One could always cop out and say it it was not _precisely_ earth-like. Certainly, I doubly-doubt that any Gloranthan culture would have "discovered" such curves in order to come up with this explanation.
> The horizon effect is very
> noticable if you can fly. The idea that Gloranthans might be unaware
> of the horizon seems unlikely to me.
Being totally unaware is unlikely, but depending on how large the horizon effect is (it could be less so than on earth, frex, or vary less with observer height), how locally not-flat their area is, and their philosophical biases and failings, they may attach little significance to it.
> So if you accept that the horizon is there, then you either have to
> believe that the ground is curved [or] that it just *looks* curved
But this is the situation on earth, too: how many terrestrial cultures ever dreamed up theories of curving light rays to explain this? A less rhetorical, and hopefully more useful question: how did people, especially believers in a flat earth, explain the terran horizon?
> Without further observation/experimentation both theories are equally valid.
Indeed, but I feel that even if the bent light explanation were "true", then the curved earth one would be much more likely to be accepted, not to say thought up in the first place.
> Bendy light is pretty bizarre; but is it really any worse than gravity?
Bendy light seems worse to me than Newtonian gravitation (granted, not relativistic gravity, since that _implies_ Bendy Light), but in any case, I don't think (m)any Gloranthas believe in it, either. Galileo managed a belief in a round earth without troubling the gravitational scorers, so the two aren't _that_ closely linked.
Alex.
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