A man has attempted to silence Flat Earthers once and for all by explaining why the horizon can look flat while the planet is round.
Despite it having long, long been proven that our planet is of course spherical, Flat Earthers are very real.
Plenty of people do truly believe the conspiracy that Earth is flat and some are so convinced we're being lied to they've died trying to prove their point.
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Back in 2018, a man used a photo of his hometown and genius workings out to prove the planet isn’t flat, even though when you're standing on it does look flat.
Getting pretty mathematical, Greg Pagel took to American image sharing site Imgur to make his case.
Even creating a whole video to explain it on YouTube, the bloke took a snap of Lake Michigan is Manitowoc, Wisconsin, US, with Silver Creek Park’s beach in the distance on the right-hand site and the south side of Two Rivers over on the left.
With other snaps, he acknowledged how the landscape did appear flat.
However, he used Google Earth to show that the planet really is round.
So, and here’s where it gets all a bit mathy, those two points of Silver Creek Park and Two Rivers are 8.4 miles apart.
Then, with the quantity that Earth has a circumference of 25,000 miles, then 8.4 miles of that arc would equal as 0.12 degrees in angle.
Still following? Yeah, I’m just about hanging on too, but bear with it.
Pagel then shared images of how a right angle looks compared to a 45-degree and then a one-degree angle.
A pie chart then comes into play (360 degrees, of course) to show how a one degree angle looks pretty straight even when he zooms in to it.
So, this shows why a 0.12 degree angle is hardly noticeable at all – explaining why you might think a landscape looks flat in photos, as well as to the naked eye.
That’s why people might argue that the Earth is flat, just because it looks it when in fact, it is of course not.
Topics: Science, YouTube, Conspiracy Theory, Space
Jess Battison