• Question: is the earth round or flat?

    Asked by anon-200870 to Rosemary, Oliver, Leigh, Jordan, Hannah, David on 7 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-200919.
    • Photo: Leigh Kesler

      Leigh Kesler answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      The Earth is closest in shape to a sphere or a ball. It basically looks like a ball that has been squished just a little bit so it bulges out around the Equator.

    • Photo: David Walker-Sünderhauf

      David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 10 Mar 2019: last edited 10 Mar 2019 2:26 pm

      I actually happened to come across a really good video from the BBC today that explains lots of different ways how we can observe that the earth is indeed round: https://www.bbcearth.com/blog/?article=why-some-people-believe-the-earth-is-flat
      Flat earth is indeed just a conspiracy theory that believes NASA is out to get us and all pictures from space must be faked 🌍

    • Photo: Oliver Gordon

      Oliver Gordon answered on 10 Mar 2019: last edited 10 Mar 2019 6:17 pm

      The earth is mostly round, with a few lumps in it. There’s a lot of ways we know it’s round (the video David linked to is also good!), but the most important one from a scientific point is that all the maths and experiments we think we understand only make sense if the Earth is round. If it’s flat, then this would mean that basically everything we can see and explain about the Earth is suddenly completely wrong, which is incredibly unlikely.
      .
      The idea that the Earth is flat is a bit silly to us – what would anybody have to gain by pretending that the earth is round when it isn’t? Why would scientists suddenly lie to the world about one single, very specific thing?
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      There’s also some pretty cool research from a guy called David Grimes about how long you can keep something a secret for. He figured out that to fake the moon landing in the 1960s, it would have been exposed in 4 years or less. It’s been over 50! If the Earth was actually flat and scientists were made to lie about it, because basically all the scientists in the world would have to be in on the secret, then the secret would probably be exposed in a few days. And that hasn’t happened yet!

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