Here are some responses to selected arguments in a variety of videos appearing on Youtube suggesting that the world is flat rather than a globe. They are collected here for ease of access, and also because comment histories are lost when videos on Youtube get deleted.
The URLs and (large font) titles link to the original videos by various creators whose icons and handles appear beneath the titles. My responses appear below in regular text with occasional time references (min:sec) corresponding to moments in the original videos. Mentions of "you" or "your" refer to the original video creator.
By the way, the Wisecrack video "Flat Earth: What Makes REAL Science?" (https://youtu.be/umo6pMCkcXs) is about the best exposition that I have yet found of the philosophy of science, and some of the sociology and psychology of this issue.
I heartily welcome comments and suggestions.
You note at 3:28 that stars trace out "perfect circles" in a time-lapse exposure because the Earth is revolving on its axis (which makes days and nights). But the planet is also orbiting the Sun, and the whole solar system is whirling around the Milky Way galaxy, at velocities much greater than the spin of the Earth. So you ask, at 4:30, why are the stars are not making other crazy patterns in the night sky as a result of this motion? Good question. The reason is simply because the stars are really, really, REALLY far away from our planet. The Earth's displacement relative to the Sun is, I guess, about 93 million miles times two, over 6 months. But that 200 million miles or so is completely trivial compared to the distance to the stars. The very nearest star other than the Sun is over 4 lightyears away, which is like 25,000,000,000,000 miles. Thus, the amount we move around the Sun is less than 0.001% of the distance to the nearest star. And most stars are vastly farther away. So the stars trace out apparently perfect circles because the direction we're looking is spinning around from night to day, but the position we're in relative to the stars hardly changes at all in during one or even many nights, even though we are moving 70,000 mph around the Sun and and 514,000 mph across the galaxy. It would take thousands of years to make a deviation large enough that you'd notice with your naked eye. We actually can measure the tiny wobbles in the star trails caused by our orbit around the Sun and across the galaxy, but they are really small. Those perfect circles are not actually perfect. Over tens of thousands of years, the stars we see move in the night sky. (We know this cause we can measure their speeds.) Constellation configurations will change dramatically, but this is way too slow for time-lapse photography.
At 41:21, you ask whether rockets can work in a vacuum. You suggest that rockets need something to "push against" to move. I thought so too when I was in school. So I asked the science teacher how rockets could move in space if it was a vacuum. It was like the first and maybe only questions I ever asked in that class. My science teacher explained that rockets don't propel themselves by pushing against anything. Instead, they propel themselves using the "equal and opposite reaction" principle described by Newton. If you shoot a gun, you get a recoil. If you inflate a toy balloon but release it rather than tying it closed, it flies around the room. If you sit on a toy red wagon and chuck a cinder block in front of you, you'll make yourself and the wagon move backward a little. This reaction is what propels rockets. It's hard to control a rocket (or a deflating balloon), and that's why it took some serious engineering by von Braun and others to use this method of propulsion in a controlled way.
It is most disingenuous of you to suggest at 45:34 that "In fact, seeing stars through the Moon is actually a phenomenon occurring fairly often." Your citation of two odd and ambiguous reports of this from one or two hundred years ago is not what I would think of as scientifically compelling. The word occultation just means hiding, as when one object (the Moon) passes in front of another object (a star). Stars are vastly farther away from us than the Moon, and we know this because the Moon always hides the stars, rather than stars appearing in front of the Moon. If you ever do see a star in front of the dark part of a less-than-full Moon, it would be big news. I can pretty much guarantee that you would be (rightly) famous throughout the world, certainly throughout the world of science, if you could document such a sighting...unless the 'star' turned out to be an airplane or a man-made satellite.
Some of the other arguments are laughably wrong, but some I've not heard before. I would not dismiss these just because of the wrong arguments you list. Nevertheless, you weaken your argument overall if you have a bunch of clearly wrong parts in the video. It would be better if you have one really good, tightly considered argument that could not be explained away. That's how science generally works, guided not by a preponderance of weak evidence, but a clear, compelling, inescapable argument with repeatable observations.
I was so proud of you until you got to your own "proofs".
The curved shadows on the Moon (mentioned at 9:44) are due to the Moon's own sphericity, not to the Earth's. The Earth casts a shadow on the Moon only during lunar eclipses. During these events, the Moon just turns red, and you cannot see any sharp shadow edges (because our atmosphere scatters the light).
The spherical geometry argument (8:57) would be reasonable to sixth graders, as you say, only if they had some practical way to make the large-scale measurements required to compute the sum of angles of a giant triangle on a sphere. One cannot actually walk along the equator, turn right and walk to the North Pole, etc.
Eratosthenes' calculation (10:49) can only be considered a proof if you also have another compelling proof that the Sun is very, very, very far from the Earth, which is something the FEers don't believe.
You cannot see the curvature of the Earth from a plane ride (12:45). Planes just don't get high enough to see it. Likewise, the backyard imagery from GoPro cameras does not capture the curvature of the Earth. They don't even go as high as planes. The appearance of curvature in GoPro imagery is entirely a result of (fish-eye) lens effects. The video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfBPrdGLOlo is a great illustration. On it, at 48 seconds into the video, the horizon appears curved, but a few second later at 58 seconds it is not. At 1 minute 7 seconds, the horizon curves the other way! There are, however, multiple space-based images of the Earth showing its sphericity.
At 2:00 in the text on the video, you suggest there is a conflict between how Venus looks from Earth using commercially available telescopes and the view from "a super-powered special NASA Mason CGI telescope". There is no such telescope. As explained at http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/pia00104.html, the image you show at 2:10 is constructed by a computer that pieces together a whole bunch of little images from spaced-based radar sensors. Like you paint an entire wall with a paint roller that's only a few inches wide. The sensors flew to Venus and orbited it on the Magellan probe, so they were vastly closer than earth-based telescopes could get. They also weren't blurred by having to look through Earth's atmosphere. Because they're using radar, they can see through Venus' thick cloudy atmosphere. Visible light you see through your telescope can't do that. The image shown at the URL shows some missing bits at the bottom of the planet where there was no imagery taken. Your use of the image obscures this fact.
I am pretty sure that South America has not "moved". Part of your confusion seems to arise from the fact that Minnesota observes daylight saving time (DST) while most of South America does not. I would guess that's why Google said the times in places in Minnesota matched the times in places in South America one week, but not the next. Did you have to change your clock that weekend by any chance? Most countries in northern South America near the equator don't observe DST, although Paraguay and southern parts of Brazil do. Of course, being in the Southern Hemisphere and all, even if they did use DST, they would switch differently from Minnesota because they have winter while we have summer. You believe that part, right? By the way, what you are doing is not generally called "research". I'm not trying to be mean. It's just that we call it "study".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGx1zs0k4qw
Save This Engineer From Becoming a Flat Earther!
You know, this is what I predicted would happen. First it's Tila Tequila. Then it's people who coasted through physics. Now we have an actual engineer hinting he's a flat earther. Well, not an actual engineer...a structural engineer, but still. Don't get me wrong. We should question authority, but, my god, people!
I'm in the same category as you all , found the video's , doing a bit of investigating but still not sure whether to believe or not - but how does the moon shine during the day for us in the UK but yet still be in Australia 🤔 , I too have been met with criticism
Are you saying that both the UK and Australia can see the Moon at the same time (as confirmed, say, by a telephone or Skype connection between two observers)? That might be possible if the Aussie is in Darwin or possibly even Perth. But it's not possible if the Aussie is in Sydney or Melbourne or Hobart. Does anyone say otherwise?
+Enoch Furyan They are not both theories. A theory has to be consistent with all observations. You don't even have a world map with correct distances. Here are some other considerations for you to ponder. Yes, this is a re-paste, but it's my content... The Earth is a spinning globe for a multitude of reasons, too many to list completely here. But let's start with: 1. Distances are only correct on a globe. All flat projections are wrong. You guys don't even have a working map. 2. Time works with longitude, perfectly simply on a spinning globe, contrived to fit on your flat Earth. 3. Length of day varying with seasons, works at every latitude according to a tilted globe in orbit. Contrived to work on your flat Earth. 3b. 24 hour daylight in summer in Antarctica. 4. The sun sets below the horizon. On your flat Earth, it would be at 25 degrees above the horizon when it gets dark. 4b. The setting sun lights up clouds from underneath, impossible on the flat Earth. 5. The sun has the same size all day long, travels at the same angular speed all day. Both impossible on your flat Earth. 5b. The heat flux given by the sun would vary too much over the course of a day if the sun were that close (extra square of distance to account for) 5c. What would power the sun? Hundreds of GigaWatts, minimum. 5d. Spectral content of solar radiation tells us what temperature it's has at the surface (6000K) and it has sufficient mass to raise that to million of degrees at the core, sufficient to drive fusion. Wouldn't work if it were that close and that small, so what would power it? 6. The moon is a sphere. That's the only shape that looks like a circle from all angles. On a flat Earth and a close moon, people everywhere would not see the same face as everyone else. 6b. The lit part of the moon faces the sun. Always. 7. Tracks of stars. They turn around polaris, run straight at the equator, and spin in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere around the southern pole. 8. Coriolis. Winds turn around highs and lows instead of running from high to low. Currents also run perpendicular to pressure gradients instead of along them. 9. Tides. Spring and neap 14-day cycle. 12.42-hour semi-diurnal period. All consistent with moon in orbit around Earth. No explanation on Flat Earth. 9b. Internal tides that are affected by rotation (Coriolis), yielding tridimensionnel structure, e.g. Poincaré waves. 9c. Kelvin waves and Rossby waves. 10. Satelittes that give us GPS on the whole globe, satellite TV and satellite radio. 10b. Satelittes that have orbital tracks predicted a year in advance to the minute, a fact we program in at the lab to download data when some fly overhead. I didn't even mention observed curvature, did I? Yet I lie down on my SUP and the horizon changes. Winds and currents are killer. Rotation is required to observe them the way we do.
Another hero! But we have a few trivial quibbles. You don't have to agree with all facts to be a theory. Theories can be bad. Why, in the FE model, would the Sun be at 25 degrees above the horizon when it gets dark? Only a sphere looks like a [disk] from every angle. What happens to the horizon when you lay down on your [standup paddle] board?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p22LSKPUxJk
Google Project Loon Proves Flat Earth
At 3:17, you introduce the topic of communications delays that we sometimes witness, for instance, when people on television interview people who are far away. You mentioned that you "sure as hell don't" recall the delay during the communications in the Apollo missions. You must have a poor memory, because the delays were very noticeable. Or perhaps you didn't watch the missions live on television. Walter Cronkite explained why they were happening at the time. Your calculation about how much time the delay should be is incorrect. In short-range and chained communications, the bulk of the delay is due to circuitry and software involved in generating or regenerating the signal. But, once the electromagnetic signal is generated, it travels at the speed of light. For instance, when I call Australia, sometimes I don't notice any delay, but sometimes a bad connection creates long delays that make conversations difficult. For communications between the Earth and the Moon, a signal takes about 1.25 seconds to traverse the distance of about 380,000 kilometers, because the speed of light in a vacuum is about 300,000 kilometers per second. During the Apollo missions,they were using dedicated hardware, so the bulk of the delay was due to this distance. That's why it took a couple of seconds for the crew on the Moon to respond to messages from the Earth. One and a quarter seconds to get the message to them, and one and a quarter seconds for their response to get back to Earth. (Plus whatever human processing time it took for the astronauts to hear and understand the message and react to it.) I understand that videos today sometimes have the delays edited out so the exchanges are easier to follow, but you can check out the time-stamped original transcripts at https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11transcript_tec.html which show these delays for every exchange. If you didn't listen to the Apollo broadcasts in 1969, I would suggest you ask somebody who did about the delays. Or do you think those of us who remember them are making them up, or somehow have had our memories altered as part of a giant conspiracy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3hEUfRq-vg
NASA WTF Did You Do To Piss Off E.T - STS107 I Want ANSWERS On This One 11-21-2013
Your idea that you can discern where the Columbia disintegrated by ground reports of the fireballs is unconvincing. Who could have seen the fireballs? Given that the Columbia was at an altitude of 63 kilometers when it distintegrated, who could have witnessed the event, local weather permitting? The answer depends on whether the luminosity was bright enough and the event high enough above the ground to not be obscured by the curvature of the Earth. Putting the altitude into Bogna Szyk's "Earth Curvature Calculator" available at https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/earth-curvature, it is easy to see that anyone whose eyes were, say, 1.6 meters above the ground could see it if they were within 900 kilometers of its re-entry path. Apparently bright lights were seen as parts of the craft were shed even while it was in California airspace, thus it may have been visible to people in California, Nevada, Utah, almost all of Arizona, almost all of New Mexico and most of Texas. Keep in mind, that Columbia was moving pretty fast. It was travelling about 18 times the speed of sound when it broke up. That's 13,860 mph or close to 4 miles per second. The debris field was hundreds of kilometers long.
Are you suggesting at 4:06 and 4:42 that Russia would not be aware of a projectile the size of a shuttle in space above them, even one that is "coasting in silence"? You are aware, I assume, that during the Cold War, they sort of concentrated on such detection capability. In case it's not clear, the Columbia disaster happened at the end of its mission, fully two weeks after launch. The astronauts, and indeed NASA, were not aware of the seriousness of the problem, which was trivial in space, but became fatal when the vessel was exposed to very high temperatures during the friction heating of re-entry.
The video at 11:29 to 12:56 that you suggest is or may be "legit" seems to be an acknowledged product of special effects editing created by an amateur. You can find the original at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KS-ypy88fY&t=0s. The "TFH" in the upper, left corner stands for its creator "TheFakingHoaxer". Such imagery could also have been from Cuaron's popular movie Gravity with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prlIhY3e04k). As many commenters have asked already, who would be taking this video? For crying out loud, where are they standing? I kinda think that also explains why at 14:09 there is a NASA logo visible in the video of the shattered shuttle that is not present on the actual Space Shuttle Columbia. The movie makers slapped on a NASA logo. This fictional event is not at all similar to the actual event discussed in the overlain sound track which apparently comes from the Columbia disaster. The fictional image displays a shattered vessel floating in orbit; the Columbia actually distintegrated into fireballs from the extreme heating during re-entry. Putting the Columbia sound track over this video imagery is---what can I say---an evil lie. Perhaps also qualifying as an evil lie is cropping the labeling that identifies the video as fictional.
By the way, it would be much easier to read your titling and description if you made use of standard punctuation and sentence structure conventions.
Bizarrely, a commenter at that the TFH site insists the footage is "real". On 25 September 2016, Shafeeq Muhammad12 wrote "This is real I do special effects and to prove it's real any special effects artist has the ability to show it's various stages before the final render if it's really CGI then show the image in wire frame mode texture and material mode it's the real deal and people need to wake up! ...". So we live in perverse times in which people soberly concluding historical images such as the moon landing are fake and faked images are real.
There is a famous story of a class of high school students standing in line to peer through a telescope trained on the heavens. The physics teacher had set up a telescope to observe a planet and its moons. The first student could not see anything, so the teacher demonstrated how to adjust the focus for his nearsightedness. After some fiddling with the focus, the boy finally said he could see the planet and moons. Thirty-seven other students, each in turn, looked into the telescope and saw the planet and its moons. Finally, the second to last student looked into the telescope and said he couldn't see anything. Chided by the teacher to adjust the focus, the student persisted that he couldn't see anything. The now angry teacher shouted a bit and looked in the telescope himself. When he did he realized that the lens cap had been on the entire time. Nobody had seen anything, but they were too afraid of the teacher's wrath to admit it.
John C. Maxwell, the author of How Successful People Think, attributes this story to Benno Muller-Hill of University of Cologne, although I actually thought the story had happened to me. I was the student astronomer. I clearly remember the look on the teacher's face when he looked into the telescope lens but before he realized the lens cap was still on. If I am convinced today that it really happened to somebody else, and not to me, what should I think? I suppose it is conceivable that this is an instance of the Mandela effect that somehow proves the existence of parallel universes rather than old-fashioned pseudomnesia. But I think it is far more likely that I simply heard this story somewhere and over the years I gradually made it my own, perhaps like Helen Keller, Ronald Reagan, Brian Williams and probably everyone else in the world occasionally does. But my memory was so clear. Could the telescope story be mine? I went to parochial and public schools. When was there an occasion to use a telescope at night? Never. My high school physics teacher was all about F = ma and electricity and conservation of energy. He didn't care about astronomy. And his face is not the face of the physicist I remember setting up the telescope.
I now realize the story could not have happened to me. But on reflection, I also have some real doubts that it happened to Benno Muller-Hill either. For one thing, isn't it a little self-aggrandizing to be the only one of thirty-nine students to have the bravery to buck the conformism of a German gymnasium? And what's the chance that the bravest was also at the tail end of the line to have a look? But the really suspicious part is that the physics teacher somehow got the telescope set up to look at a particular planet and its moons while the lens cap was still on, or, presumably, put the lens cap back on between setting up the telescope and inviting the first student to have a look. I think that anyone who has handled telescopes would not reset the lens cap for fear of jarring the telescope and disturbing its alignment. But it is, nevertheless, a great story, and it's kind of an important story too. Even if it did not actually happen, it certainly conveys a larger truth about the prevalence and depths of conformism.
However, I do recall a similar event from my actual primary education. It is from my junior high school days. If you think I've plagiarized it from someone else, please don't tell me. It was in seventh or eighth grade, during a demonstration of gravity. The science teacher, Mr. Palmer, had evacuated a large glass cylinder of air to create a vacuum. In the top of the cylinder he'd placed two weights on a ledge. One was of lead, and the other was something much lighter, but I don't think it was a feather because a feather wouldn't have fit in the cylinder. Also inside the cylinder was a contraption that could drop the two objects simultaneously from the top of the cylinder. The vacuum pump made a lot of racket and it took a long time to evacuate the cylinder, so the prelude to the big experiment was a little boring. But when the teacher flipped the switch to drop the weights, it all happened very fast, and it made a loud noise when the lead weight hit the bottom of the cylinder. We'd all just witnessed an experiment of which Galileo would be proud. The teacher wanted us to acknowledge that the two weights had hit the bottom at the same time. And he asked me, "Did they hit the bottom at the same time?" I was a little startled to be called on, but I couldn't say yes, because I just couldn't tell. It was kind of what happens sometimes when I fall down. If I don't see the fall coming, I don't experience it like a process during which I am aware that I am falling. Instead, I am walking along and then, boom, I'm on the ground. Likewise, I didn't really see the weights fall. I wasn't sure if I heard one or two (muffled) thuds when they hit. The teacher asked some other people in the room and they didn't know either. That's when the teacher got mad. Maybe he thought we just weren't paying attention, but I genuinely couldn't tell whether the two weights hit at the same time either. When I said that, he got really mad. That's the level of conformism that was expected where I grew up.