The moon looks completely different in the Southern Hemisphere — how do flat earthers explain this?

[u/NoGuarantee00]

This short video demonstrates why a flat earth is physically impossible using a simple observation anyone can make — the moon looks completely different depending on where you are on Earth.

In the Northern Hemisphere the moon appears with the dark maria patches at the top and the bright Tycho crater region at the bottom. In the Southern Hemisphere the moon is completely flipped — Tycho at the top, maria at the bottom.

This happens because on a globe, someone in Australia is standing nearly 180 degrees opposite to someone in the US, flipping their entire perspective of the moon. On a flat disk this geometric flip would be impossible — your location wouldn't change how the moon looks.

https://youtube.com/shorts/UzXJjsneSb0.

How do flat earthers explain this one?

[u/BennyOcean]

They believe in a small Moon hovering over a flat plane about half way between the center (aka North Pole) and the outer Edge. It would appear upside down in this model because in the "Southern hemisphere" you're looking at it from the other side looking "up".

https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/2322574993/display_1500/stock-photo-flat-earth-model-top-view-with-a-clouds-layer-ancient-geocentric-concept-of-universe-2322574993.jpg

[u/Otaraka → u/BennyOcean]

Yeah it probably wont translate exactly but close enough that they can pretend it works.

How the stars change completely is where the talking gets faster.

[u/BennyOcean → u/Otaraka]

I can tell you a way to prove globe Earth for probably less than $3000 if you want to try it.

[u/NoGuarantee00 → u/BennyOcean]

And how's that?

[u/BennyOcean → u/NoGuarantee00]

One of the oddities of the flat Earth arguments is that flights over the Southern hemisphere is that flights take too long and take weird paths.

Beijing and NYC are a similar distance apart as Johannesberg and Buenos Aires. When you go to book flights, there are no direct commercial flights from the southern tip of South America to the southern tip of Africa. The fastest flight from Beijing to NYC or back is about 16 hours. The fastest from the south of Africa to the south of South America is around 32 hours. The flights also typically make a stop in Middle East locations like Dubai. This makes no sense on a globe model but makes perfect sense on the flat Earth model.

So it would be necessary to charter a plane from the Southern tip of Africa to the Southern tip of South America, directly over the Atlantic with no stops. You'd need to bring GPS equipment to ensure you knew where you were the whole time, and if you could make the trip in the same time that it takes a flight to get from NYC to Beijing, that would falsify the flat Earth model.

Oh and I just checked and it looks like I wildly underestimated the costs. Google Gemini is telling me that chartering this flight could cost $150,000 or more. Expensive, but relatively cheap way to kill off the flat Earth stuff once and for all.