At the risk of beating an already zombified horse, I thought I’d amuse myself by compiling answers to the most frequently asked questions (FAQ) and points refuted a thousand times (PRATT) posed by people in the Flat Earth discussion. The answers are from a pro-science layman. I have no official credentials, but I can read, and I can ask questions, and I can tell when something doesn’t hold together and (most importantly) I can explain why and how.
“FE” here can stand in for a hypothetical pro-Flat Earth interlocutor, someone who espouses some variety of Flat Earth as a working understanding of reality. Example:
FE: I have a question Me: here’s the answer FE: I don’t like that
So here goes!
You can substitute the following exchange for a lot of the specific answers here:
FE: how do you know that (blank)? Me: we’ve sent human beings to space FE: no we haven’t Me: what makes you doubt that? FE: it’s all fake Me: on what evidence? FE: This Looks Shopped Me: what about (grand level of effort required to pull this off)? FE: There’s a conspiracy
If this is you, congratulations, you now have to prove two things: that the Earth is flat, and that there is a conspiracy. If you try to say “there’s a conspiracy theory because the Earth is flat”, I will let you ride your merry-go-round of circular arguments on your own.
You’ll commonly hear Flat Earthers say something about “eight inches per mile squared” as being the accepted formula for curvature. It is not.
<aside> ⚠️ Please cite the actual use of this formula. Please cite Zetetic Astronomy’s use of it.
</aside>
If you want to find an actual calculator for Earth curve, here’s one.