Originally Posted by Chula Vista (Post 1766185)

P A N = Troll.

Let's stop feeding him and maybe he'll go away.

Next he'll claim that the International Space Station is a hoax too.

http://www.boeing.com/resources/boei...02_960x600.jpg

Originally Posted by Aloysius (Post 1766245)

What you describe is not what happens when viewing ships. The ship disappears from the bottom up - with a large ship and calm sea you can see this with the naked eye. Use binoculars and you will see the ship as if it were closer, but the same amount of the bottom of the ship will be out of view. I strongly encourage you to try this yourself if you live close enough to a port - this is science from first principles, and all science is ultimately based on common sense and first principles.

The issue of atmosphere shouldn't be hard to understand - even if you don't like the term gravity you will notice that you don't float off into space, and neither does your car, nor the air that surrounds us. These things have mass. We can see that things with mass don't float off into space, and we call that gravity, but if you don't like that term you can call it Fred.

Originally Posted by Janszoon (Post 1766176)

Sure you can. People have observed ships disappearing over the horizon for centuries. The horizon line we see is created by the fact that the surface of the Earth is curving away from the observer.

Originally Posted by P A N (Post 1766287)

ships don't actually disappear from the ground up. it kinda looks like they do, but what's actually happening is as the ships goes further away, a mirage of the top of the ship appears at the bottom of the ship. in a lot of cases, when they get really far out, they look like just floating masts.

Originally Posted by Frownland (Post 1766290)

:laughing:

Pure genius.

Originally Posted by P A N (Post 1766289)

that would be detecting the curvature. much different than seeing it.

Originally Posted by P A N (Post 1766289)

and just to test your logic about horizons a bit, would the horizon not still exist if the earth were flat? to me the horizon is just where the sky meets the earth.

Originally Posted by P A N (Post 1766288)

it looks like some people have basically said what i wanted to get out though, which is that a gaseous system within a vacuous expanse does not exist other than in the case of earth.

Originally Posted by P A N (Post 1766288)

next question:

why can't a plane fly into the rotation of the earth to shorten its flight times?

Originally Posted by Janszoon (Post 1766293)

No, when you look at the horizon, you are literally seeing the point at which the surface of the Earth is curving away from your line of sight.


I'd imagine that would depend on how far away from you the surface of your imaginary flat plane stretched and how much the thickness of atmosphere at that distance diffused light.