(I am mentally challenged and btw,.. I was just joking about the fifth grader thing. XD)
So why does a drop of water look like a flat disk? The earth looks the same way from the moon. The earth is a huge "drop" of atmosphere sitting on a flat surface. The atmosphere is the curve, not the surface of the earth.
I’m glad that I came in here, I got a bad assumption straightened out. It does seem totally obvious that a photo of Earth would be lit because of the sun, and that was what I originally believed. Ironically a long time ago it was because of rarely running into a YouTube flat Earth argument that I just made an assumption that from space Earth must be dark. Maybe by coincidence every flat Earth argument I saw had the photoshopped complaint front & center, so without giving it too much thought I assumed that their main argument had to have an explanation behind it, and I just thought to myself that the explanation must be that it’s too dark for unaltered pictures. It wasn’t too weird for me to make that bad assumption because I knew that the moon is totally lit from space yet if standing anywhere on its surface it’s dark because it doesn’t have an atmosphere like ours to keep the light contained, so I figured that the Earth’s special atmosphere must cause the opposite effect (light from inside its atmosphere but dark looking at it from outside the atmosphere). It was just an attempt to try to understand the other side’s argument, where they are coming from. Wow it turns out that for years flat Earthers faked me out on this one, so for many years I was assuming that every single space photo of Earth had color photoshopped into it by necessity.
Antarctica is the land that keeps the oceans in place. It is land, not ice. Ice just covers the land. If a human walks the coast line of Antarctica, they would have walked the longest continuous length of land on earth. It should take about 8 times longer, than a walk from Siberia, across to Alaska, and down to the tip of South America. Antarctica is not a perfect "circle", nor a perfect square. The north pole is the center. No matter the shape, flat or globe, the distance to Antarctica is roughly the same no matter which direction you leave the north pole.
Fifth grade is the last age of literal thinkers. The smartest group on the planet.
A drop of water doesn't look like a flat disk.
The problem you have is that only a couple of continents are visible at any time, but over the course of 24 hours all of the continents will have passed through your view. From space, the atmosphere is an extremely thin layer relative to the earth, which has next to no effect on light reflected off the earth's surface. Bending of light only occurs when looking at a tangent to the earth's surface as there is much more air to pass through combined with the pressure gradient as you move away from the earth's surface.
Quite a number of people have crossed the continent of Antarctica via the South pole.
