Ok, I'm new. Clearly, given the topic of this forum, this is a place for debate. I'm going to add some. I'm surprised at the well-argued points of FE believers, and the not-so-well argued points of the rest of the forum.
I'm going to offer some evidence for a spherical Earth. I'm aware that some of the believers think that satellites can 'orbit' the Earth, held up by the gravitational attraction (or some other force) of elements of the heavens. I'm also aware that some don't believe man-made satellites can sustain an orbit above the Earth. I will address both groups.
There are many satellite programs that have run (or claim to have been run) for many years. One of these is NASA and the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) Landsat program. I'm aware that FE believers think NASA contains fraudulent elements. I hope to prove that whatever you might think of them, the Landsat program exists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_programIt has been running since 1972 as a series of satellites which orbit the Earth taking images of its land surface in an effort to attain constant global coverage, with a satellite revisiting the same area every 16 days, providing information on the change in surface characteristics. Currently Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 are operational in low Earth orbit. Each satellite takes images and transmits them back to Earth roughly every 25 seconds. This has been happening for the last 39 years.
Here is an example individual Landsat image (false-colour):
Ok, for those that don’t believe satellites can have sustained orbits
at all:
So what, you might think. “Sustained space flight is not possible! NASA fakes the images ‘produced’ and isn’t transparent. Show me the raw data!”. Well they might fake it, but it would be A LOT of work. Most of the archive (and this is 39 years of images every 25 seconds, or less when there is more than one satellite claimed to be orbiting) is available for public viewing.
Here is one source:
http://glovis.usgs.gov/ - it is fairly easy to use, you can drag the map or input coordinates and right click on individual ‘scenes’ (that is what the images are generally known as) and click ‘show browse’ to see a high quality version of it. On the left panel you can choose which year or satellite you’d like to see imagery from. You can also register for free to download the raw data, which are generally quite large file sizes.
Ok, so say this archive of millions of images accurate to the surface conditions of the Earth at the time they were taken WERE faked. I mean, after all, the quality is quite low. The earlier satellites (Landsat 1-3) had a low spatial resolution, each pixel was 80m by 80m on the ground. Maybe they were digitally or analogue generated? This would require accurate knowledge of the material make-up of the whole Earth’s land surface, down to objects which are 80m by 80m in size. It would also require accurate knowledge of cloud cover at every location on the Earth’s land surface, down to the same size, as these show up on any images where cloud-cover is present.
But how does anyone know the images are accurate? Who’s going to check? The raw data in those images have been used in countless academic, governmental, NGO and business applications for the last 39 years. This includes agriculture, cartography, geology, forestry, regional planning, surveillance, education and national security. There have been no reports of inaccurate information. Please tell me if you find any. Also, you can check yourselves due to the archive and report back if anything looks amiss.
Another counter-argument I’ve seen here: It was planes that took the images. The archive consists of images taken EVERY 25 SECONDS FOR THE LAST 39 YEARS. Each image has the approximate dimensions of 185 by 170 km. One plane cannot image an area that large, even at high altitudes. If it did, anything other than an area of a few square kilometres directly under the plane would be extremely warped if it were laid out on a flat image. Even if algorithms were applied so the stretching is ‘unstretched’, the spatial resolution would be extremely low compared to the imagery from directly under the plane. So what if it was a few planes flying all at once capturing the images? That would be an ASTRONOMICAL amount of planes – to cover 185 by 170 km every 25 SECONDS, for 39 years, in every single country.
So maybe they weren’t all flying at once, but rather the imagery is gathered at a slower rate, not 25 seconds as NASA claim. Maybe lots of images are stitched together from repeated aerial passes to make one Landsat scene? There are no joins in any of the images. Any cloud cover would change by the time a second pass is made to capture more of the Landsat scene, as well as lighting conditions and shadowing, leaving each scene an obvious stitch-up composed of lots of images. As well as scientifically worthless.
If there are still any doubters (I suspect this is about three of you), I shall direct you here:
http://earthnow.usgs.gov/earthnow.html This page shows a near real-time feed from one of the Landsat satellites currently in orbit. If not it will show a replay of an imaging sweep from the past day or two. It WILL pass over your current area at some point in the next 16 days, I’d like you to go outside and check, for instance, that the cloud cover is the same as is displayed on the real-time feed, or that it is otherwise accurate from any other features.
Right, the next part. I think it is now clear that satellites can and do orbit the Earth over long periods of time, that the Landsat program does exist and has imaged the Earth routinely from low Earth orbit for 39 years. I’d like to show you how their orbital paths show that they are orbiting a sphere, and not going round in a circular pattern (or any other pattern) above a disk.
The following image is an example to show the approximate orbital path of the Landsat series of satellites:
The red line shows the path of one particular orbit from an arbitrary starting point. You will notice how it proceeds North at a slight angle, passes near the North pole, and then continues South down the opposite side of the globe until it nears the South pole and carries on to repeat this orbit, only slightly moved to the West. The yellow lines show the future and past orbits. Unfortunately the satellite does not pass directly over the Antarctic 'South Pole' so any FE believers will not see imagery of the great wall or mountain range, or the edge of the world! Coincidence or what?!
Obviously this is projected onto a flat representation of the globe, a representation of these orbits on a globe would also be helpful to visualise it. I trust that people can use their imagination. Alternatively you can download a layer for Google Earth which shows many satellite orbits in full 3D.
Anyway, let’s suggest that the satellites follow these same orbits on a flat disk Earth, as proposed by some on this forum, but held up by attraction from the heavens, dark energy, or some other force. These orbits would look (and you’ll have to excuse my amateurish drawing skills) something like this:
This is the orbit from the previous image roughly approximated and laid over the flat-Earth model. As you can see this is not so much an orbit, but rather COMPLETE MADNESS. If satellites do indeed follow this path, for some unknown reason, I would like an explanation as to how they change their direction so easily and so often. These are spacecraft travelling at approximately 7 or 8 km/s to change direction in such an abrupt fashion would involve expending a huge amount of energy, in any known or theoretical propulsion system. Obviously my diagram is simplified, and the sharp turns when the spacecraft approaches and leaves the South Pole would be slightly softer, but still end up turning their direction to the same effect. The spacecraft would have to do the above manoeuvre every single orbit, which is once every 100 minutes. There is no way a spacecraft could pull this off under its own energy.
So, again, I’m going to grant FE believers some leeway and let’s assume that dark energy or some other force (handy how little-understood scientific phenomenon can be postulated to have ANY EFFECT YOU LIKE, isn’t it?) is stopping the spacecraft’s journey to the edge of the Earth, and sending it around the circumference of the Earth to reappear precisely where it needs to for the next orbit. This still leaves an abrupt change in direction near the North pole, where there should be no dark energy interference, right?
I’m aware that the above ‘map’ of a flat world is a guess at best. However if you believe in reality it is so different to the above that it negates my proposed orbital paths, please offer me an example of FE map where these orbital paths are not erratic.
Ok, so the above orbit of a flat Earth is clearly fraught with problems. Let us say, and I’m granting so much leeway here it must be a world record, that the satellites (Landsat and others) do orbit the Earth, do take images constantly and for the last 39 years, but the Earth’s surface IS a flat disk, and their orbits are different from those released to the public and those which the data show. This would require the previously discussed archive to be composed of scenes which are of a different chronological sequence and imaging angle, I guess in circular patterns around the lines of latitude? As this is a circular orbit around the North Pole. Scenes which are presented in a chronological order would then have mismatching cloud cover and lighting conditions due to difference between the claimed time and the actual time these images were acquired.
However, whatever route satellites take around a flat disk Earth, they would have to expend energy to change their course ALL THE TIME. This would necessitate impossibly powerful satellites, expending energy all the time to change their position in space, as they are not travelling in a straight line, like one would in orbiting a globe.
Maybe Dark Energy is pushing them? No scientist can agree what dark energy is. The only known fact about it is that it only affects extremely large scale structures like the position of galaxies, pushing them apart from each other by expanding the very fabric of space. There has been no observation of dark energy affecting anything to any measureable degree at the scales of the Earth, or anything like that.
Thus I conclude that the Earth is a sphere.
I’ll be happy to answer any questions.
Thanks for reading.