Originally Posted by
undersky
you are right! if you point a laser beam in SFO toward the direction of SYD, and if someone is looking at the beam from moon, that person would see the laser beam "bending around" the earth surface to SYD, although to laser beam itself, it's going a straight line in its curved space-line!
...and you are wrong.
The curvature of the light beam due to the gravitational mass of the earth would be extremely negligible. It would just toodle on off into space.
Even if the Earth had the mass of the Sun (which is the experiment Eddington performed to verify General Relativity), the curvature of the light beam would still require pretty delicate instruments to detect it.