The “Flat Earth” thing does not go away. This year USA Today had articles about the April 2024 eclipse and flat Earth believers, while FOX News carried a story about NFL players and Flat-Earth-ism. Obstinate belief in baloney of all kinds seems to be a persistent curse of the internet society. This particular baloney belief is especially egregious since it requires ignoring what your own eyes and brain tell you.
Check out the video below, from my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky (USA). Note that the Sun has set, but that the tops of larger clouds are still illuminated by sunlight. It is not uncommon to see this cloud illumination. And it is a very effective demonstration that the Earth is not flat.
Let’s imagine that the Earth is indeed flat. See the diagram below. A ray of light from the Sun, which has set and is below the horizon (red dotted line) illuminates the top of a cloud. The angle of the Sun below the horizon is Ѳ. The height of the cloud is H. The distance to the edge of the Earth is D.
By geometry, the angle Ѳ is also an angle in the red right triangle. And in a right triangle, H and D are related to Ѳ through the tangent function: tan(Ѳ)=H/D. Thus D=H/tan(Ѳ).
What is Ѳ here? Let’s look at the photo below. The date stamp on it is March 26, 2024, at 8:03 PM.
According to the Stellarium app, at that moment the Sun appeared to be 0° 36´ 24.8´´ below the horizon. That is 0+(36/60)+(24.8/3600) = 0.606888889°. (It would be easy enough to ascertain this angle for yourself by just measuring the Sun’s rate and direction of motion at sunset and extrapolating forward to project where it would be shortly after sunset.)
Let’s suppose the cloud top is at 20,000 ft, or 6100 m (H=20,000 ft). Clouds can be much higher, but if you travel by air you see for yourself that most storm clouds are below the altitudes that airliners fly at, and the clouds in the photo and video here are not particularly tall clouds. They are probably much lower than 20,000 ft. Rough estimates will suffice for us, however.
Based on a 20,000 ft high cloud, the distance to the edge of the Earth must then be
D=H/tan(Ѳ) = 20,000 ft/tan(0.606888889) = 1,888,110 ft
There are 5,280 ft in a mile, so D = 1,888,110/5280 = 358 miles. The edge of our flat Earth is a mere 360 miles (570 km) to the west!
Well, 360 miles to the west of Louisville, Kentucky is the middle of Missouri. Thus, if the world is flat, Kansas City does not exist. And forget about the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Coast, etc.
Could the atmosphere be bending the rays of light and throwing off the results? That does happen, but if I ask Stellarium to remove the atmosphere, I find that at 8:03 PM on March 26, 2024 the Sun is actually 1° 17´ 21.4´´ below the horizon. Run the calculations and that puts the edge of the Earth a mere 170 miles west of Louisville.
We can imagine that the clouds in my photos are towering giants, reaching 60,000 ft (they obviously are not, but we can imagine). That will triple my D value of 358 miles from before, giving me roughly 1100 miles to the edge of the Earth. That maybe gets me to the Denver area, but Utah is definitely off the edge of the Earth. And again, no Pacific Coast.
If the Earth is flat then certain places to which we can readily drive do not exist. So, obviously — obviously — the Earth is not flat. Everyone with eyes and brains can see for themselves that the Earth is not flat.
This is a re-run of sorts. I talked about this topic four years ago,
but I did not have video for my post then!
