@veeall my biggest question is similar to yours, but from the perspective of the horizon.
The concept of how they say that a ship sailing away from you starts to look like it disappears into the ocean because it is on the downside of the earth's curve that you can't see. That sounds nice but I don't feel like that works in practice, one of the better FE experiment videos I saw showed that with high-power zoom you can still see those "vanished" ships, it's more of a vanishing perspective effect.
But I think of curve in the horizon sense, from left to right in your field of view. I think the calculation is called 'arc minutes' or something. If you were able to measure how long your FOV is, which should be possible with known landmarks, and you were able to measure the amount of "drop" the center of your FOV, then you can calculate the rate of curve. This is a crude drawing, but green is horizon that you can see, red is just a flat line superimposed over the horizon, and yellow is some small amount of drop that you can measure of the earth's curveature.
I'm not convinced that calculation experiment would equal the circumference of the Earth. From googling various terms, the rate of the Earth's curve is supposed to be 1/8th of an inch over 100 feet. So if you can figure out how wide your FOV is (or half of it from center to left or center to right) you should be able to validate how much curve you should see at either end. We all know that even from the best of scenic views, there is no perceptible curve. My issue with that is that it seems like this would calculate out to a huuuuuuuuuge Earth. I know the Earth is very big, but I just really want to see the numbers prove out. I can drive a good chunk of a map in a day, you can fly a much much greater distance in the same amount of time. It's not impossibly huge. I feel like if you were able to prove there are shenanigans with what we're being told, this should be how you can prove it. It doesn't seem like it bends enough such that if you extrapolate that out you will get the 24,900 mile circumference. Based on that 1/8" inch calculation (assuming it is accurate) then in 2000 miles there should be 1100 feet of decline from the horizon. (maybe I didn't do the math right).
Recently David Blaine did that Ascencion special with the balloon. Here he's at 24,000 feet and you can overlay a line on this horizon and it doesn't drop anything on either end. it may look like its curved but it's due to some land features that are a different color close to the horizon, when you look at it closely. Now they say you can't detect curvature at this level, you have to over 35,000 feet. It just seems like it curves so little, how could it really be a ball 25000 miles in circumference. It's got to bend somewhere dammit.
Anyway, that's my rant. They teach you that you can see the curve when its a ship sailing from a harbor, but if you want to prove it for yourself, you can't because you have to nearly be in space to see the slightest amount of curve by the naked eye. why the discrepancy?
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