I use here a video for one side of the ongoing debate regarding a round vs. a flat Earth. But whether I am on the round Earth side or the flat Earth side is unimportant here. I chose to transcribe this video because, as I try to do from time to time, I want to hit two (or more) birds with one stone. And as I was looking for resources for the round vs. flat Earth debate, I found this video that seemed to me a good transcription specimen. Hit many birds with one stone, I thought - find resources for the issue, practice transcription, add transcription to portfolio/blog. 😃
To try to be fair to both sides of the debate, I will try to find in the future, a video for the flat Earth side. For now, though, I have in line parts 2 & 3 of this series from VoysovReason.
Note:
I am keeping my time stamps on the transcription mainly as a guide for me to be able to see how long I take in doing it. Anyone looking at this transcription because they are looking for a transcriber may also look at the time stamps as an estimation of how fast (or slow) I work.
Also, if I seem to be a bit on the slow side when working, please realize that I do additional 'research' while transcribing. This includes checking (by google, etc.) to see if I am getting the spelling of names and places, and other terms correctly.
11:56 AM 6/21/2017 start
The Earth is not flat. We live on a spinning globe.
It's amazing to me that I actually have to say those words in 2016. But there are a number of scientifically confused people that have convinced themselves, and are trying to convince others, that we live on a stationary, flat plane.
There are a number of reasons for this resurgence of a long-extinct belief system including: literal interpretations of the Bible, scientific illiteracy, cherry-picking and other errors in reasoning, and a general distrust of government leading to imagined conspiracy theories.
I don't, for a second, think that NASA, along with every other public and private space enterprise, and every other scientifically literate person in the entire world are involved in a massive conspiracy to hide the truth from us. That's a claim that demands really strong evidence.
But let's leave them out of it. I cannot prove to you that the images and videos from space are real, and you cannot prove that they are fake. But we don't need to believe them. We can prove the globe and the heliocentric model to ourselves without them, just as generations of people did long before NASA or anyone else went to space.
In a series of short videos, I would like to teach you how you can prove to yourself with your own eyes and experimentation that we live on a spinning globe. Several things that we can see with our own eyes clearly demonstrate that the Earth is a globe and cannot be adequately explained by the Flat Earth model, no matter how you try to twist reality. These include the apparent movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars, moon phases, lunar eclipses, timezones, and many others. But in this first video, I'm going to focus on just one thing - the horizon.
The most important thing to understand is that the horizon is flat. That's right. From our vantage point, even from a high mountain or an airplane, the horizon is flat. Flat Earthers, and also many globalists, for lack of a better term, seem to think that the horizon should look curved to us. That's flat wrong. And I think this is the single biggest reason there even is a flat earth community. The biggest source of confusion. You are expecting to see a curve where there is none to be seen. You are looking for the wrong thing.
To picture what I mean, look at this orange. If I take a thin slice of it, I get a round disc. The edges of it where the knife cut through is a flat circle. That is what you see when you look at the horizon - the edges of a circle. The edges don't curve side to side, they run straight across our view. And since we are always in the center of the circle, they don't curve down. When you can see the horizon in all directions, it is the same distance away in all directions. So when you spin around, it looks exactly like a straight line and comes back around to join itself. Think about that. If it were curved down, it would not come back around and join itself at the same level. Even from a high mountain or from an airliner, the horizon is flat because the Earth is so big and we are so close to it. All we are ever going to see is a small, flat, round slice of the ball of the Earth.
There's a handy website that will calculate the distance to the horizon for any viewing height. It also tells you how much of an object will be hidden the horizon if it's past the horizon. The site is: metabunk.org/curve. Let's look at an example.
12:26 PM 6/21/2017 lunch break
12:50 PM 6/21/2017 resume
This is the view from the JPMorgan Chase Tower, the tallest building in Houston. The observation deck is 879 feet above the flat Texas landscape. According to the metabunk site calculation, the horizon is about 36 miles away. So this is what the horizon looks like on a map - a circle with a 36 mile radius. As we zoom out, you can see what a small part of the Earth this is - under 1% of the Earth's diameter of 7918 miles. And when we show it edge on, you can really see that it is just a small, flat, round slice of the large Earth.
But getting back to the orange, you might be thinking that the slice of the orange is not flat. It curves down in all directions from the center. Well, yes, that is true for the orange, and it's also true for the Earth. And you can clearly see that on the orange, but on the Earth, it is simply impossible to see because the Earth is so tremendously big.
If you are 6 feet tall, and you stand at the shore of the ocean, or on a flat desert plane, the horizon is about 3 miles away, and the change in vertical height of the surface is only 1 1/2 feet spread evenly over the entire 3 mile distance. You just aren't going to be able to see that. It's way too subtle.
As an illustration, this is a Google Earth picture of the New York City skyline from Caven Point, New Jersey, just over 3 miles away. The Earth does indeed curve down away from the viewer in this picture but it is just about 1.5 feet spread over 3 miles so it is just too slight to see. The Statue of Liberty is in the picture and it's 305 feet tall, and only 1.2 miles away, and look how small it looks. But if the horizon is flat, how does it prove a round Earth, you might ask. It's what happens when objects are past the horizon that reveals the curve.
Sailors, for many centuries, have noticed that ships sailing away from you in the distance disappear bottom first and sail last. If you live near a large body of water, you can easily see this for yourself with binoculars or a telescope. But here is a video you can watch of a cruiseliner going over the horizon. See the link in the description for the full video. This only works on a curved Earth. The view of the ship is obviously going behind the curve and you can always calculate exactly how far away this will happen depending on how high you are up from the water. The higher up, the farther away the horizon.
Flat Earthers try to explain this phenomenon away in a few ways. Some claim that the ships aren't actually hidden by the curve, they are just at the limits of our ability to see them, and if you zoom in, they come back into full view. But whenever they try to demonstrate this, they use a boat that is near the horizon, but not beyond it. Like this one. Notice, he did not show a boat that was hidden at the bottom, this is just a blatantly wrong example to use. I don't know how they think this explains anything. The examples they use are always not beyond the horizon, but near it or right at it. To show the effect, you have to show a boat partially obscured by the horizon like this. Not this. Some will show a boat in choppy seas and claim that the swells are causing the obscuring of the bottom of the boat. But, again, that's a bad example to use. Do you think there are swells big enough to hide half of this cruise ship? Also, you will need a clear day, and one without extreme cold. Cold air near the water can create a number of different mirage effects because the temperature differences actually bends the light. But you can usually tell when this is happening, and it only happens in certain conditions.
Also, the sun and moon rising and setting beyond the horizon perfectly shows that the Earth is curved, and they are much easier to see than distant boats. They both emerge from or slide behind the horizon exactly as we expect on a globe, and not at all what we would see on a Flat Earth. Flat Earthers claim that the sun and moon circle above the Flat Earth, and the rising and setting is due to them coming in and out of view due to perspective, as explained - and I use the term loosely - in this clip from Flat Earther, p-brane.
[Clip]
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Ok. Here's a little, uh, illustrator or a little cartoon from a website called timeanddate.com. It's really funny that they would have a perfect illustration of a sun rising and setting on a Flat Earth due to perspective. You'll notice that it rises from below the horizon and sets below the horizon. Now, you might be saying, "well, how's that possible? I can see now you're saying that it rises and lowers due to perspective but how does it disappear below the horizon?" Well, I got a theory about that. Because of the fact that all parallel lines and planes converge at your eye level horizon - this is according to the perspective, I'm not making this up. If in fact, and they do - they converge at your eye level horizon visually, then it makes sense that after that point, they diverge, meaning they then separate. So the sun would continue on a downward track, as you can see from my illustration here, the lines would go to your horizon and then afterwards, they would spread out and separate, kinda like a starburst.
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Two huge problems here.
One is that he shows a sun in the animation that always stays the same size, which indeed is what we see in reality. But if it were disappearing due to perspective, it would be getting bigger as it rises and smaller as it sets. But in his animation, it does not. The edges of the circle of the sun would get farther apart and closer together just as all the sight lines he drew in do. Why would everything get smaller as it moves away except the sun or moon? That's absurd.
Here is what we actually see. The sun and moon slide behind the horizon and maintain their visual size. That is not perspective. Perspective works both vertically and horizontally. Objects farther away appear smaller and closer together in both directions. If the sun and moon were just circling over the Flat Earth and getting too far away to see, then we would see them shrink and fade out of view as they set, but we don't.
Flat Earthers will show you videos where the sun appears to grow or shrink but this is an illusion due to thick clouds. You can always see that there are clouds near the horizon when they try to show this. Normally, this illusion does not happen.
The second way this so-called perspective matrix fails is even more ridiculous. The lines drawn in the illustration are lines of sight, and they correctly converge to the vanishing point - the point at which you can't see farther. But he claims that past the vanishing point, the lines diverge. What? What lines? It's a vanishing point. There are no lines of sight past the vanishing point. There is nothing to diverge. You can't have lines of sight past what you could see. And if it did work that way, we could see objects beyond the horizon and they would be upside down. Think about that. No. This is totally wrong.
Another way to demonstrate the curve is with distant city skylines. A good example is the City of Toronto viewed from across Lake Ontario. The city is dominated by the distinctive CN Tower, currently the 3rd tallest tower in the world at 1815 feet. There are many pictures online of the Toronto skyline, viewed from Niagara-on-the-Lake, New York (sic), 30 miles away. With the metabunk calculation, we see that 486 feet of the tower or about 26% of it should be hidden behind the curve of the Earth from that distance. And this is exactly what we see as you can easily tell when compared to an image of the full tower at the same scale.
Flat Earthers sometimes show cities in the distance that, according to them, should be below the horizon but are clearly visible and claim this proves the Flat Earth. This can be difficult to disprove because you never really know where the picture was taken from. They may have gotten the distance wrong, or the height of the observation wrong, or the calculation wrong. One example they use is the Chicago skyline seen from 60 miles away across Lake Michigan. At a viewing height of 6 feet, we calculate that 2166 feet should be below the horizon at 60 miles. So they are right that the entire City of Chicago should be completely hidden. And it is hidden nearly all the time. But sometimes it can be seen from that far away due to a type of atmospheric light refraction phenomenon called a superior mirage.
A superior mirage is caused by colder air below warmer air which bends the light around the curve of the Earth. This event sometimes makes the news for the very reason that it is a rare occurrence.
[News clip]
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...until I found this photo from Grand Mere State Park. This is from Joshua Nowicki. And what you're seeing here is a mirage. We typically would not be able to see this from the Lake Michigan shore. We talked about this last night. Conditions are right on the lake that we're actually seeing a mirage of the Chicago skyline.
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You can tell that it's a mirage because there is lots of distortion. The Willis Tower on the left is clearly elongated. And also, there are videos of this same view that show the buildings dancing around, changing shape, and even disappearing. Even though this is a mirage, the bottom parts of the buildings are clearly still obscured from view, just as we expect. If the Earth was flat, you could see the buildings on any clear day, not just rarely when the conditions are right for refraction.
Flat Earthers use these rare events to try to prove the Earth is flat, but that makes no sense. It's called cherry-picking, a favorite trick of all types of science deniers. You don't get to pick the anomalies that seem to agree with your views and ignore the common observations that don't, and still call yourself an honest investigator. That is intellectually dishonest.
As I have shown, the horizon is all we really need to know that we live on a sphere. But there are other observations you can make yourself that all perfectly fit the heliocentric globe model when you understand it, as I will explain in future videos. Thanks for watching.
2:39 PM 6/21/2017 finished transcribing
2:40 PM 6/21/2017 to 3:03 PM 6/21/2017 proofreading #1
3:04 PM 6/21/2017 to 3:20 PM 6/21/2017 proofreading #2
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