I can think of no reason why a round Earth would be "bad", except in the sense that it doesn't accurately reflect the reality I observe every day of my life.
high five, that is a legitimate reason. Myself, I would believe in a flat earth according to my own observations, but I choose to believe what others have seen, and experimented on, what with space travel, and space stations, and such. If you don't cheers.
If the Earth looks round from space, that's fine. It certainly doesn't prove the Earth is round.
I, however, think flat earth creates more questions than it answers. But whatever.
At least, now, they are the
right questions.
You're precisely hinting at the fact that observing your local surroundings won't tell you much about the larger-scale shape of the Earth. So you can't tell the difference between living on a flat Earth or a globe Earth, or a muffin-shaped-one or whatever.
Yet you call "direct eye observation" of your surroundings conclusive evidence of a flat Earth...
First, please don't put "direct eye observation" in quotes as if I ever used that phrase. It is intellectually dishonest.
Now, then, obviously what we judge to be the conditions of the world around us has to be dependent on our senses. Whether you'd like to face it or not, all of our knowledge is entirely dependent on what we are able to empirically observe. Please take note of how often the theoretical aspects of RE Theory are rewritten to account for things we observe that don't fit with the
a priori calculations.
Now, my own observations tell me the Earth is flat and stationary. I don't think it's unreasonable to require extraordinary evidence that this is not the case. I have yet to see such evidence. Just a whole lot of conjecture and some pretty pictures from hundreds of miles away, mostly, none of which is conclusive evidence of anything.
Is the Philly soft pretzel shape of our Earth mainstream science's view? You have a million and one reasons to think the Earth is round, because those million and one reasons are pieces of evidence from mainstream science.
I feel no need to respond to a pure
argumentum ad populum. If you have something serious to add to the discussion please do so, otherwise don't waste our time.
If the Earth were pretzel shaped you would see different horizon effects depending on which portion of the pretzel you travelled. Along the length of a bread twist the horizon would be at eye level and objects would shrink in angular diameter until undetectable, but along the width of a twist the horizon would behave like a spherical Earth more or less. The horizon would be just below eye level and objects would disappear from the bottom up. There is one way it would differ, that is not observed as far as I know, so it's fairly safe to conclude that pretzel shaped is off the list.
Nice try. But how could we possibly know where on the pretzel we are to see if such differences exist? I also feel like you're making blind assumptions with no empirical evidence to back them up. You REers love your higher dimensions; what if the twist is happening in one of those, so that you can't observe it?