This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by Mordhaus.

Very cool vid

*dupeof=https://videosift.com/video/Cosmos-Eratosthenes-calculates-Earths-circumference

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by oritteropo. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

Eratosthenes actually knew from local lore that the sun shone directly down a well at modern day Aswan, in Egypt, on the summer solstice. On the same day at noon he measured the sun's angle using a vertical stick at Alexandria.

Well explained here: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/big-history-project/solar-system-and-earth/knowing-solar-system-earth/a/eratosthenes-of-cyrene

Talking to a conspiracy theorist about either the moon landing or the flat earth theory is exasperating. They discredit a scientific theory on the slightest technicality in your brief retelling of it, but if you baulk at their vague one-sentence alternative you're brainwashed.

You can tell them about the retroreflectors, or the satellite images we have of the landing site. You can tell them about sundials, the phases of the moon or constellations.

They don't care - anything can be faked and their definition of "proof" boils down to seeing it with their own naked eye.

It's totally impractical to take everyone up in a Red Bull balloon to see the curvature of the Earth for themselves. Presumably you'd have to take everyone up twice at two locations to show that the circular horizon is not an edge. Or kill two birds with one stone and take them to the moon landing site and back again because nothing less will suffice.

Because if I take them to the most advanced telescope in the world and focus it on the moon landing site - the image could be faked. You could show them how the telescope works, but each component could produce a faked output. The only way they would accept the telescope information is if they built it themselves from raw materials - oh you used a standard electronic device such as a basic motor? Illuminati dude, that thing can produce EM waves that fake the image. You're going to use a Macbook to read the USB output? Are you a shill?

Literally nothing is good enough but they are all, without exception, too fucking lazy to go and prove it to themselves from first principles.

Which is called "getting a degree in physics", where you are also taught to question every step, AKA being "brainwashed".

oh...whoops

You don't need any fancy equipment to know that the earth is a sphere. If you watch a ship sail over the horizon you will see the hull disappear first, followed by the sails, then the top of the masts. Also, during a lunar eclipse the earth's shadow is round against the moon.

This guy proved the earth to be round in 240 B.C.E. in a totally awesome experiment.

Like Stephen says, there is no evidence of people thinking the earth to be flat. It was believed that the earth was the center of the solar system but that is because the bible said it was, and more importantly, the ancient Greeks thought it was.

If you think about it you would have to be very stupid to believe that the earth is flat. Travel in any direction and you can see things that you could not see before.

For those who are fooled by the "scientist used to think the earth was flat"-argument, I kindly refer you to the video I posted on Eratosthenes, who , by employing the SCIENTIFIC method, calculated the earths circumference , 300 years before Christianity was born, and 800 years before that same death cult lead the human race into a 500-year sleep.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Cosmos-Eratosthenes-calculates-Earths-circumference

RE: Scientific method
The clip is a dupe
http://www.videosift.com/video/Cosmos-Eratosthenes-calculates-Earths-circumference

*comedy

I mean, it's really easy for any semi-intelligent person to laugh off, but at the same time... wasn't it just a few hundred years ago that the world's greatest minds were insistent on the fact that the Earth was flat?

No, check your history books again. Even if you ignore all of the non-occidental thinkers who came before, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference pretty accurately back around 250 BC. Even back then, he only had an error of about 1,000 to 5,000 miles from the actual circumference, depending on who you ask.

And even if you had been right, the issue here isn't ignorance or a lack of evidence - which was how early civilizations came to believe in a flat Earth - it's the complete dismissal of the abundance of solid evidence to the contrary.

I see my Carl Sagan - Eratosthenes clip has been, by probably by Satan himself, insultingly "related" to this cruel embarrassment to the human mind, I ask you humbly to spare a vote to the man who, 200 years before the birth of this womans religion, figured out, and measured, what she still cant understand..
http://www.videosift.com/video/Cosmos-Eratosthenes-calculates-Earths-circumference

Well, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference, which is more than just guessing its shape.

But still,information flow hasnt always been like it is now, to put it mildly. One reason I dig this story so much (apart from Sagan telling it) is that this little piece of information, a mere curiousity, could do so much if the right brain happens to come across it, this is why I love the internet so much, it really has potential to change the world, simply over the information flow, its so easy to get information nowadays..

Anyway, for the greater part of the last 3000 years, and certainly all the time before it, information flow sucked. Yes, people back this and this time figured it out, but its not like putting it on Youtube and everyone can cry OLD! three days later. No, most information just got stowed away and forgotten by everyone for hundreds of years before re-emerging, and wars were not being broadcast live on CNN either, news took weeks and months to reach more distant places, and the information had suffered through a heavy game of "telephone" before reaching the majority's ears.

This lack of effective communication prevented people from hearing about disease outbreaks, it created ignorant religions and left most people clueless. Hence you get times like the dark ages, where people thought the earth was flat, hundreds of years after these discoveries. It is readily apparent from an honest interpretation of the Qu'ran, for instance, that Muhammed thought the earth was flat as a pancake.

Errrm, feels very errendous to claim that Eratosthenes (ca 240 BC) 'discovered' that the earth was not flat when that fact had been a strong hypothesis since atleast ca 600 BC (and probebly as far back as 900 BC from memory) and Aristotle (ca 330 BC) provided quite compelling observational evidence for a spherical earth, Eratosthenes really mostly added to that.

So contrary to what is still sometimes a popular belief 'intellectuals' in the European (dont know enough about arabic/asian/south american etc to comment really) world have not believed the earth to be flat for atleast 2000 years and probebly longer.

Still Carl Sagan does have a purty voice, rawr.

No real use? Surely civilisation would have progressed at a faster pace if the early sailors did not fear the edge of the earth...

Eratosthenes was a genius >< Someone should put that on an IQ test. Ouch.