Rant: I spent two years arguing about flat earth until a guy in a Denver coffee shop asked me one simple question

I was deep into all the usual arguments, you know, the curvature stuff, the NASA lies. This older guy at the next table overheard me and just asked, 'If it's all fake, why do cargo ships disappear hull-first over the horizon?' I tried to explain it with perspective, but he pulled out his phone and showed me a video he took from a beach in Maine last summer. You could literally watch a tanker sink bottom-up until it was gone. My whole spiel just fell apart right there. Has anyone else had a basic, real-world observation completely dismantle a theory they were defending?

3 comments

3 Comments

river_hart182d agoMost Upvoted

The zoom lens thing gets thrown around a lot but it doesn't hold up when you actually watch the video. I've seen those same clips where people zoom in and the hull is still gone, not just hidden by waves or haze. The Bedford Level experiment you mentioned actually had major issues with refraction and the observers not accounting for it properly. Real world tests like the one at Lake Pontchartrain or the Chicago skyline from across Lake Michigan show the opposite of what flat earth predicts. At some point you gotta trust what your own eyes show you over a theory that needs constant mental gymnastics to work.

sean_foster522mo ago

Hold up, that video proves nothing. A simple zoom lens brings the hull back into view, which shows it's just an effect of how our eyes work over distance, not actual curvature. The guy probably didn't know about the Bedford Level experiment that proved a flat water surface over miles. You're letting one clip undo years of looking into how they fake all the footage.

jakewhite2mo ago

That's the thing about real world proof, it cuts through all the online theory. People get so caught up in arguing about pixels on a screen they forget to just look at a boat. The simplest answer is usually the right one.