9 Most Popular Flat Earth Arguments, Debunked

1. A Few Further Points

NASA Is Lying To Us

A neat way of explaining the vast collections of images and measurements that incontrovertibly demonstrate that the Earth is a sphere, is to dismiss them as fakes.

However, much like the moon landing conspiracies (something that also has to go hand in hand with flat earthing), the sheer size of the conspiracy is what makes it unfeasible. When you're talking about the structure of the very planet we live on, you're not just talking about NASA telling porkies, but every other space agency, private aeronautical company, astrophysicist, amateur astronomer, airway, pilot and anyone else who has ever looked up. As tinny and foily as your hat is, not everyone can be lying to you.

Timezones Are A Thing

When it's daytime in the States, it's nighttime in China, because the sphere of the Earth eventually turns you away from the sun. If the Earth were flat, you would always be able to see the sun somehow, even if it was really far away on the other side of the disk.

Flat Earthers get around this by saying that the sun is a spotlight that shines down on specific areas. This would indicate that, like the flat earth, it is also a disk as opposed to a sphere, but if that were the case, the perspective would cause it to warp into an oval shape as it moves further away from an observer. So which is it?

Lunar Eclipses

During lunar eclipses, the Earth moves between the sun and the moon, casting a shadow on it. Now, apart from the fact that you can tell the Earth is spherical from the shape of this shadow, a flat earth model also doesn't allow the Earth to put itself between the sun and the moon, so what's going on?

Some FEs theorise the existence of a "brown dwarf" that is also passing over the Earth, undetected and, when its orbit aligns with the sun and the moon in a certain way, it causes the shadow. The only possible conclusion to this theory is that they're actually trolling us now.

You could write for WhatCulture Science! Click here to find out how you could get paid to write about what you love.

If science gives you the warm fuzzies, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to stay up to date.