20 Reasons We Know the Earth Is Spherical

Re:20 Reasons We Know the Earth Is Spherical by growlist on Thursday June 14, 2018 @10:43AM (#17312079)

Not sure why you've been downvoted, unless it's for pedantry. The Earth is indeed spheroidal, in fact an oblate spheroid - flatter at the poles and bulging at the equator due to the rotation of the earth. Modelling the true shape of the Earth is central to geodesy.

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Re:20 Reasons We Know the Earth Is Spherical by yaks_hairbrush on Thursday June 14, 2018 @10:58AM (#17312199)

There's a danger in pedantry -- outsiders can mistake it for "see: there's no consensus that the earth is a sphere!". Having said that, the earth is not an oblate spheroid -- it's very slightly pear-shaped, and has all sorts of mountains and valleys.

To paraphrase Isaac Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong: "The earth is flat" is a pretty good model. "The earth is a sphere" is much better. And "The earth is an oblate spheroid" is just a bit better than that.

So, let us consider the aim of the essay: to debunk the flat earth claim as many ways as possible. I think they did a pretty good job finding data for which the flat earth model is insufficient, but a spherical earth fits quite nicely.

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Re:20 Reasons We Know the Earth Is Spherical by Jyaif on Thursday June 14, 2018 @12:17PM (#17312737)

You'd understand why he was downvoted if you had read the article.

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Re:20 Reasons We Know the Earth Is Spherical by nikdaheratik on Friday June 15, 2018 @01:44AM (#17317751)

Because the 2nd paragraph of the article uses that exact phrase. Which means that neither of you read the article.

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