In Zetetic astronomy, the perception that Earth is flat leads to the deduction that it must actually be flat; the antimoon, NASA conspiracy and all the rest are just rationalizations for how that might work in practice. yoongi wearing from a collection that criticised our new age of spreading conspiracy like virus,, then mentioning how their authentic words were twisted for an online phenomena with zinger words like “old, stop group activities” by media,, there are dots that connect there

Karen Douglas is professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the U.K., specializing in the psychology of conspiracy theories. Karen’s research regularly features in the media, and she gives public talks. She is a founding member of an international network of conspiracy theory scholars. And when Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492, the question wasn't "Would he fall off the edge of the world?"—educated people knew the Earth was round—but rather, how long a westward voyage from Europe to Asia would take, and whether any new continents might be found along the way. During the Age of Exploration, European sailors noticed that, as they sailed south, "new" constellations came into view—stars that could never be seen from their home latitudes. If the world were flat, the same constellations would be visible from everywhere on the Earth's surface.The ancient Greeks figured out that Earth was a sphere 2300 years ago by observing the planet's curved shadow during a lunar eclipse, when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon. Some flat-Earth believers claim the world is shaped like a disk, perhaps with a wall of ice along the outer rim. (Why no one has ever seen this supposed wall, let alone crashed into it, remains unexplained.) Wouldn't a disk-shaped Earth also cast a round shadow? Well, it would depend on the orientation of the disk. If sunlight just happened to hit the disk face-on, it would have a round shadow. But if light hit the disk edge-on, the shadow would be a thin, straight line. And if the light fell at an oblique angle, the shadow would be a football–shaped ellipse. We know the Earth is spinning, so it can't present one side toward the Sun time after time. What we observe during lunar eclipses is that the planet's shadow is always round, so its shape has to be spherical. But you don't need a ship to verify the Earth's shape. When the Sun is rising in, say, Moscow, it's setting in Los Angeles; when it's the middle of the night in New Delhi, the Sun is shining high in the sky in Chicago. These differences occur because the globe is constantly spinning, completing one revolution per day. If the Earth were flat, it would be daytime everywhere at once, followed by nighttime everywhere at once. rod said:Helio, in your post #7, I know some flat earth folks. Conspiracy can play a role but for many, flat earth is empirical too. I have studied flat earth videos on measuring the distance to the Moon using telescopes, angles obtained, and plane trigonometry vs. spherical trigonometry. FE folks are correct like the Flat Earth Society. The Moon will always be much closer to the flat disk earth using plane trigonometry. At most the Moon is about 3400 miles away and about 0.5 degrees angular size, so much smaller in size too. I don't know the trig approach they use, nor care to spend time on it, but the parallax would be 75x greater for a 3400 mile distance than actual. Two telescopes relatively close together could see this. Only one falsification is needed to debunk their model, but hundreds exist. Finding one element to be correct and hundreds false is not a scientific model, even if one element is found. However, I stand by what I said about QM philosophy interpretation of nature. Applying to the macro universe leads to no objective reality and the space.com report does suggest this to me.If you remove the teeth from a dog then it won't bite. Redefining objectivity changes things. Objectivity is simply repeating tests by many others and agreeing on the results. And it helps to remember that not agreeing on results for clearly understood reasons, is what scientists look forward to, unlike many philosophies and religions. You can learn more about the first photographs that clearly showed Earth's curvature in this NASA story. This explainer from Arizona State University lays out clearly and concisely the plentiful evidence for our planet's spherical shape. (Nearly spherical, rather: Earth's rotation causes it to be slightly squashed at the poles and swollen at the equator, a shape known as an oblate spheroid.) And this piece by fivethirtyeight.com explains why people believe in conspiracy theories such as the flat-Earth idea. Bibliography

People who believe that Earth is flat aren't coming to that conclusion from the same types of observations. Instead, they believe that we are being misled and lied to, that scientists (including me) want you to believe that Earth is round, despite its flatness. Dean Burnett covers the neurological mechanisms leading to conspiracy theories and more in his debut book The Idiot Brain,Eric Oliver is a professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on American politics, public opinion, political psychology, local politics, racial attitudes and self knowledge. He has published a number of books, the most recent of which was Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (The University of Chicago Press, 2018). He has also authored numerous articles in journals. Not every celestial body is a sphere, but round objects are common in the universe: In addition to Earth and all other known large planets, stars and bigger moons are also ball-shaped. These objects, and billions of others, have the same shape because of gravity, which pulls everything toward everything else. All of that pulling makes an object as compact as it can be, and nothing is more compact than a sphere. Say, for example, you have a sphere of modeling clay that is exactly 10 inches in diameter. No part of the mass is more than 5 inches from the center. That's not the case with any other shape—some part of the material will be more than 5 inches from the center of the mass. A sphere is the smallest option. I don't think this discussion is really about the actual evidence or the scientific process, however. Different stars are visible from different parts of Earth, in two very peculiar ways. First, there is the division between the northern and southern hemispheres. So, you can see Polaris, the star nearly directly above Earth's north geographic pole, quite easily in northern latitudes. As objects recede from you, they begin to look smaller and slowly disappear in a very unique way: first their bottoms become hidden, and then their tops. If you've ever watched a ship on the horizon, you've seen this for yourself. Similarly, from a great distance, the tops of tall objects like mountains are visible well before their bases.

On July 30, 2021, Shenzhou 12 astronaut Tang Hongbo photographed the spectacular scenery of thousands of lights in North Africa, clearly showing the curvature of Earth. (Image credit: Tang Hongbo/China Manned Space Engineering Office) By claiming that Earth is flat, people are really expressing a deep distrust of scientists and science itself. Earth's shadow blankets the moon during a lunar eclipse on May 16, 2022 in this image taken from the International Space Station. (Image credit: NASA)And Earth's curvature is clearly apparent from high altitudes, as Capt. Albert Stevensof the U.S. Army Air Corps showed in the 1930s. In December 1930, for example, Stevens snapped a photo looking westward while flying at an altitude of 21,000 feet (6,400 meters) above Villa Mercedes, Argentina. For those who might not know, a “flat earther” refers to people who believe in the conspiracy theory that planet earth is flat, not spherical. But what could lead someone to believe that Suga was a part of such an absurd belief? To put it bluntly, we know more about the curvature of Earth than almost any other topic in the realm of physical science. There are so many experiments, observations and demonstrations that have, time and time again, revealed the curve of the Earth. When you follow this train of logic, it becomes clear that the only feasible conclusion is that Earth is indeed flat. Flatter than anyone has ever expected. ARMYs feel that Suga chose the t-shirt for its satirical punch, which ended up creating a full-circle moment after BTS took a jab at their words being twisted by the media during the concert. Some also feel that the shirt ended up being complimentary to the controversial event that the concert itself had become over the past few months.

For instance, what’s the tallest supposed mountain on Earth? Everest. Except it isn’t. The name is a giveaway; it’s clearly a morphing of “never rest”, because if you wanted to go to the biggest mountain you’d literally never rest, because it isn’t actually there. What about all those people who have climbed it, you say? Well, consider all the people who have died supposedly doing so. How do you die climbing something that isn’t there? You can’t. They were obviously killed to protect the conspiracy, whereas those who “survived” were willing to play ball. The Andes Mountains, 287 miles [462 kilometers] away, and although taller than the plane's altitude, lay below the sensible horizon, marked by the white horizontal line in the photograph," NASA officials wrote in a description of the flight. "The Earth's curvature explains this phenomenon, as described in the diagram accompanying the photograph. The Earth's curvature is also visible laterally in the photograph, although the effect is subtle as the image encompasses only 1/360 of the Earth's circumference." The ancient Greeks also knew Earth's size, which they determined using the Earth's shape. In the 2nd century BCE, a thinker named Eratosthenes read that on a certain day, the people of Syene, in southern Egypt, reported seeing the Sun directly overhead at noon. But in Alexandria, in northern Egypt, on that same day at the same time, Eratosthenes had observed the Sun being several degrees away from overhead. If the Earth were flat, that would be impossible: The Sun would have to be the same height in the sky for observers everywhere, at each moment in time. By measuring the size of this angle, and knowing the distance between the two cities, Eratosthenes was able to calculate the Earth's diameter, coming up with a value within about 15 percent of the modern figure. Those details make the flat-earthers' theory so elaborately absurd it sounds like a joke, but many of its supporters genuinely consider it a more plausible model of astronomy than the one found in textbooks. In short, they aren't kidding.

Earth is not flat, but it's not perfectly round either

And in November 1935, Stevens and Capt. Orvil Anderson took a photo from a balloon that lifted off from Rapid City, South Dakota and soared to a maximum altitude of 72,395 feet (22,066 m).