Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - 10 Ways You Can Know That the Earth is a Sphere

Episode Date: July 3, 2021

One of the saddest things in the modern world is that with all of our technology, and with all of the information in the world at our fingertips, there are more people today who think the Earth is flat than there were 20 years ago. While most people don’t subscribe to this, thankfully, most people have never really given the idea much thought. They know the Earth is round, but they can’t really articulate why. Thankfully, I’m here to help. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the saddest things in the modern world is that with all our technology, and with all of the information on the world at our fingertips, there are more people today who think the earth is flat than there were 20 years ago. While most people don't subscribe to this, thankfully, most people have also really never given the idea much thought. They know the earth is round, but they really can't articulate why. Thankfully, I'm here to help. Learn 10 reasons how you can prove to yourself that the Earth is a sphere on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by the Travel Photography Academy. If you've listened to enough episodes of this podcast, you'll know, that I often interject places that I've visited. That's because I spent over 10 years of my life traveling around the world almost nonstop. During that time, I went from being a complete novice in photography to winning almost every major travel photography prize in North America. When I learned how to do travel photography, I did do it the hard way. It took years of time and lots of travel. That's why I created the Travel Photography Academy, so you can learn from me

in much less time, spending much less money. It's an online video course, which I shot on location in France, Spain, and the United States, and I cover everything you need to improve your travel photography. So, if you want to take your photography to the next level and get better photos on your next trip, visit travel photography academy.com or click on the link in the show notes. Let me start by saying for the permanent record that the official stance of myself and the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast is that the earth is a sphere. Well, technically it's an oblate spheroid, but you know what I'm talking about. If you believe the Earth is flat, then this is probably not the podcast for you. That being said, while almost all of you can accept

that the Earth is a sphere, there's a big difference between accepting something and knowing something. Most people have never really given much thought to the idea of knowing, really knowing, why the Earth isn't flat. Well, thankfully, I'm here to help. It turns out that there are things you can observe with your own eyes which can provide proof that the earth is in fact a big ball. Let's start with the first and most obvious one, which is time zones. If the earth was flat, then the sun would shine all over the earth at the same time. Put a pizza under the light to see this in action. If you've traveled anywhere, even within the same time zone, you will have noticed that the sun rises and sets at different times based on latitude and longitude. This simply

can't be the case if the earth is flat. The flat earth people, however, have an answer to this. They now say that the sun is a giant spotlight that shines down only on parts of the earth at any given time. The problem this creates is with sunsets. If the sun is a giant track light in the sky, then it would never and could never sink below the horizon. All of us have seen the sun sink below the horizon and slowly disappear, only to come back the next day on the other side. Basically, you can't have time zones and sunsets at the same time and have a flat earth. To answer this, the best they can come up with is the word perspective, which doesn't even mean what they think it means.

Perspective is things getting smaller the further away they are, or parallel streets converging on the horizon. The sun is the same size no matter what time of day or year. Method number two is the moon. The moon causes problems with the flat earth model, especially. lunar eclipses. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth is between the sun and the moon. This is literally impossible if both the moon and the sun are always in the sky in some big celestial dome. The only way this could happen on a flat earth is if the sun went below the disk of the

earth, but then we run into the problem of time zones. Also, during a lunar eclipse, the shape of the shadow is curved, as if a sphere were casting a shadow somehow. To top it off, the illumination of the moon can't really be explained if the sun is just a giant spotlight pointing down on the earth. The third method has to do with constellations. In the northern hemisphere, we can see Polaris, the north star. However, we can't see the southern cross. In Australia, it's just the opposite. If we were all on a disk with a dome of lights above our head, you should be able to see any point on the dome from any point on the disc. However, this isn't what happens at all. We can't see all the stars at the same time. We can see different stars in different hemispheres, and we see

different stars in different seasons. One of the best flat earth answers to this that I've heard is that Australia simply doesn't exist. And for those of you listening in Australia, I'm sorry to break the news to you. The fourth method is ships and skylines. If you watch a ship sail out of port, you can't see it forever. It eventually disappears as it sails over the horizon. The last part of the ship that you can see would be the tallest part of the ship. ship. There are many images and videos online showing this effect. The same holds true with cities with skyscrapers. If you get far enough away, you will only see the tops of the buildings. I've seen this effect firsthand, and one of the best places to observe it is at Indiana Dunes National Park.

Located at the southernmost point of Lake Michigan, you can just barely see the tops of the skyscrapers in Chicago. I have a link to an image that I took in the show notes if you want to see it for yourself. On the same note, if the Earth was flat, you'd be able to see a ship from any distance. Likewise, you should be able to see Mount Everest from every point on Earth. At a minimum, radio waves and lasers should easily be able to cross oceans because they're traveling in a straight line, but that isn't how it works. Method number five has to do with satellites. If the Earth was flat, there would be nothing to orbit. The concept of an orbit doesn't even make sense for a flat object. Yet, if you go outside on any clear

where the sky is dark enough, you will probably see moving specks of light within about 10 to 15 minutes. These are satellites orbiting the Earth. In fact, there are a lot more satellites now than there were just a few years ago due to the starlink constellation. Moreover, you can get GPS coordinates from anywhere on Earth, and the only way that would be possible is if it was coming from a satellite. Furthermore, if you ever had a satellite TV dish, or better yet, if you've ever installed one, you know that you have to point at an exact point in the sky or else it won't work. Method number six has to do with shadows. This one might take a bit of work if you want to do it yourself, but it isn't that hard. In fact, this experiment was done back in the year

240 BC by Aristosanis of Cyrene. Aristosanis heard that there was a well not far from the modern-day city of Aswan Egypt, where on the day of the solstice, the sun would shine directly down to the bottom of the well at high noon. That meant that the sun was directly overhead, and today we know that means that the well was directly on the tropic of cancer. Aristosanis then measured the shadow cast by a stick at the same time in Alexandria. By measuring the length of the shadow, he was able to come up with the first measurement for the circumference of the earth, and by extension, he proved the earth was a sphere. If you want, you can replicate the experiment, or you can work with a friend who you trust who is not part of the global ball earth conspiracy.

You don't have to take measurements on the exact line of the tropics like Aristonsonis did, but it can be done at different latitudes. The seventh method is something that everyone has experienced, and that is the fact that you can see farther from higher heights. If the earth was flat, you wouldn't be able to see farther being on the top of a mountain. The higher up you go, you can see around the bend of the earth. If there was no bend, you could draw a straight line between any two points of a mountain, mountain and a point in a distance. The longest distance that you can see between two points on

the surface of the earth is believed to be the 443 kilometers between two mountain peaks in the French Alps and the French Pyrenees. If the earth was flat, you wouldn't need two mountain tops. The eighth method is something you may have experienced yourself, and that is looking out the window of an airplane. Yeah, you can actually see the curvature of the earth from the window of an airplane at a very high altitude. The curvature is very slight, because even at 35,000 feet, you aren't really that far from the surface in the big scheme of things. However, if you take a photo and then draw a straight line with the photo editing app, you can see a very slight bend. Depending on the photo and the software, it may only be a few pixels, but it's there.

Obviously, the higher up you go, the more pronounced the apparent curvature of the Earth will be. I have on my wall a photo taken from a 1935 National Geographic-sponsored balloon flight that went up to 72,000 feet, which was a record at the time. And you can clearly see the Earth's curve in the photo. The ninth method is airplane flight pass. If you look at a flat earth map of the world, no routes for flights would make any sense. Long flights follow a great circle route, which takes you over areas that you wouldn't fly over if the Earth was flat. Likewise, a flight from South Africa to Australia would be the longest flight in the world on a flat earth, but it is even close to being that long in reality.

Some companies offer flight seeing tours over Antarctica, which, according to flat earthers, doesn't even exist. Look at the map on your screen the next time you take a transcontinental flight, and the route you take will only make sense if you're on a globe. The tenth method isn't a proof per se, but it is a strong inductive argument. Every large heavenly body that we can observe with a telescope is a sphere. The sun, the moon, all the planets, and the other stars are all spheres. And even the smaller ones like asteroids are sphere-ish. Why is it that the Earth would be the only thing in the universe that was flat,

and that all the laws of physics would apply differently here than they would elsewhere? There are far more ways to prove that the Earth is a sphere than just these ten things. These are just the things that you can observe and reason for yourself without resorting to photos from space. In 2018, there was a documentary that covered the Flat Earth believers called Beyond the Curve. In the film, a group of Flat Earthers engaged in a crowdfunding campaign to purchase a $20,000 laser gyroscope that was accurate enough to detect the rotation of the Earth, or as they were hoping, the lack thereof. If the Earth rotated, it would show a 15-degree change every hour, in other words,

360 degrees divided by 24. They were going to use this as their big proof to show that the world was flat. What did the gyroscope show? A 15 degree rotation every hour. Rather than accept the results of the experiment which they funded, they immediately turned to explain the results away. Perhaps proving that the Earth is a sphere might seem sort of trivial. However, I do think it's something that everyone should know. You should have one or more of these proofs tucked away in the back of your mind at all times, just in case of a flat earth emergency. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com.

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