See if you can get this into your head: when people travel by plane, it doesn't matter how grand and reliable the estimates are, they only know the time the flight takes, not the distance. The time the flight takes depends on its speed and its speed depends on route and wind and direction...
The distance is not 'suspect' because THERE IS NO DISTANCE GIVEN. THERE IS JUST FLIGHT TIME.
Yes, there is a flight time and a given aircraft cruises at close to the same air speed on every flight west to east or east to west.
The west to east will have a faster "ground speed" because of the jet stream, but The east to west will have a slower "ground speed".
Sure, this does not give exact distances, but it is close. Of course, distances are given,
but you choose to ignore anything that does fit your own ideas.
Not only that, but I believe that I showed you flights
from Perth to Melbourne, with distances that were derived from surveys and
from Melbourne to Aukland, with distances that were over sea and were derived from latitude and longitude.
The distances and flight times were almost the same.
No, you can get away with your claim that we do not know distances between continents.
I repeat my question to you, which I notice you ignored:
If finding the distance between two points is easy, please find me the distance between New York and Paris. I don't mean google it, I mean find it. It's a simple, one-instance situation of the kind of thing you're asking us to do on a colossal scale. Take a flight? Won't do, you don't have an accurate measure of the plane's speed even if you assume it takes a straight path because of jet streams. Take a boat? Hardly accessible for most people, and you get a similar problem.
You ask us to map the whole world, and you claim it's 'not that hard,' it should be downright trivial for you to calculate one little distance and tell us how.
Look, get this straight, one person cannot gather all this information. You simply have to rely of measurements made by others.
All the data you need to make a map is available in the form of latitude and longitude for any location you like to pick.
Mapping then involves deciding where those latitude and longitude lines go. The
Standard flat earth AEP "place holder" is one.
But, one does not have absolute freedom in this assignment, because,
for example, whatever the cause, you might have great difficulty of trying to get away with the sun moving at different speeds/angles as it apparently moves around the earth.
Then the azimuth and elevation angles of the sun, moon, planets and stars are very well documented and have been for centuries in places like the Almanac used by ships navigators, mainly in earlier days.
You simply will not get away with claiming that these tables are wrong, so puts clear restraints on what you can do.
You might claim that these tables were made up for the Globe, maybe so, but they were certainly made up for the
real earth, the only one we have.
So don't claim that we don't know these things - we do know them and closing your mind and eyes to that is simply foolish.