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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blurt" data-source="post: 388731" data-attributes="member: 648">Seems like most people in this thread are boldly going where no one has gone before.Anyone with even a mere handful of brain cells at their disposition (and a modicum of education) knows the following to be true:✓ The Earth, like other high-gravity solar system bodies, is a sphere (slightly squashed at the poles because of its rotational axis);✓ The planets formed by pulling matter (increasing gravity attracting stellar dust, debris, and gases) to themselves from an accretion disk originally surrounding and rotating around our young sun; the Earth is no exception;✓ The "water finds its own level" argument for a flat Earth is born of a failure on the part of those who use it to understand the scales involved; same thing goes for the "sun's divergent rays" argument [here's a simple experiment anyone can perform: next time you see a daytime crescent moon (say, in late afternoon) on a sunny day, hold a golf ball or a tennis ball at arm's length next to the moon and you will see that their respective terminators (the line that divides the sunlight from the shadow on their surface) are precisely parallel, not divergent];✓ Gravity is a thing; "buoyancy" has nothing to do with anything (if it did, and if gravity were non-existent, there would be no reason for any object to fall toward the ground rather than in any other direction); there's no spectacle quite as charming as seeing a gravity-denier make his point by pouring a glass of water over a spinning basketball held in his hands and claiming that, if gravity were real, the water would never just fly off the ball like so... while forgetting about the water falling off the ball to the ground because... gravity.I'm pretty much done with arguing with Flat Earthers. Addressing such mental midgetry is usually a waste of time. To those truck drivers, shoe sales associates, and barristas who claim they've "researched" the subject, I say "Don't bother." For centuries now, folks with an interest in these matters have devoted their lives to this research, relying on increasingly sophisticated tools and instruments to do so, and reporting their findings to a community of like-minded experts for peer review. The language of science (mathematical equations, mostly, when it comes to astronomy and astrophysics) is often beyond the ken of most truck drivers, shoe sales associates, and barristas. Hence the need to heed science popularizers such as Sagan, Hawking, DeGrasse Tyson, Greene, Kaku, and the rest. You can disbelieve them if you wish, but you also need to shut the hell up about your ignorant idiocies. You're making it difficult for smart peop!e to become smarter.The Earth is not flat.</blockquote>

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