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I finally looked into that 'flat earth' map thing my neighbor kept going on about
He kept saying the flight paths didn't make sense, so I pulled up a globe and a ruler and spent an hour last Tuesday checking routes from Sydney to Santiago. The straight line on a flat map would go over Africa, but on a globe it's a curve over the Pacific, which matches the real flight path perfectly. Has anyone else actually tried to plot a long flight to see if it checks out?
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jessel351mo ago
A pilot friend once explained how they use great circle routes for navigation. Those curved paths are the shortest distance on a sphere, which your ruler test proved. It's a solid way to show how the real world works.
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christopher_ellis781mo ago
Hold on, doesn't that just prove maps are flat? If the shortest path curves on a globe, @jessel35, but looks straight on a flat map, maybe the map is right. That ruler test seems backwards to me.
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shane_perry2925d ago
But what if the globe itself is the wrong model? You're starting with a ball and then saying the flight matches it, but that's just going in a circle. Maybe airlines publish those curved paths because they have to work with the round earth maps everyone uses. Couldn't the real shortest path be the straight line, and the whole navigation system is just built on a mistake?
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