[wolfgke]

> Just curious, do Flat Earthers never fly the earth a round to confirm? I mean, leaving from America to go to Europe then Asia then America. Doesn't have to go to the space to see the shape of the earth but just keep looping the round earth should be sufficient.

If you look at the picture at

https://wiki.tfes.org/Flat_Earth_-_Frequently_Asked_Question...

you see that what you call "fly around the earth" is simply flying some giant "circle" (perhaps not a perfect circle in the geometric sense, but you get the idea) in the Flat Earthers' model.

[codebook]

If they have only one flat model, then probably pole-to-pole might be the best to explain... the plain cannot suddenly go to the opposite continent, for instance goes to Australia then south pole then south America...

[jtbayly]

Or challenge them to a race between those locations.

[munk-a]

Ah, so that's why it takes as long to fly from San Fran to Tokyo as it does to fly from Santiago to Sydney - because the government purposefully slows down plans between San Fran and Tokyo...

I feel like it'd be pretty trivial to charter a flight from Punta Arenas Chile to Melbourne Australia and blow the minds of some flat earthers... but, eh, willfully ignorant people are going to be willfully ignorant.

[tasty_freeze]

Airline flights can be tracked online, eg at https://flightaware.com

For parts of the Pacific there is no coverage, not because GPS doesn't work there, but because there are no ground stations to pick up the telemetry from the airplanes. Such flights take off, fly over the ocean, then "disappear" for a few hours, then reappear when they approach Australia.

Flat Earthers take this to be evidence of the cover-up.

[munk-a]

I am assuming (probably falsely) that if you assume the earth is flat then you assume there is an edge somewhere - not anywhere but in some particular spot. If the assumption is that it's around the south pole (as per the map in the linked page) then a flight from Chile to Australia would be among the longest flights possible, it would be hard to argue[1] against a round earth when that flight took a few hours when Bejing -> Melbourne or even London -> Melbourne is a clearly shorter according to their flat earth map.

As per my general ambivalence to disproving their ignorance though - at this point they might suspect... anything really, maybe they were secretly drugged during the flight to feel like it was really quick and their watches were adjusted or maybe the lizard people used their warp technology to teleport them part of the way. Honestly, willful ignorance gonna willfully ignorant - a conspiracy theorist that's in deep can always find a new excuse.

1. Argue logically that is... willfully ignorant people gonna willfully ignorant as mentioned in the comment above

[Thrymr]

It's a nice touch that that image of the flat Earth seems to have been generated from satellite imagery of the continents.