Great point.  The swiss cheese of globe-earth has more holes than we thought.

All these hundreds of videos done by amateurs with P95 zoom cameras, discovering that they can see farther than they should be able to, were all being too modest!

They measure Point A to Point B, calculate how much "drop" there should be on a curved earth (using official calculations), and determine that they should not be able to see the object.

TRUE so far.

While completely disregarding terrestrial refraction. That's either due to incompetence or due to dishonesty.

Even using standard refraction as measured would be a start. But in some cases, more extreme refraction occurs, allowing for even further lines of sight.

As explained before, refraction makes the earth appear less curved than it actually is; the apparent / effective radius increases the stronger refraction is.

However, I don't think anyone has thought of this or mentioned it yet: What about the opposite direction? What if I can see 20 miles in EITHER direction, for a total of 40?

If I'm supposed to be able to see 10 miles, but I can see 20 -- it's actually twice as bad as that. Because I can see 20 in other direction as well, for a total of 40 miles of "apparently flat earth" on a supposed globe -- twice as impossible as seeing a bit too much.

Doesn't that push us EVEN FARTHER into "can't be refraction" territory?

What I'm saying is, it's more than just X miles of flatness that needs to be superimposed on the surface of the supposedly ball-shaped earth -- because it's not like the space behind you is a steep drop-off! So the "flat part" is much larger, and even harder to nicely fit on a ball earth.

No. We're always just considering line of sight between an observer and a point on the surface of earth. The horizon is a circle around the observer, and the line of sight exists within that circle. So adding the length of two unrelated lines of sight together in this case would be wrong.

At any rate, it's easy to say "we see too far on this supposed globe using the geometric calculations while completely glossing over refraction" (and wrongly concluding from this that earth is not a globe), but what you can't deny is that all points on earth will evidently, measurably drop away from an observers horizontal plane.

I among others posted tons of examples of this before.

Image 1: Refraction and drop from horizontal in one picture. A level water surface is evidently not a horizontal plane.


Image 2: The mountain, whose base is at the same elevation than the the observer, disappears below the horizon. With literal kilometers of the 4,392m high mountain missing it's straightforward to conclude that the base of the mountain, while at the same elevation above the vertical datum, physically drops away from the observer:


Image 3: When measuring azimuthal (heading) angles between any three points with substantial distance, the sum of these angles will be greater than 180°. Thus these points can't possibly form a flat Euclidean triangle on the surface of earth, but they form a spherical triangle whose angle sum can be up to 270°. This is called spherical excess and it has been measured over and over again. In this example, 34,396 arcseconds of spherical excess have been measured.

Image 2: The mountain, whose base is at the same elevation than the the observer, disappears below the horizon. With literal kilometers of the 4,392m high mountain missing it's straightforward to conclude that the base of the mountain, while at the same elevation above the vertical datum, physically drops away from the observer:

The photo on the right - supposedly 130 miles from Mt. Rainier, doesn't provide an accurate depiction. Here's a photo of Mt. Rainier taken on the Seattle waterfront, which is about 100 miles from Mt. Rainier as the crow flies. As you can see, it's shows much more of the mountain than your photo. And.... I was able to see Mt. Rainier from my living room window from our house that we recently sold. It was a little over 100 miles away. I don't have a photo. 


seattle-boat-cruise-view.jpg (800×495) (quirkytravelguy.com)