How Do We Know the Earth Isn’t Flat? We Asked a NASA Expert: Episode 53
2 min readHow Do We Know the Earth Isn’t Flat? We Asked a NASA Expert: Episode 53 This was a magical revelation for the Greeks and the Egyptians, who were able to see from the motions of the stars and the way the Sun moved. They saw the way the Sun’s shadow worked in different places. And they figured, well, that’s only possible if the Earth is round. And they took that information and it extended into the time of the great mariners that explored our Earth by ships. They made the first orbit of Earth by sea, and they knew the Earth was round, allowing them to go across one ocean and come back home the other way. If the Earth were flat, they would have sailed off the end. And so we knew that. But then, at the dawn of the space age, in the late 50s and 60s, we were...