As ridiculous as FE seems, prima facie, until it's proven false, I keep my mind open to plausible explanations for why:
A) the moon landings were all fake and we've never "been back"
B) there are no actual photos of the entire earth from space (unless you believe the sizes of the continents are changing by 30-60% every decade or so)
C) the only people on earth that we give billions of dollars to, to go to space, are faking any, let alone much (or all) of the footage, using green screens, parabolic "zero gravity" flights, actual hair spray to make their hair stand up, underwater studios (unless you believe in air bubbles in space)
You might say "but these items have better explanations than FE". Well let's hear those theories also. Let's not shoot down those who are proposing an outlandish, yet mostly comprehensive, theory, one that explains these anomalies as well as a plethora of others, like how did they use radio frequencies that don't even purportedly bounce off the ionosphere to communicate hundreds of miles during WWII, how can the horizon be seen above an item whose entirety should be hidden behind it, why is Antarctica, aside from a tiny portion, entirely off limits to most civilians, how was Felix Baumgartner able to slowly float up to nearly 30 miles without drifting a thousand or more miles because of the earth's rotation, etc.
Suggestions that these things are not even worthy of discussion, on a forum dedicated to conspiracy theories, have to be disingenuous.
Original Research
Let's not also forget that FE researchers are literally the only conspiracy theorists doing original research. These people will buy lasers that cost thousands of dollars, cameras, etc., and go to some large body of water (large lakes, bays, etc.) where they can test their hypothesis with an actual experiment. Everything else I see on here is pure speculation, or videos of interviews involving various professionals with dubious backstories (Malone, etc.).
Does it Matter
Pertaining the "would it even matter" argument, you honestly don't need a lukewarm IQ to imagine how much it would matter, if FE was real.
Principles
Most of us are here because we couldn't speak freely elsewhere, because "hate has no place on our platform" type communist bullshit. Now we're going to make the same kind of rules, especially banning arbitrary content that is desired by a clear majority, on a platform with already-existing mechanisms for getting rid of low quality postd (downvoting, hiding)? If FE posts are banned, this place is no better than TGA, and don't even pretend to be pro constitution when you can't even stand up for free speech about a conspiracy theory in a conspiracy theory forum.
I'm out of here, for good, if FE is banned. Aside from spam, illegal, doxxing, banning has no place on our platform.
Hey, I voted to let them post. But it concerns me a lot more that people like you don't think it has been proven false. If the earth was flat you would see the sun all the time. End of story. You can replicate that with a camera, a big circle on the floor and a light bulb. Try it in a dark basketball court. Case closed.
(And if you say the sun is a spotlight then you need to make it light a semicircle and get the correct sunrise headings for all positions in the circle. Again... impossible. )
Pardon the rambling chaos of this comment, I wrote it with voice to text while walking:
I'm not suggesting that the world is flat. It doesn't make any sense that it would be, unless we were literally in some form of Truman Show style simulation. But, it definitely hasn't been proven to be a globe, either. The supposedly non-composited images from space do not corroborate each other, because the continents are sized incorrectly and differently from photo to photo, and the colors change drastically (i'm not talking about film differences over the years, I'm talking about like entirely different apparent biomes). Every bit of the math involved in proving the globe also supports flat earth, including the scientist back in the whatever hundreds who calculated the size of the globe Earth using shadows.
It's one of those topics were the only way to get somebody to hear you out is to say "just go do some research and then tell me what you think", because you'll be surprised. Again, I don't believe in FE. It hasn't been proven, either. The fact that we can't even confidently understand the geometry of where we live, without indoctrination (how else would you know the Earth is a globe if somebody didn't tell you in school? Would you feel the roundness? Would you actually see something dropping below the horizon with your own bare eyes? You might see something Fade into the horizon, but pull up a large telescope and you'll see it is still there, etc.) is grounds enough for me to be interested in learning more. If you don't want to, don't take the pill, just ignore it. But if you care enough to debate about it in a comment with me, I suspect you were interested enough somewhere deep down inside that you at least want to explore. Rather than starting with flat earth content, I recommend watching a compilation of NASA fakery. Flat earth is more like a vehicle for research, because even though most of these people are working from the confirmation bias of believing that the Earth is flat, what they are really doing is exploring. They are taking something that can't be simply taken for its face value and going in trying to prove or disprove it. For example, even attempts to make fun of flat earthers end up sending up Balloons to the upper atmosphere with wide angle cameras and using the camera distortion to show that the Earth is flat, which people than immediately and unequivocally debunk by showing that even the math of the globe earth doesn't support seeing the kind of curve that they are seeing with their lenses. If you go down that rabbit hole, you will be absolutely stunned at the amount of real information that is out there in the amount of propaganda there is trying to prove that the world is a globe. That alone is enough reason to be interested (why is there so much money and effort put into convincingg people of the shape of our world?).
It was proven to be a spheroid shape thousands of years before the space age. They are not trying to convince you of the shape of the world. With their doctored images NASA are trying to convince you that they can and have successfully sent people into space who could then take great photos of the earth on an analogue film camera. It is that massive whopper of a lie that they are trying to protect. That's it, that's what the composites are about, at least it is the most logical reason. The way they try and convince you the pictures are the real deal, is by making the composites look how the earth is supposed to look like - How we know it to be - but it's stitched together from satellite images that are taken much closer. The composites were made to look like they were taken from much further away.
I am sorry for my tone earlier, but in your OP you have said some outrageously stupid and incorrect things that degrade everyone that has ever looked into a non FE conspiracy and discovered something original and worthwhile relaying to others. There is really some shocking nonsense going on in your OP text.
I don't have any hostility toward you. I've seen your posts on here in the past and I know you're not a shill. You're just frustrated at FE posters.
However, according to your logic herein, it would be more reasonable to assume NASA and the entire space edifice is perpetuated simply to convincing us that they can put people in space and take photos from space than it would be to assume they are hiding something bigger.
What I am suggesting is that these lies from NASA and the space edifice, as a whole, are cause for concern enough to justify looking into any theory that could possibly explain these lies. One such theory is flat earth. The reason I think this is worth exploring is because none of us have the ability, realistically, to go up and check for ourselves. Most everybody that many of us will ever talk to in the span of our lives believe what they believe about the shape of the earth and about outer space, not because they've observed it up close themselves, or even with a telescope in most cases (the majority have only looked up at the sky from the ground), but instead because of what they were taught by the government (public school, NASA, mockingbird media, etc.).
None of this is evidence that the Earth is flat, and I never claimed that it is. But what it is evidence of is a deception so vast as to span generations and consume budgets aggregating to trillions over its lifetime. I think that the most likely version of our earth is a planet orbiting around a star, because it seems to make sense, based on what we see from the ground. However, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that I am wrong about this, including, but certainly not limited to, some of the things that I mentioned in the paragraph below my A B C list in the OP. Keeping obvious spammers off the platform (people copy paste spamming over and over all day and upvoting themselves from alt accounts, etc.) will allow for Real discussion well preventing people like you from being frustrated by a constant barrage of spam.
I don't know what it's called, but this is the most corrosive fallacy of FE and beyond.
Yes, we abso-fucking-lutely can prove (insofar as anything outside of pure math can be proven) the shape of the earth without going into space. Because we can see our relationship with other objects in space, we can show that every observation of them we make alignes with the sphere shape model using well-understood geometry.
All these FE "free thinkers" love to tell others to "do your research" but not one of them has bothered to actually learn the math that they would need to prove either model. Honestly, I haven't either, but I know enough to prove that FE is obviously impossible because it really is that easy (grade 10 math). Really, any 3D shape but a spheroid is obviously out of the question, which is why they picked a 2D shape instead.
We can't see atoms either, and we never will, but we know they exist amd have certain properties because we can observe the results of those properties. FE is basically alchemy, in this metaphor; it can explain some things, but atoms explain those things, and many more. Shortcomings in atomic theory don't a) prove that it's wrong, merely incomplete, b) justify using an obviously incorrect replacement or c) indicate a conspiracy.