Point: Hundreds of years of scientific evidence prove that the Earth is an oblate spheroid.
Look, I don’t even know how this is still a discussion. You know how people, and by people I mean second-grade teachers because they’re the only demographic on God’s green (oblate, spheroid) Earth that should still be having this discussion, say that Columbus wanted to prove the earth is round? Well, much like Washington’s cherry tree, the United States’ unambiguous moral imperative during the Cold War, and everything else you learned in elementary school history class, that’s total bullshit. People already knew the earth was round when Columbus sailed off on his little genocidal tantrum. The Greeks figured it out in 600 B.C., along with democracy and lube, and the fact that people are still fucking up all three of those things in 2018 is a disgrace. All of you should be embarrassed. I have a goddamn PhD.
Counterpoint: This great blue sea before me stretches flat and true to the horizon.
You speak of facts and figures and history, yet have you ever spent a month on the open sea? All that is and has been vanishes; there is no history, no context, no self, no point of view. Man dies and is reborn as a thing that works the sails, component and dependent, knowing only port and starboard, rope and grommet; and in this state of listless vacancy, this opium-like death of ego and unconscious mystic detachment, only that which is visible is real: the deep, blue, bottomless soul of the ocean, the celestial emptiness of the sky, and the seam that binds them, a straight line, joining two half-seen, elusive points at the edge of sight. A round globe? Nay, such thoughts are for the shore. At sea the earth is flat, and if thy mind wanders beyond the expanse it might fall over the edge, into blackness.
— M. Kreutter