There! I’ve outed myself as a “Globetard”!
In recent months Alex has spent a fair amount of time arguing with flat earthers on Facebook. So much so that I decided to take a look at what they’re saying and, much more entertaining, how people who actually DO know what they’re talking about rebut and debunk this nonsense. Now, I don’t actually care what these people believe, but I have a strong aversion to them trying to place such beliefs on the same level as, or even ahead of, proper science. And if their nonsense is allowed to go unchallenged it will gain more traction and suck even more people into their pit of disinformation and deliberate misconstruction. (I have the same aversion to creationists!)
Science is difficult – I know this because I’ve had to do quite a lot of it in my nearly fifty years of working life. Proper science that is – you know, the stuff that researches the evidence, argues rationally about the observations and gets peer reviewed, that kind of stuff.
I was asked a few years ago whether I believed that men went to the moon. Well, I know they did, so belief is irrelevant – and with the right equipment I can prove it. Several of the Apollo missions left laser reflectors up there and you can bounce a light beam off them. We did a lesser experiment with radio dipoles mounted in old dustbin lids about forty years ago off the roof of a school. Proper scientists laser range the moon regularly as it’s very useful to know how far away it is – it helps predict the tides and the weather and it’s how we know that the moon is moving away from us. Science – it works!
I’m not going to waste too much time on what the flat earthers call their evidence, but their predominant argument seems to be that we’re being lied to, mainly by NASA, about the heliocentric model and that gravity will tend to make spherical stars and planets. However, they seem to have no comprehension of just how many people would have to be involved in such an alleged cover up or that, with so many people involved, the chances of proof emerging would be huge. [If you’re really into such things see “On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs” by David Robert Grimes (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905). His modelling suggests that, with more than 400,000 people involved, if the moon landings had indeed been a hoax, they would have been exposed as such by 1973, or while the Apollo program was still running.] That aside, the Russians were tracking each mission and would have debunked Apollo in real time if it had been faked.
One of the biggest problems the flat earthers have is dealing with gravity – you know, that thing which makes the toast fall butter side down? They maintain that there’s no such thing, as to admit otherwise would mean they’d have to ignore the fact that large celestial objects tend to be sort of round. The best they can come up with is that the Earth is constantly accelerating. Now, Newton’s first law requires that there be a force acting on the Earth for this to happen. In the heliocentric view it is gravity which causes us to orbit the sun, but the flat earthers fail to explain what powers the acceleration in their model. They also fail to explain the origin of the infinite amount of energy which would be needed to continue this acceleration once we got close to the speed of light (which we’d have done after about a year!). One of their more ludicrous claims is that objects fall because they are denser than the air around them. Yeah – just think about that for a moment – I’ll wait!
Many flat earthers say that we must trust our own eyes – we can look and see that the Earth is flat! Well, two things. An observer looking at the night sky in the UK will see Polaris and the stars will rotate counter-clockwise, while in Australia they will see the Southern Cross and the stars will go the other way. That works on a globe, but it’s completely impossible on a flat plane. Secondly, to an ant on the roof of the O2 the surface would appear flat. It’s all about scale and perspective!
The stock-in trade of most flat earthers is to deny the overwhelming mountain of evidence for the globe and then insult or try to belittle anyone who disagrees with or challenges them. They tend to be sad, negative people, prone to clutching at straws and they’re often very angry and sometimes religious, but they all share the same delusion while being unable to agree on a flat earth model which actually fits all the observable evidence. If they can’t or won’t understand the science then it’s either bullshit or CGI. (Despite the fact that two of the most famous photographs of the globe, Earthrise (1968) and the Blue Marble (1972), were taken when CGI could just about do a line animation of the human hand and more than a decade before Max Headroom!)
Some of the worst propagandists for the flat earth are lying charlatans and clearly just doing it so that they can con more money out of those poor deluded people in the bacofoil hats. For the latter, it’s just another sad example, were one needed, that some people are so paranoid that they would rather believe an elaborate, complicated and fanciful conspiracy theory than face the more humble, but still amazing, facts.