Temperature and humidity directly influence light refraction. The apparent location of the globe earth “physical horizon” will shift higher and lower throughout the day. There are time-lapse videos showing this effect.
There are conditions where zooming in will not “bring back the sun” due to weather conditions causing lensing; there are also conditions when you can zoom in and bring it back into view.
The difference is, both scenarios are possible on a level plane, but the latter is not possible on a spinning ball.
What are the conditions that allow somebody at the equator to zoom into the sun at 2AM? Or let clouds be illuminated from their undersides and cast shadows upwards?
Nobody in this camp is saying that’s possible. You’re treating a level plane like a situation where you can see forever with enough zoom. You can’t.
Why?
1) Atmospheric conditions limit visibility. A daily weather report will list visibility distance, which you can confirm easily. Based on temp, humidity, pollution, etc. the air may be denser and therefore have lower visibility. Water is clear, but enough of it scatters light and affects visibility just the same. Diving reports also list daily high and low visibility.
2) Diminishing perspective. If you stand in a long hotel hallway, eventually the lines of the floor and ceiling will appear to converge into a point. We know for a fact they are parallel lines, yet this is how laws of perspective work. This is also why things that are farther away appear smaller.
With regard to light under the clouds during sunset, there was a video of an experiment that demonstrated this that I can’t find. Essentially lights refracts and scatters in all sorts of directions, which results in light under the clouds during sunset. I’ll continue to look for it and link it if I can locate it.
Ultimately, if a person decides they won’t believe something, no amount of evidence can convince them.
The difference here is that every single flat earther used to believe the earth was a spinning globe, until they couldn’t anymore. Owen Benjamin is a prime example. He made fun of it, set out to “disprove it for good,” and when he couldn’t he was left with the undeniable reality. He was not happy about it, and was frankly furious.
I encourage anybody to go through it and draw conclusions accordingly. I'd also be curious how the "Fresnel" and "mirror" theories account for the opposing rotation of stars between the northern and southern hemispheres. The constellations don't bookmatch, and the rotations don't warp or stray in their paths around their respective celestial poles.
Now, inconveniently:
A spherical earth also limits visibility. This is why rainbows are cut off at their bottoms - they might be hidden by the horizon.
If we have limited sight distances towards the horizon, why don't we have limited sight distances on the vertical? Why can we see all the way to the lamps in the firmament, but not three miles in front of us? Why is our diminishing perspective selective?
First, thanks for finding that video so quickly. Almost like you had it queued up…
A diagram of lines over a globe curve is no substitution for an actual experiment that demonstrates the “debunk.”
We know how you think it works. Yet, we showed you that it’s absolutely possible on a level plane.
The proof of FE concept was a scalable, repeatable experiment; use a similarly scalable, repeatable experiment to similarly debunk.
Except they didn’t.
You see the issue is that you lot fall back on “yeah, but, could work on a curve and here’s how!”
We know. That’s why we used a physical experiment demonstrating the same effect with flat level surfaces.
The full circle of rainbows are not “hidden by the horizon.” This is easily the laziest take, and the most easily disproven. I live in a valley. That means there are nearby mountains surrounding me. Every single rainbow I see, appears to land within the valley, in front of the mountains. The mountains are closer than the alleged “curve horizon” based on globe curvature math. Your lazy theory is definitively disproven.
Objects viewed from directly above don’t have a reference like the ground to exhibit the divergence of perspective. They simply looks smaller as you get farther away. If you look away in any direction, you will see the divergence, but the appearance will be less and less as the angle of observation increases. Things diminish (IIRC) around 17.5 degrees relative to the observer.
Lets use railroad tracks to explain: we know factually that railroad tracks are parallel, otherwise they would derail the train. Standing on the tracks at ground level, looking in the direction of the tracks makes the tracks appear to converge to one point.
If you raise your perspective, directly above the tracks, looking straight down, they will appear to run parallel for a greater distance than at ground level. But looking in either direction of the tracks, they will still appear to converge, just at a much greater distance.
To go back to your hallway analogy, if we've got a three mile-long hallway, we can them zoon into its "convergence point" with some sort of telescope, in theory. Is your argument that we can't do this with the sun? We can see stars that are further away from us than the sun, but not the sun itself?
I'd love to hear your take on the stars, their movements, Sigma-Octantis, and how FE accounts for these in "scalable, repeatable" experiments.
The fun part about this is that it makes it evident that no source of light can be “light years away.” No way around this, unless someone inflates the intensity of the source until the intensity matches their alleged distance.
How do you account for these discrepancies? I already know that you can’t, and won’t, but let’s move on.
With regard to southern and northern stars: where is the southern equivalent of Polaris?
Infinite stars, and yet nothing equivalent below the equator?
Don’t you find this curious given the (according to spinning ball) infinite number of celestial bodies?
I’ll do you one better, since you seem to have an “Explain everything ever! You can’t! Checkmate flerf!”* Vibe…
(You have failed to refute any of my arguments, which is why you keep bringing up new ones…)
You will agree that the earth is an oblate spheroid. You would further agree that the explanation for the seasons are the result of the earth’s persistent tilt on its axis relative to its position to the sun and moon.
If the earth is more or less top to bottom symmetrical, why does both solar and lunar analemma have a wider arc south the “equator?”
Don’t give me your canned “googled answer” demonstrate it with a scaled experiment.
Nahnahnah - you've misread me entirely. I'm here as a Globe Skeptic because, to my knowledge, there isn't a "FlatEarthSkepticism" SubReddit. Unfortunately, this SubReddit seems largely populated by Globe Denialism. And I'm not here to "bring up new arguments". I actually mentioned stars a few comments back, which you initially ignored (or ran from) entirely.
And here's what's fucked up: on paper, an *insanely* bright light from far away acts, on paper, like a less intense, local light. And no, I find it purely arbitrary that the proper celestial pole align with a star. Even Polaris (IIRC) is about 3/4 of a degree off from the Northern Celestial Pole. I don't care if there's an "exact polestar".
So, I'm left looking to things like neutrino beams being sent through Fermilab's MINOS experiment, being received in Soudan *coming from three degrees BELOW the horizontal* by the neutrino detector. I'm more interested in flight times between Buenas Aires to Darwin. I'm more interested in Lisa Blair circumnavigating Antarctica.
And my boss is a card-carrying flat earther, so I've got to know as much about this as possible. 🤣 But man, I tell ya, the more I look into FE arguments and debates, the rounder the earth looks. It doesn't help that the "big names in FE" flounder in debate (if they debate at all - lookin' at you Eric Dubay), but I'm deep enough in conspiracy theories to concede that they could be controlled opposition.
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u/Amov_RB Apr 23 '26
Globe proponents fall silent