There are a surprisingly large number of people who believe, to this day, that the earth is flat. They reject modern science out of hand, and are part of a organization known as The Flat Earth Society. You can show them a globe, or photographs of the planet from space, or Aristotle’s extensive treatise on the subject, but they just laugh at your predictable gullibility with the firm certainty that they haven’t had the wool pulled over their eyes and know better than the billions of people who weren’t accidentally dropped on their heads as a child.
On some basic level, their logic makes sense. If you walk outside, the earth certainly doesn’t look spherical. And seriously, if it was round, then people who lived on the bottom would just fall off into the void, right? And do you really expect us to believe in Newton’s Second Law of Motion? Keep in mind that these are the same people who think that the Apollo Moon Landing was secretly filmed in an Arizona studio, so their analytical notions should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Scientific tenets of the flat earth theory:
- The earth’s circumference is 78225 miles, and the diameter is 24,900 miles.
- Stars, moons, and other planets may be round, but the earth is not.
- Tides are the result of a constant wobbling of the earth.
- Gravity exists because the earth is continuously accelerating upwards at 1g, along with every other celestial body in the universe.
- Sunrises/sunsets are an optical illusion caused by the sun drifting around.
- The planet is surrounded by a 150 foot wall of ice which prevents water and everything else from falling off the edge. This has been concealed from the American public through an elaborate government conspiracy.
