Despite the claims from flat-earthers, there are plenty of ways to know that the world is round. One quick option is to check out NASA's image library, which is chock-full of nice, curvy pictures of the globe taken from the International Space Station. If NASA is hoaxing everyone, they're committed to the bit.
Don't trust NASA? The Russians also snap pictures of the round Earth, Space.com reported. So does Japan's space agency. And China's.
For the flat-earther convinced that all these countries put aside their political tensions in order to maintain the fiction of a spherical Earth, there are also ways to check on the planet's shape with one's own eyes. One of the simplest is to go to a harbor and watch the ships depart. As a ship disappears over the horizon, the bottom of the ship will go first, followed gradually by the mast.
You can also take a page out of the ancient Greeks' book. Ancient Hellenistic philosophers figured out that the world had to be a globe based on a few observations. One was that the stars aren't the same in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: From opposite halves of the Earth, you're clearly looking out at different quadrants of space. Another was that Earth's shadow on the moon's surface during lunar eclipses is curved.
The Greeks even figured out how to calculate an approximate circumference of the Earth with no fancier tools than a stick and the light of the sun. By measuring the angle of a shadow cast by the sun at the same time and day in two cities a known distance apart, the philosopher Eratosthenes was able to calculate that the planet's circumference was between 24,000 and about 29,000 miles (38,600 and 46,670 kilometers). (It's actually 24,900 miles.) The very fact that the angle of the sun differs on different parts of the planet indicates that we're all sitting on a globe.
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