Do you think the earth is flat or is it all just a conspiracy?

The fact that the earth is a sphere has been known to sailors for centuries. Even before there was GPS, which cannot function without earthly satellites, they have determined their latitude with the height of the sun above the horizon, which would not be possible on a shallow earth, and that the flat maps they used were just an angular Mercator projection of the sphere, they also knew.

Everyone is convinced of the curvature by placing themselves on the beach with a binocular and seeing something like this:

https://youtu.be/i0ObTd7DLMw

https://youtu.be/zYYZMJL5aBc

Only that one sees a sharp horizon, whose distance depends on the height of the observer (and therefore cannot be the edge of the disc), should be sufficient with some thinking, because on a flat earth the horizon would be infinitely far away and would always disappear in haze.

Now, of course, there are people who paint an escape point on the horizon, and this is a popular auxiliary construct of painters and drawing to construct a credible perspective, but is wrong, because the escape point is infinitely far away and the horizon is not.

There are people who expect an angular deviation of the horizon under the horizontal from a sphere, but who forget that the radius of curvature of the Earth is more than 6000km, and that you have to go to at least 100km in height to see an angular deviation with the naked eye.

And there are people who recognize the sharp horizon, but say that it is flat – which cannot be the case, because the horizon is not an area, but a line, and it runs symmetrically around the observer in every direction equally far away: when you rise vertically with a rocket, this line slowly moves back to an ever greater distance until it finally corresponds to a large circle around the planet.

Furthermore, there are people who believe in standing waves between the edges of the earth's disc, and that the sharp horizon would come. With standing waves, however, the water does not stand still, it swings up and down, only the positions of the nodes are constant – so you should see different situations at different times, but you do not.

And then there are people who lead a rowing boat on the horizon, which is initially invisible due to the limited resolution of a digital camera, and then becomes visible with optical zoom – these people do not understand that zoom only increases the image, but does not draw things closer. The effect of the horizon can only be seen with sufficiently large vehicles whose lower part is then cut off from the horizon and is not visible with zoom – see the above videos. And then there are those who reject the above-mentioned view with the binoculars because "the lenses are made extra round so that it looks round" – also the human eye is round: who manipulated this?

I have written this once (and copy it since then) for those who desperately seek arguments against flat eagles, not for flat eagles themselves – who does not already accept reality, he will also not accept arguments. You can laugh about it, but only until such people get power*. The despair in argument can also be intent: as some alleged flat eagle wants to only annoy one, and then builds straw men, proud of his dialectical skill, such people are not interested in truth.

*) Conspiracy theory has believed that witches cause bad weather and burned innocent women, conspiracy theory has believed that Jews form a world conspiracy and gassed them. I'm not talking about ignorance, that's just lack of information and easy to fix by giving information, but conspiracy theory can't start with information, rejects it and rejects the angry one that brings it.