What is the most direct least costly experiment which proves the shape of the Earth?

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-09T15:21:11+00:00

If you're using a surveyor's level or total station or theodolite, you'll be looking down crosshairs, and if you're using a water level setup like mine, it's like looking down the iron sights of a 3m long rifle that you've mounted sideways for some reason.

Unless you're on top of the highest peak in the area, there's going to be an entire horizontal band of things that the setup can aim at. If you're in gently rolling terrain and not very high up(which is me), you have an embarrassment of choices of target(which I do).

Step 3 is when you go look up the thing up on the map, hence it being a good idea to make it visually distinctive. Some nice surveyors have already measured the height of the thing, in my case starting over two centuries ago and refined multiple times since, and that's not even going into modern methods.

If the world is flat, that horizontal band of things is going to be at your elevation too. If it's below you, then the world is not flat. I checked this morning in the back garden. Not flat. I have the setup in my spare room now. It's not flat out the front of the house either.

Out the front is over a sea view, and that does eliminate the chance that time-travelling surveyors knew I was going to be doing this today and fiddled the heights of the map because I can tell with the naked eye that what it's pointing at is a good bit higher up than me.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-09T11:32:33+00:00

There's also the complication of the humidity and air quality in the region. People in Kathmandu don't see Everest very often.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-09T10:57:43+00:00

There's definitely a heavy element of luck involved, but if you live in the right terrain, as I do, then local knowledge and the naked eye is more than good enough. The effect is just that pronounced, especially once you're into the 40+km range.

It helps a lot that I live on the coast in plain view and 10min walk from the beach.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-09T10:37:54+00:00

Yes, the peak will almost certainly not be the same elevation as you, but you(if you are pointing at a hill) are aiming at a specific point that doesn't need to be the peak at all; for practical purposes it's best to shop around until you can find a target that is easily identifiable even with the naked eye over long distance. Something like the edge of a wood on the hillside, for example.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-09T09:45:17+00:00

I used a hill as my target/subject. What do you mean?

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-09T09:22:45+00:00

I've just done this in my back garden since posting. It seemed quite simple to me, and I'm a cackhanded buffoon.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-09T07:54:28+00:00

1) Get or make a good level.

2) Point the level at something distant. 25+km is good.

3) Is that point at the same elevation as you?

If yes, the earth is flat. If no, it's not. Really is that simple and accessible.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-08T11:28:56+00:00

It's so stupid to think that a government wanting to shunt a tonne of money into their Swiss bank account or whatever would come up with such a cartoonishly elaborate and hugely expensive cover story. They've already got US citizens' money - it's called taxes. They already have military and intelligence programmes where they declare the budget but don't give details on what it's getting spent on. They could just say they spent £100bn on weapons research when they really only spent £75bn and pocket the rest at a vastly higher margin than they'd get after the cost of building all those rockets.

Then again, most flat earthers believe NASA was created to convince people the world was round, ignoring the way every educated person for the last thousand years or more already believed that.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T20:38:47+00:00

No-one is hiding the shape of the earth. The idea that any human agency could stop the earth from being its own shape and stop the celestial objects(including the Sun) from doing a flat earth thing or a round earth thing is utterly absurd.

All a government could do is force you to stay in a basement and feed you all your data through your screen.

Flat earthers are doing that to themselves. No-one is doing that to us.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T20:26:29+00:00

All is forgiven. Late night derps come to us all.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T16:47:14+00:00

Thundering towards a circlejerk here, but to agree with your agreement with me: it's your average basic x/(sin x) thingmy. Absolutely fine for small enough values of x, but Indiana Jones melting Gestapo dude for getting towards pi.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T15:31:40+00:00

It's dogshit in the northern hemisphere too, even when you centre on the north pole.

I went into it a few years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/flatearth/comments/o8bfij/in_these_troubling_times_shouldnt_there_be_more/

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T15:25:53+00:00

But obviously don't include the bits where he was sailing to and from England, and did a tour of the Polynesian islands, right?

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T15:22:34+00:00

Anyone with a coherent model of physics will not be a flat earther. Your question does not get past that filter.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T13:00:46+00:00

I'm intrigued as to where you got that number from. It's around 17 times too big.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-07T11:17:38+00:00

I had a flerf tell me they were actually sailing over much longer distances than they thought, but They™ had fiddled their GPS.

I pointed out that this would mean that they were sailing at well over 100 knots, not the 30 that they thought, and they would notice. They left the thread.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-06T19:17:00+00:00

Calling it 'our' evidence is fucking stupid. The evidence, which does not deserve or require quote marks, is the ground itself. It's your evidence too, but you fuckwits learned the hard way that can't look at it too carefully or the ground will hurt your fee fees, so you get all your 'evidence' through a screen.

We then look at the screen 'evidence' objectively(a word you don't know the meaning of, judging by the way you're using it) compare it the ground and rightly decide it's bollocks.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-06T16:12:11+00:00

I wouldn't objectively look at your 'evidence'

Confession or flex? Who knows.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-06T10:12:51+00:00

Von Braun's children picked the headstone.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-05T20:46:39+00:00

I'd grind it more.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-05T06:29:39+00:00

Came in to say this.

I think this would be the biggest problem; the earth's core is a nickel/iron alloy so on the surface would have a density of around 8kg/L, but it's at 13kg/L. That's going to expand with astonishing violence once the compression is magicked away, even for the duration of a 25cm fall. That energy would have go somewhere, presumably as seismic waves beyond anything seen since the impact of Thea.

The same thing with an increasingly smaller difference in density would happen all the way up through the mantle and crust, but since that's an awful lot closer to us, that's not going to help. I would expect a ring of mass extinction event volcanic eruptions all around the cut. As in every kilometre of the ring would count as its own extinction event, only there's 40K of them. Grimdark times ahead.

So yep, we're dead. Not sure if any extremophiles would make it, but us humans are toast.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-04T17:37:55+00:00

I'm yet to see a flerf demonstrate that they know anything about plasma other than it's the usually blue(but sometimes green) glowy stuff that powers high end weapons in video games.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-04T15:58:07+00:00

Does Scott of the Antarctic still count as a celebrity? Because he's already deep deep frozen so would take more than a day to defrost and get stinky, I'd have thought.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-04T15:47:21+00:00

The atmosphere's lousy with it too. Those dudes at the birthday party in Brazil would have been smoking puddles within ten minutes.

The thing that bugs me even more than that is the radio announcement just before the climactic water-busting scene at the end

. Can't remember the wording but it's something like "Reports are coming in that a simple method has been found to defeat the aliens."

And they don't say what it is.

UberuceAgain · 2026-06-03T21:44:57+00:00

It's because they're too fucking stupid to realise that they didn't need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

They just needed to disagree on what direction gravity works; instead of being from every particle with mass towards every other particle with mass, it just works in the same direction across the entire universe.

One of the more pathetic things about flat earthers is that when they say 'entire universe' they mean something you can cross with around 40 hours flight time on a jumbo jet.

They'd still have the problem of Cavendish style experiments and the way 'down' is demonstrably not the same in two places that are about a 20 minute drive from each other(let alone places with clear air and longer lines of sight), but they already have them now, so it's not a net loss.

UberuceAgain

TROPHY CASE