You Can Rise Above the Noise

We’ve been told from a young age that the Earth is round. The government and private organizations have provided us with this information; however, could you prove, based on what you sense everyday, that the Earth ISN’T flat?

The so-called sinking ship effect (that a ship disappears into the distance, from bottom to top, because it was blocked by the curve of water) isn’t valid. This is because when you look through a telescope the entire ship can be seen, so the bottom of the ship isn’t really being “blocked” by the curvature of the Earth. What we’re really seeing is the vanishing point of our own finite human perception that makes the bottom of the ship seem to disappear, when it is too far away to distinguish from the water. Several mathematicians and pysicists reported that our perception of the horizon would be exactly the same on a flat Earth. Railroad tracks are constructed to be flat, but the curvature of the Earth is estimated by scientists to be 7.98 inches per mile. The Trans-Siberian Railway is about 14,949 miles, so on a round Earth one end of the railway should be over a mile above the ground. But, it is not. Maybe the Earth is flat. The government just generated images of a round Earth from a “space expedition” to look more advanced than Russia.

Are you a flat earther yet? It doesn’t matter (by the way evidence supporting that the Earth is round is perfectly valid). The reason I’m writing about this is that we sometimes believe any statistic, ideology or news story thrown at us without even questioning it. Example: Australia enacted gun safety in 1996 and never had a shooting since. This is a claim that no specific statistic has supported. A 2017 study from the University of Melbourne showed that the homicide rate in Australia has decreased at the same rate as in the U.S., with gun control having no differential impact. On the other side of the political spectrum, Jack Kingston said that he saw a 1964 Congressional Budget Office report that said that Medicaid would cost $9 billion dollars 10 years later. The CBO didn’t exist until 1974. These facts do not fully represent my beliefs on either of these issues, but regardless, the truth often takes much more effort to find than the story we are told.

Similarly, all the statistics I provided about the flat earth are just false or skewed.