There’s something new we have to start teaching our children. In a world where almost anything can be photoshopped, where computers can create sounds and places and even people so vividly real you’d swear that they were true, it’s more important now than ever that we teach our children logic and critical thinking – two skills that are paramount to interpreting our world.
Flat Earth believers didn’t learn those skills in school, apparently. And no matter how many times we ridicule them for believing something so obviously false, that has been proven false by various cultures for millennia, there’s something profoundly sad that any portion of society could hold such a belief so fervently. There is no worse sign that we are as a species failing than the rise of Flat Earth.
It doesn’t stop at believing the Earth is merely flat. Oh no: Flat Earthers believe in a whole host of ridiculous notions that fly in the face of basic grade school science. It’s almost painful to think that their beliefs are given enough credibility to even discuss, but we’ll take a look at a few of them and why they’re very, very wrong.
5. The Earth Is A Flat Disk (And Has No Edge)
Let’s start with the big one, which is the Earth is not a globe, but a flattened disk. Nevermind the fact that great thinkers throughout history have proven that the Earth is a sphere, such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle (not to mention a bunch of Arabic and Asian philosophers), and nearly everything to do with modern communication depends on a spherical Earth. Nope, Earth is flat because that’s how it looks. End of story.
Actually, no, not end of story. There are a bunch of ways disproving the Earth is flat even without invoking Science or ancient Greek thinkers. The fact that the Moon has phases is proof the Earth is round and its shadow causes the Moon to appear in slivers. The fact that the Sun and ships rise over the horizon rather than materialize from nowhere is proof that the Earth is round. The fact you can get on a plane and see the curvature of the Earth yourself is proof that the Earth is round.
Perhaps the best proof is the fact you can just walk straight in one direction forever and wind up at the same spot you started. Flat Earthers believe this is because we’re subconsciously walking in circles whenever we go anywhere rather than walking in straight lines. They also believe that the North Pole is the only pole and that the Antarctic is the endless border of our world, with South apparently being a direction that doesn’t exist.
While that might sound cool, it’s completely untrue.
4. Gravity Doesn’t Exist
Newton and Einstein would be very upset to hear that Gravity doesn’t exist, but that’s what Flat Earthers believe. So why do things fall? According to Flat Earthers, that’s just a natural property of everything.
Sounds a bit like equivocating to us.
Depending which Flat Earther you ask you could be given a number of different nonsensical theories to explain why an object falls to the ground, ranging from electromagnetism (wrong), to air pressure (still wrong), or even that the density of objects simply being heavier than the surrounding medium (which is actually why boats float but still doesn’t disprove gravity).
They also say that since scientists can’t fully explain how gravity works it must be false, which is a ridiculous argument. It’s the same as saying cancer doesn’t exist because we don’t know how it works. A) Cancer definitely exists, and B) you’ll still die from it whether you believe in it or not. Same with gravity.
3. The Moon Landing Was Faked (And All Astronauts Are Lying)
The Moon landing being fake is an old conspiracy theory that saw new life under the wise and thoughtful guidance of the Flat Earth Society. If Hollywood magic could make anything seem real in the 60s, then not only was the Moon landing faked, but every space mission since then is a fake too since Photoshop is so much better.
And Astronauts? All of them liars, according to the Flat Earthers. Every single one of them is either a mouthpiece for a government that wants you to believe in a spherical Earth (for some unexplained nefarious purpose), or has been bribed by said government to keep their mouths shut about what they actually saw.
We’d really love to send a Flat Earther up a spaceship, but we’d be too worried they’d deliberately sabotage the ship and kill a bunch of far more important astronauts.
2. The Moon And The Sun Are The Same Size
We don’t know about you, but we’ve never been able to look directly at the sun long enough to think that it’s the same apparent size as the Earth. Evidently, some Flat Earthers spent a long time staring at the sun. Maybe a little too long.
Not only are the Sun and Moon the same size, they also don’t orbit the disk in any way that makes sense. To account for the day and night cycle, Flat Earthers believe that the sun and moon are like spotlights, bathing the Earth in light and darkness depending on the hour of the day. This, of course, does not explain why the Sun and Moon rise and set, or why we have time zones, or why the moon has phases. We could go on, but you get the idea.
1. Satellites Are There To Fool You
that let us see top-down pictures of our homes on Google Earth apparently don’t exist. Oh, and the things that allow GPS, global communications, weather prediction, and spy on every country on Earth too. None of that is real. All fake.
Right.
Flat Earth’s explanation for all of the above? Pseudo-satellites, which is a fancy term for cell phone towers, and stratolites, which is a fancy term for a balloon. Apparently, America managed to float a balloon over North Korea to get all those nice images of nuclear missile sites.
Parents, we’re begging you: keep your child in school, make sure they learn about the sciences, and for god’s sake, if you find out they think the Earth is flat send them on the first rocket ship to orbit. You’ll thank us later.
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