Hi, my name is Chad and I can't believe how stupid this society is, I'mma just give you a proof the Earth is not flat. If you had 2 helicopters flying at the exact same hight from the sea level (eg 100m above the sea), that were at a significant distance away from each other (eg 3000km), and if you had the best telescope in the world, when you would try to scope in to locate the other helicopter, if the Earth was flat you could find it easily, especially if you had the latitude and the longitude of the helicopters location.
No, you would not, if the distance between then is 3000 km, then let’s talk ratio of the volume of your search area and the volume of the helicopter. A helicopter is about 9m height by 13m long by 7m wide which come out to 819 cubic meter of volume.
Your search area volume will be 100m height by 3,000,000m long by 100m wide = 30,000,000,000 cubic meter of volume.
Why would it be so large?
Especially that length?
Using the telescope you have effective 2 degrees of freedom, looking around the surface of a sphere, using angles, but that can be approximated using surface area of a sphere.
That means the helicopter would take up an area of
117 m^2.
Sure, you can try to use the entire surface, but why would you? If you are looking for something due north of you, would you bother looking south? No. If you were looking for something at the same elevation above a flat surface as you, would you look significantly up or down?
No.
So instead, you use the information he gave you.
He said we know the height and latitude&longitude of the helicopter.
With GPS we can get quite accurate positioning data, to pinpoint an object within less than a m.
So for the horizonal component, we know that angle quite well and should be able to just point there.
The helicopter is 7 to 13 m accross (depending upon the angle), yet our search area for it would be less than a m or 2 wide.
So the real question then is height.
We can get that to within a few m from various sources, so you are really just looking for a 9 m high object in a few m high column.
That wouldn't take long at all and would be quite easy to do.
It is nothing like what you have made it out to be.
Know on a sheet of paper that has a line 30 cm long, the vertical line that will correspond to this angle will be
=0.30m*sin (0.0098534) = 5.1592356 x 10^ -5 m = 51.59 micrometers
The diameter of a human hair has a size of 50 micrometers.
So you expect to see on a sheet of paper of 1 meter by 1 meter a mark that has the same size as a human hair? That is why we can’t see it.
You would need an electron microscope to see it.
No. A human hair is typically quite easy to see. I don't need an electron microscope to view it.
Regardless, he said to use a telescope, not just try and find it with the naked eye.