The thing about this particular topic is that humanity has known this fact for millennia, not because we flew or went to space, but because we sailed. Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Where I grew up you can stand by the shore on a clear day and see the tree tops on the neighboring island, but not the beach. Sailing there, the beach emerges from the horizon.
The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
"The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass."
The main cause I could determine was rather a deep trauma of some sort or the other and with the result of them now mistrusting everything mainstream by principle and only now trusting their eyes and "intuition".
And believing the earth is flat is maybe the most anti mainstream position ever.
Edit: and my conclusion sort of was, that the only thing, that would really convince some of them is indeed to let them see it with their own eyes. So maybe I will organize a high altitude baloon trip for some people some day, but personally I also always wanted to get as close to space as possible at least once in my life..
Greeks calculated the circumference of the world based on the shadows of obelisks. Parallax was used to calculate how far the moon was, & from that how large
(people didn't think Columbus would fall off the edge of the world, they thought he wouldn't make it to India, which to be fair, if it was only ocean between the Pacific & Atlantic, him & his crew most definitely would've perished)
> Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Of which, until recently, there were very few. Civilizations developed not just on the coasts, but along the rivers, and until ~industrial revolution, the bulk of people at any given time didn't really have a chance to see the sea.
> The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
Yup, that is still true for humanity; what's changed in the last few hundred years is trains, cars, airplanes, and them all becoming broadly accessible to people.
Still, that was then. Today, "flat Earthers" are mostly just peer groups of shitposters or extreme contrarians.
It varies somewhat by continent, but living very far from the ocean is what’s new. Humans have historically had by far the densest population near shores - river deltas, archipelagos, and so on.
The notion that “seeing the ocean” was a very special thing to most people in history is unlikely. To a Hungarian peasant or a Mongol shepherd, sure, but there were far more people along the Mediterranean coast, the Pearl River delta, and so on.
The reason is very simple: Ocean = free food.