“Yes. I’ve left everything to the Flat Earth Society. But don’t worry about it. I’m forted up here with plenty of firepower.” – Hopscotch
A trip flying from Seattle at night to Fairbanks in the summertime. You leave in darkness, and then arrive at 2AM in a perfect daylight. Proof of a flat Earth!
I really enjoy a good conspiracy theory. The very best ones make claims that are entirely consistent with agreed-upon facts, and that you can’t disprove. The JFK assassination theories are an amazing treasure trove of paranoia, and so are a thousand others – from ancient aliens to “we knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor,” to the theory that your Mom is bigfoot (that would explain her back hair).
The conspiracy theory that’s currently ascendant is “Flat Earth Theory.”
Yes.
Flat Earth theory says the Earth is, well, flat. And this theory has been gaining followers globally.
Did you see that, globally? Heh. I crack myself up.
Anyway.
And here I thought that Bugs Bunny® had solved the issue once and for all.
The idea is that the North Pole is center of a disk – and the Sun is only 32 miles in diameter, and 1,500 miles away. Likewise, the Moon is only 32 miles in diameter and 1,500 miles away. Seems legit! What about the South Pole? The South Pole isn’t. It’s the edge of a pancake, with a 150’ ice wall that surrounds the disk of the flat Earth. And, while vague, it sounds like there’s a dome about 700 miles up.
So how do we explain the International Space Station (ISS)? The ISS is either a secret NASA spy plane, or maybe a secret NASA hologram projection to make us think there’s an ISS. And satellites? Totally fake. There’s no way that your DirecTV© technician could possibly aim at a spot 22,000 miles away moving at 7,000 miles per hour!
Of course, that means the Moon landings were fake (its own conspiracy theory by itself). And O.J. Simpson had to go to prison for starring in Capricorn One® (a movie that showed a fake Mars landing) because that would totally have stopped NASA.
Like I said – these theories are fascinating. Most of them are hard to refute, but Flat Earthers are so very easy to refute, it’s like placing a kitten in a room full of velociraptors. Not really sporting.
I’m not going to get into the energy flux that would have to be created by a 32 mile diameter Sun to warm the Earth, even if only 1500 miles away. But we’ve been sending people to Antarctica for over 100 years. The first people to reach it was Roald Amundsen back in 1911.
To believe in the Flat Earth, one would have to believe in a conspiracy heading back over 100 years. To add further problems for the Flat Earthers – the differing constellations south of the equator should be visible from a flat Earth (which I can personally attest to), Polaris being at different positions in the sky based on latitude (personally verified by me during my Alaska days), and Johnny Depp having a career. Johnny Depp would never have a career on a Flat Earth.
But NASA would also have had to flawlessly fake all of the Moon Landings, all of the satellite launches, a shuttle program, and Elon Musk’s ego. Not possible for a group that wanted to inject water into the Yellowstone Caldera to cool the magma chamber and (probably) trigger a volcano – I wish I were making this up, but I wrote about it here (LINK). Large swaths of NASA are hopelessly inept and stupid. They couldn’t keep an afternoon nap secret.
Oh, and sending O.J. to prison for murder to keep him quiet about “faking the Moon landing”? Capricorn One was a movie that had been out 18 years by the time O.J. was arrested. If so, their punishment of James Brolin was even worse – they made him marry Barbra Streisand.
And as for a technician being able to point a dish at a satellite that’s moving at thousands of miles per hour? Well, it has to move at thousands of miles per hour, since it’s in stationary orbit around the Earth. It’s easy to point an antenna at something that’s not moving (relative to you).
See, they are moving fast to stay stationary! If they want to go anywhere, they’d have to move faster still.
Francisco Esquembre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia
The question isn’t if the Flat Earth theory is correct. It obviously isn’t. But the question is why would someone believe in something (and I believe that the believers in the Flat Earth are sincere) that is observably disprovable? In today’s world, you’d have to really make an effort to ignore/come up with complicated alternative answers to data clearly visible around you daily.
(By my count, there can’t be more than a few thousand of these believers in the Western world, but they make a lot of YouTube videos.)
So, why? In some cases faith. The idea of a flat Earth is based on (some) interpretations of Biblical passages. In some cases reasoning. The main proponent of the Flat Earth Society® for decades mentioned that he felt that way from when he was young – and that his teacher in second grade was lying to him. He reasoned that the simplest thing was a flat Earth. Other writings (some guy who named himself Koresh – not from Waco but this time from Illinois) explicitly called for a flat Earth, such that teaching normal geography was banned in the local schools around Zion, Illinois until the 1920’s when they disbanded.
But the rumor is that bigfoot your Mom scared them away.
