It has occurred to me today that when a ship sails off toward the horizon, it doesn't just get smaller and smaller until it's not visible anymore. Have you ever noticed the hull seems to sink below the horizon first, then the mast. When ships return from sea, the sequence is reversed: First the mast, then the hull, seem to rise over the horizon. The ship-and-horizon observation is so self-evident but Flat-~Brainers~
Earthers assume WRONGLY that the sequential disappearance is simply an illusion brought on by "perspective". This "debunking" doesn't make much sense, as there's nothing about "perspective" that should make the bottom of an object disappear before the top. If you'd like to prove to yourself that perspective isn't the reason for boats disappearing hull-first and returning mast-first, bring a telescope or binoculars on your trip to the harbor. Even with vision enhancement, the ship will still dip below the curve of the Earth.
And then there's THIS little inconvenient tid-bit: Aristotle figured out this one in 350 B.C., and as far as I have ever been able to tell, nothing's changed. Different constellations are visible from different latitudes. I can give 2 great examples are the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross. The Big Dipper is always visible at latitudes of 41 degrees North or higher. Below 25 degrees South, you can't see it at all. And in northern Australia, just north of that latitude, the Big Dipper just barely squeaks above the horizon. To make Flat-Earthers sweat their little derrieres off even worse, in the Southern Hemisphere, there's the Southern Cross, a bright four-star arrangement. That constellation isn't visible until you travel as far south as the Florida Keys in the Northern Hemisphere. These different stellar views make sense if you imagine the Earth as a globe, so that looking "up" really means looking toward a different sliver of space from the Southern or Northern hemisphere.
Oh and if we're still on Aristotle, he wrote (and we still have the text) during lunar eclipses, the Earth's shadow on the face of the sun is curved. I have repeatedly shown this to Alpha. Since this curved shape exists during all lunar eclipses, despite the fact that Earth is rotating, Aristotle correctly intuited from this curved shadow that the Earth is curvy all around — in other words, a sphere. For that matter, solar eclipses also prove the idea that the planets, moons and stars are a bunch of roundish objects orbiting each other. If the Earth is a disk and the stars and planets a bunch of small, nearby objects hovering in a dome above the surface, as many flat-Earthers believe, the total solar eclipse that crossed North America in August 2017 becomes very difficult to explain. Verrrrrrrrrrrrry difficult.
Aaaaaaaaaand there's this: the curvature of the Earth limits our sight to about 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) … unless you climb up a tall tree, building or mountain and get yourself a perspective from higher up. You can see farther if you go higher. If the Earth was flat, you'd be able to see the same distance no matter your elevation. Think about it: Your eye can detect a bright object, like the Andromeda galaxy, from 2.6 million light-years away. Seeing the lights of, say, Miami from New York City (a distance of a mere 1,094 miles or 1,760 kilometers) on a clear evening should be child's play.
But it's not.
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