Despite the fact that I've written articles debunking flat earth using some of the most simple observable ways possible to understand how to determine for yourself that the earth is a sphere, people have still complained that the math is too complicated.

I've even explained Why The Earth Looks So Flat if It's a Sphere and given multiple ways we can know it's not flat, but flat earthers still insist that it looks flat, therefore it is. No further inquiry necessary for them to claim to have overturned over 2000 years of scientific inquiry on the subject.

Image Credit: Mlive.com Fair Use Claim

So, today I'm addressing how we know the earth is curved through simple observations of what can't be seen. While it may sound a bit oxymoronic to observe what we can't see, you'll see, as the image above illustrates, why it makes perfect sense and why people for millenia have used this fact as evidence for a round earth.

We have already discussed how and why things disappear over the horizon in the article Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Horizon, where we also debunked the flat earth claim that objects disappear bottom first due to perspective, as in the image below of objects actually disappearing due to perspective, but not disappearing bottom first.

Image Credit: Cherry Point Marines
Example of Vanishing Point. Note how the cones do not disappear bottom first, but simply get smaller and smaller until they seem to vanish in the distance

Using Missing Parts of Buildings Confirms the Globe

Since it's difficult to know exactly how far ships are away from us, buildings are a better choice for determining if the distances match the curvature of the earth, or are truly just at their vanishing point, as flat earthers claim.

Fortunately, we have ample photographs of this too, often thanks to flat earthers who think they have proved the earth is flat, while they ignore the missing bottoms of the buildings they are photographing. Some of the most famous and controversial are the Chicago Skyline images which, like the image in my post This is the Single Best Evidence Flat Earthers Have, and it Still Proves the Earth is a Sphere was taken by a photographer who actually waited for the correct mirage conditions to get the shot when he otherwise would not be able to, and also states the earth is a spherical, since he knows he cannot get these types of shots on a regular basis, as would be expected on a flat earth.

Image Credit: Joshua Nowicki from his Facebook Page

Interestingly, this image first featured on a local TV station as evidence of mirage conditions. Flat earthers hilariously, though think these types of mirage conditions are a lie despite the newscaster having not only predicted mirage conditions the night before this image aired, but he actually shows what those conditions look like! Both the newscast showing the photo and the newscast predicting it are in this follow-up article from the news station called Skyline Skepticism, the Lake Michagan Mirage.

In science, the best measure of a good theory is it's ability to predict events accurately; something this newscaster did accurately, but that no flat earth model can do. If you want to shut down a flat earther, just ask them to predict any natural event whatsoever, such as moon phases or an eclipse.

Showing What is Missing

But flat earthers were not satisfied with this, and demanded that the Chicago image is NOT a mirage. One flat earther set out to prove this, and did a video on his bid to Prove the Chicago Skyline Image is Not a Mirage by taking a boat across Lake Michigan while filming the skyline. While he predictably declared victory and maintains the earth is flat, he seems to have not watched his own video.

Fortunately, others did and, by showing what is missing in Skiba's video, proved the earth to not only curve, but to be a globe the size of the earth. The image below is a compilation of the images in the Skiba video at different distances from the skyline and then overlaid with an image of the full sized tower matched to the same size.

Image Credit: The Quagmire Via Flat Earth Math

Here's a closeup of the 31 mile image of the Willis Tower overlaid with an image of the full tower down to the shoreline to show how much of the building is actually missing.

Image Credit: Rob Skiba. Edit by Me. Note, this is the same building, the left image has just been taken from a different angle than the right one.

See how much of the building is missing? For most people, this would be sufficient proof that the horizon is the curvature of the earth and the building is behind it, but not so for flat earthers who will say the building is simply disappearing by perspective.

In this particular case, Skiba went across the lake and took different images at different distances, giving us several data points. With this data, we can take this one step further and, by how much of the buildings are missing at what distance, can plot this on a graph to show whether the distances are consistent with the earth as a sphere the size of our own.

Image Credit: The Quagmire

Sure enough, plotting the distances proves that the amount of the buildings missing is not due to arbitrary environmental conditions or perspective, but is measurable and predictable as the same amount of curvature we would expect on a sphere the size of the earth.

I promised that I would not go into the math since the 'complex math' was the complaint in one of my previous articles. However, without some degree of math, there is no possibility of refuting claims such as objects disappearing bottom first due to refraction verses being due to the curvature of the earth. Anyone who is interested can visit the rebuttal video below which goes into the math used to create this graph.

I hope this clarifies some of these concepts for anyone who may not understand how science knows for sure the earth is a sphere. Many claims that the earth is flat focus on flat earth claims that globe science is 'scientism' or 'pseudoscience' because they claim:

1. They are unable to see the curvature
2. Mainstream science is not observable or measurable by most people
3. No one has ever measured the curvature

Yet that is exactly what we did here, and did it using a video from a flat earher, so they can't scream the video was faked or was CGI, like they continually do with any videos or images that do not support their ridiculous claims. We've shown here that science of the globe is not only observable and measurable, but repeatable, falsifiable, and better yet, predictable.

This article shows that we see the curvature all the time. The ability of a theory to predict what we will observe is the hallmark of good science and, using the globe model, we can predict how much of buildings will be missing at different distances. Not only that, but the globe model predicts other natural phenomenon such as eclipses, meteor showers, moon phases, and much more that the flat earth model does not and cannot predict. Sorry, flat earthers, the earth is not flat, but a sphere, and one the size science claims it is. And yes, this fact is actually science, as we just proved.