The flat-Earthers hypothesis continues to have a stranglehold on the internet.
People should have given up the idea that the Earth is a 2D piece of cardboard floating about in space after years of true scientific inquiry, right?
That day, however, does not appear to be coming anytime soon, as many flat-Earthers remain committed to the theory.
According to a YouGov survey done in 2018, “only 66 percent of millennials [18 to 24-year-olds at the time] firmly believe that the Earth is round,” with various variances among other age groups. A solid 2% of the American population believed that the Earth was actually flat; given that the population exceeds 300 million, this equates to nearly 6 million persons.
So, what exactly do flat-Earthers believe?
According to the deep, dark depths of Reddit, members of this peculiar group believe that the world is, in fact, disc-shaped and that if you walk to the end of it, you will most likely fall off of it.
Michael Marshall, the project director of the scientific skepticism group Good Thinking Society, explained the idea better in an interview with Scientific American, saying: “Some do believe it’s a disk, but others believe that, yes, there’s an Arctic circle in the middle and land masses around it.”
He continued: “And then on Antarctica is the ice around the edge, but instead of it being a discreet disc, some people believe, in fact Antarctica just goes on forever in all directions. And so they believe that the earth is actually an infinite plane in all directions.”
However, NASA experts have fully dismissed this theory after doing their own research and determining that the Earth is, in fact, a sphere, though it is “not a perfect one.”
However, no amount of research can stop the most zealous.
Consider Bob Knodel, the creator of the YouTube channel Globebusters.
He just went viral (again!) after inadvertently proving that the Earth is round after spending $20,000 on an experiment to prove the contrary.
During the 2018 Netflix documentary Behind the Curve, the conspiracy theorist attempted, but failed, to debunk NASA’s conclusions, only to solidify them deeper.
Flat earther’s Insta Post.
“What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15-degree per hour drift,” he said, per Newsweek. “Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem.’
“We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth,” he continued, talking to a fellow flat-Earther. “We don’t want to blow this, you know? When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro.
“If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad. What I just told you was confidential,” he added.
Oh my goodness.
Perhaps it’s time to save your money and leave the space stuff to the professionals.
