwb2xlcyBvdmVyIHNlYSBob3Jpem9uIGN1cnZlSJIKUI0DWLoJcAF4AJABAJgBQKAB5QKqAQE2uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIAoAIAmAMAiAYBkgcAoAeOAg&sclient=img#vhid=RmI4MnBl40TscM&vssid=mosaic

Yeah this is a good one. I saw an image with something like telephone poles curving down over the horizon.

How can you be sure? The curvature might be too small to notice, say, if you only see a narrow piece of the horizon, but I'm pretty sure it's curved, also visibly if you'd look closer. — jkop

It's been calculated to be imperceptibly small. If your view of the horizon from a beach front is x "pixels" wide, so to speak, the curvature of the horizon is 0.01% of x - as in, the number of pixels the apex of the curve is above the lowest point of the curve is x times 0.0001. That's 1 pixel of rise for every 10,000 pixels of width of an image. I linked the article calculating it on the previous part of the page.

I do not believe you can actually perceive it. I know I can't - I go to the beach pretty often, I see the horizon a couple times a month, and there's no apparent curve from a vantage point of 6-8ft above sea level.

edit. link here: https://flatearth.ws/standing-on-a-beach

There are places you can look a long way, enough that the boat bottoms disappear behind the water, if not the horizon which is the hills in the distance. Maybe you can write that off as refraction in the other direction — noAxioms

They actually do write it off that way, funnily enough.

Well none of those words relate to visibly seeing the horizon curving. You could tell me, "yes, I understand that you can't visibly see the horizon curving". That would be cool.

Flat Earthers would also need to prove the Earth is flat — Philosophim

Flat earthers don't often like to prove anything. They don't even tend to make clear claims. I saw a flat earther recently claim they can triangulate the distance of the sun (because no way is it over 90million miles away) -- but one thing I've never seen a flat earther do is *actually triangulate the distance of the sun*. That's because actually making specific claims takes bravery and integrity. You're putting yourself at risk of being wrong.

Here's a write-up on why the curvature of the earth is not visible to the naked eye when looking at, say, the horizon of the sea at a beach.

https://flatearth.ws/standing-on-a-beach

There IS a slight curve, but it's proportionally so tiny that you can't discern it. The apex of the curve is only 0.01% higher -- I don't think anybody can honestly say "that curve is clear".

It's there, but you'd genuinely have to have super-human vision to perceive it.

If you watch for a few minutes, you can see the curvature of the earth perfectly clearly. — Srap Tasmaner

I watched that second video and cannot see anything like that.

No worries, at least we can agree - this is within the grasp of most people to figure out!

Most flat earthers believe that the earth is also 6000 years old. I'm not that concerned with their psychology to be honest, I'm more concerned with honest thinking peoples approaches to how they'd demonstrate it.

I recommend watching it in its entirety. It's very thorough about the whole thing and the people believing earth is flat. — Christoffer

I would love to, it looks like a really interesting video. It was linked in a very specific context though - the context was, someone claimed that the horizon is visibly curved, and I'm doubting that.

I'm 100% sure that the video is a great reply to the OP. What it ISN'T a great reply to, is the quote of the conversation it was given as a reply to, which was specifically about the apparent visibility of the curve of the horizon.

Yes it is, you can test it yourself. You can just walk the footsteps of everyone who was able to measure the curvature of earth before we had rockets that went into space. You can use telephoto lenses yourself etc — Christoffer

Judging by how you cut off my quoted post, and your subsequent response, I think you missed the part where I explicitly said that THIS question is within the realm of a normal person. I think you got mixed up in what I said there.

so he does disprove that the horizon looks visibly flat to the naked eye in that video? So... where's the time-stamp for that?

That covers the whole flat earth cultural thing — Srap Tasmaner

Ah okay, the context you quoted made it seem like there was some specific claim in the video about the (un)flatness of the horizon.

This isn't that, this video is more a general reply to the op.

that is over an hour long. I assume I don't have to watch over an hour of content to find out if the horizon of the sea visually looks flat or not. Do you have a timestamp to the part you think is relevant?

Ever heard of the saying, "Enough knowledge to be dangerous?" — Philosophim

Indeed! There's just a bit of a trap around the hole 'seeing stuff beyond the curve' question because of this. If you went in not knowing about refraction, you would think you've just proven that the earth is flat.

And if we're not relying on expert opinions, we might have to prove refraction too. I'm not sure how that proof would go.

definitely less expensive. I don't think sailing around the world is easy!

Absolutely. It's just interesting that, if the earth were the size oficially claimed, you would actually expect to see less than you do - that's something that a lot of flat earthers notice, it gives them ammo. "I can see more of chicago than I geometrically should if you were right". They're actually right about that.

Tourist rockets? Like the one jeff bezos went up in? Is there something affordable for a normal person?

The earth's curvature is visible wherever there's a visible horizon — jkop

That's not my experience. Go to the beach, look out to sea, it looks pretty flat to me. Take a photo, I'm pretty sure it's not visibly curved.

Does this look curved to you? It doesn't to me.

We can test by finding flat land and assessing when the visibility of distant objects should vanish according to predicted angles — Philosophim

The weird thing I've discovered with this is that there's actually a bit of an unexpected result here (at least, unexpected to me) -- you can actually see a little bit more than you would expect if you just considered the geometry of the globe. Have you heard of this?

https://sciencemeetsfiction.com/2020/12/22/flat-earth-challenge-follow-up-refraction/

great idea! What's your preferred method of guaranteeing you're travelling the same direction? Even a slight angle off from 'straight' could lead you in a circle on a flat earth.

It isn't compatible with determinism, I don't think — Apustimelogist

based on what?

It did occur to me that superdeterminism is possibly compatible with some indeterminism, but i couldn't find any confirmation of that online.

I'm saying it's not *ordinary* determinism. There's nothing ordinary about it. It is a TYPE of determinism, but not an ordinary one, not if you understand what superdeterminism is actually saying about the universe.

Right, so you *really* think all these scientists are talking about it like it's a unique propsoition clearly distinct from determinism, because physicists don't know what they're talking about and you know better.

I cannot roll my eyes harder.

No, superdeterminism is not normal determinism. You have failed to see the distinction, I hope no one else is fooled by that failure into thinking there isn't a distinction.

Seems like ordinary determinism to me. — ssu

It's not.

1) If Jesus did not rise from the dead, can there be a rational belief in Christianity? — BT

Something can be rational and untrue, and something can be irrational and true, in general. Rationality's goal is (often) truth, but it doesn't have direct access to the truth and is non synonymous with it. But belief in Christianity is not usually based in rationality anyway.

2) If one is not sure if Jesus actually rose from the dead, can they still have a rational belief in Christianity? — BT

Rationality has nothing to do with it. If you don't believe that happened, you're not a literal christian - you might be a different kind of christian.

As examples, the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations reject realism — Michael

I think the Copenhagen interpretation also rejects locality, no?

-edit, i guess i've always misinterpreted what the copenhagen interpretation is.

I'm pretty sure physics doesn't really have anything to say about realism, anti-realism, or idealism, but that hasn't stopped folks from trying. — Darkneos

You're right, it's not about the *philosophical* concept of realism, it's a physics concept.

In short, what quantum mechanical experiments, especially Bell's Test, give extremely strong evidence for, is that a classical physics type view of reality is incorrect. That's what "local realism" means.

In classical physics, for any given proerty you could measure, every object in existence has distinct values for that property - all the time, whether you're measuring it or not. Momentum, location, rotational velocity - everything has a distinct value for all measureable properties.

That's local realism, and *that* is what's not true, at least for the things we are generally inclined to think of as 'objects' at the fundamental level ie protons neutrons electrons.

Bell's Theorem demonstrates that you have to give up on at least one of locality or realism. In either words, either you have to choose to believe that causality can be non-local, faster than light, and contradict special relativity, OR you have to believe that measurable properties don't have singular distinct values when not being measured. Or both.

There is a third option, but... we don't talk about the third option.

I'm late to this conversation, but my take is:

The fact that the government is willing to have these public hearings tells me that the government doesn't actually have a whole lot to hide. If they had something to hide, they'd be trying much harder to hide it.

Then again, maybe that's exactly what the government wants me to think...

It's similar in a way. Apustimelogist answered but I would change a bit of his answer: rather than saying Bohmian is faster-than-light communication, I would say it's "retrocausal". I guess in practice that's indistinguishable from faster-than-light.

The similarity between Superdeterminism and Bohmian is that in both cases, the process producing the entangled particles somehow knows how the particles are going to be measured, and takes on the appropriate values (in aggregate) that Quantum Physics suggests. In Bohmian Mechanics, as I understand it, that's because the Wave Function is really real, it's just operating in a sort of retrocausal way. In superdeterminism... there is no explanation. Superdeterminism is basically saying "our experiments that prove Quantum Physics are wrong, but I can't tell you why they're wrong or how to fix the experiments. They just happen to be the exact right results to prove QM correct, but that's wrong, ignore your experiments and listen to me.".