I wrote recently about contrarians, those people among us who insist on disagreeing with others just to be a nuisance. In that story I left out the most extreme case of a group being at odds with the world: flat earth believers. My God, didn’t we put this idea to bed a thousand years ago? Apparently not, as there are still people around who will subject themselves to ridicule by believing this completely debunked idea. And this includes some celebrities like Kyrie Irving and Tila Tequila who aren’t threats to win Nobel Prizes any time soon. Recently some guy in California built a home made rocket and risked his life to soar 1,875 feet in the air to ‘prove’ the world is flat. Of course, he could have easily found a higher hill to look from, or taken a ride in an airplane to about twenty times that height, but how risky would that be? Perspective-wise, he might as well have stood on the hood of his car.
Flat earthers also seem quick to dismiss gravity as a fact, but I couldn’t help but notice Mr Homemade Rocket returned to earth by way of a parachute. So he must have been aware that he was going to be heading back down toward California at a dangerous speed – for some inexplicable reason.
I read on one of their websites that a really convincing argument for us living on a frisbee-shaped planet, is that if it is hurtling through space and you were on the back side of it, you’d fall off. Therefore, the earth can’t be round because people and things on the other side would tumble off into the void of space. Also they say that the behaviour of eclipses matches a flat planet and not a round one. In their model, the north pole is the centre hub of the planet, the south pole is the outer circumference of the disk, and the continents and oceans lie in between. I wonder how they explain day and night. Why does the sun only shine on half of it at a time? Why the hell is the centre so cold? Why hasn’t anyone gone to the edge and had a peek over the side? Why do all the photos from space show it as round, when most photos of a disk would look elliptical? If the south pole is the outer edge, how come the circumference of the world in Antarctica isn’t 72,000 miles? Why is practically everything else in space a sphere? The Greeks knew, or firmly suspected, the earth was round about 600 BC, so let’s just accept this as fact already.
I tried to think of a dumb idea to compare this to, but nothing is as clearly wrong as this is. There is a picture of some guy on a mountain pointing to a city in the background that is 16 miles away. He is saying that if the world was round the city would have curved away below the horizon. The trouble with that is, that distance is too small, and although he can’t see it, the buildings in the city would be less than a quarter of a degree tilted to his eyes.
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Anyways, like most things, these people are allowed to believe this, I really don’t care. The point is, this is a group of extreme contrarians who are probably fully aware of the holes in their arguments, but who continue to disagree with the world and get in some verbal abuse while they’re at it. What fun!
Here is a recreation of the beginning of time, when God whipped up a nice pancake for us to settle on. It remained cold in the middle, but the big guy never claimed to be a chef.
