When Did Flat Earthers Start Becoming Prominent Again
Are flat-earthers beingness serious?
Of all the conspiracy theories that litter the Internet, the flat Earth conspiracy is quite possibly the most curious. Afterwards all, the ancient Greeks figured out the planet's shape (and even its circumference) in the third century B.C.
But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, defended to insisting that the Globe is apartment, has given rise to a modernistic ground of flat Earth adherents. These believers claim that the Earth is a flat disc, and that evidence that it is round — say, pictures taken from infinite — are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar system to make their theories work.
No one knows how many flat Earth believers are out there. According to Smithsonian Magazine, membership in the Flat World Society, founded in 1956, once reached iii,500 people. Today, the order claims more than 500 members on its roster. But some believers want nothing to do with the Flat Earth Order, co-ordinate to a 2019 CNN article, with some attendees of the Flat Earth International Conference in Dallas that year telling the news agency that the organization is a government-sponsored front designed to make Flat Earthers look bad. (The Flat Earth Order responded to this by telling CNN, "Nosotros are not a regime-controlled trunk. Nosotros're an organization of Flat Globe theorists that long predates well-nigh of the FEIC newcomers to the scene.")
Who are apartment-earthers?
As the Apartment Earth Gild/Apartment Globe International Conference schism reveals, flat-earthers are non a monolithic grouping. The electric current president of the Apartment Earth Society, Daniel Shenton, is a Londoner who now lives in Hong Kong. Robbie Davidson, who organizes the annual Flat Earth International Conferences, is a Canadian who espouses a Biblical worldview and opposes what he calls "scientism."
A 2017 national poll by Public Policy Polling constitute that only 1% of Americans believed the Earth was flat, with an additional vi% saying they weren't certain. In that location was very little evidence of differences in this belief by political amalgamation, with whatever differences betwixt Trump voters, Clinton voters and tertiary-party voters falling within the poll's margin of fault of iii.ii%.
A 2018 article in the Colorado Sun on a flat Earth convention in Denver found that many attendees believed a whole suite of conspiracy theories, such as that all politicians are actors and that powerful shadowy forces control the globe.
Apartment-earthers occasionally get a boost from glory believers. For instance, on January. 25, 2016, rapper-vocaliser Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. (known as B.o.B) released a track called "Flatline" in which he disses astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, after the two had a Twitter battle over the spherical-ness of the planet. B.o.B is convinced Earth is flat. A day before, the rapper tweeted: "No matter how loftier in tiptop you are... the horizon is always eye level ... sorry cadets... I didn't wanna believe it either." In 2018, NBA player Kyrie Irving had to apologize subsequently causing a media controversy by speculating that the Earth was flat on a 2017 podcast.
Flat Globe map
The leading flat-earther theory holds that Earth is a disc with the Arctic Circumvolve in the center and Antarctica, a 150-foot-tall (45 meters) wall of water ice, around the rim. NASA employees, they say, guard this ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disc. (In keeping with their skepticism of NASA, known apartment-earther conspiracy theorist Nathan Thompson approached a homo he said was a NASA employee in a Starbucks in mid-May 2017. In a YouTube video of the commutation, Thompson, founder of the Official Apartment World and World Discussion page, shouted that he had proof the World is flat — evidently proverb an astronaut drowning was that proof — and that NASA is "lying.")
Furthermore, Earth's gravity is an illusion, they say. Objects do not accelerate downward; instead, the disc of Earth accelerates upward at 32 feet per 2d squared (9.8 meters per second squared), driven upwardly by a mysterious force called dark energy. Currently, there is disagreement among flat-earthers about whether or not Einstein'south theory of relativity permits Earth to accelerate upward indefinitely without the planet eventually surpassing the speed of light. (Einstein's laws apparently yet hold in this alternate version of reality.)
As for what lies underneath the disc of Earth, this is unknown, simply nigh flat-earthers believe it is composed of "rocks."
It's worth noting that all of the above is completely contentious fifty-fifty within the flat Earth community. "None of us believe that we're a flight pancake in space," Davidson told CNN in the 2019 article. At the Flat Earth International Conferences, information technology'due south more common to believe that space simply does not exist at all and the disc of the Globe sits still, he said. 1 speaker at the 2018 FEIC even argued that Globe is neither a sphere nor a disc, just instead is shaped similar a diamond, according to The Guardian.
Do flat-earthers think the moon is flat?
Flat Earth opinions virtually the moon vary. Some call up that while Globe is apartment, the moon and sun are spheres, Alive Scientific discipline'south sister site Space.com reported. In this vision of the solar organization, Globe's day and night bicycle is explained by positing that the sun and moon are spheres measuring 32 miles (51 kilometers) that motion in circles 3,000 miles (4,828 km) in a higher place the airplane of the Earth. (Stars, they say, movement in a aeroplane iii,100 miles up.) Like spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet over a 24-hour cycle. Apartment-earthers believe in that location must also be an invisible "antimoon" that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.
On YouTube, in that location are videos pointing to shadows in pictures of the moon and arguing that the moon is transparent, and thus only a calorie-free. Ane speaker at the 2018 conference attended by a Guardian reporter made a example for the moon as a project.
What is the Zetetic Method?
If flat-earthers seem difficult to dissuade based on standard scientific evidence, in that location's a reason for that: flat Earth theorizing follows from a mode of thought called the "Zetetic Method." The Zetetic Method is an culling to the scientific method, developed by a 19th-century flat-earther, in which sensory observations reign supreme.
"Broadly, the method places a lot of emphasis on reconciling empiricism and rationalism, and making logical deductions based on empirical data," Apartment Globe Society vice president Michael Wilmore, an Irishman, told Live Science in 2017.
In Zetetic astronomy, the perception that Earth is flat leads to the deduction that information technology must really be flat; the antimoon, NASA conspiracy and all the residuum are just rationalizations for how that might work in practise.
Those details make the flat-earthers' theory so elaborately absurd it sounds like a joke, but many of its supporters genuinely consider information technology a more plausible model of astronomy than the one found in textbooks. In short, they aren't kidding.
"The question of conventionalities and sincerity is one that comes up a lot," Wilmore said. "If I had to guess, I would probably say that at least some of our members see the Flat World Society and Apartment World Theory as a kind of epistemological exercise, whether as a critique of the scientific method or as a kind of 'solipsism for beginners.' There are also probably some who thought the certificate would be kind of funny to have on their wall. That being said, I know many members personally, and I am fully convinced of their belief."
Wilmore counts himself among the true believers. "My own convictions are a result of philosophical introspection and a considerable trunk of data that I have personally observed, and which I am still compiling," he said.
Wilmore and the order's president Shenton both think the evidence for global warming is strong, despite much of this evidence coming from satellite data gathered by NASA, the kingpin of the "round Earth conspiracy." They also accept evolution and most other mainstream tenets of science. This is in contrast to Davidson, who disputes other scientific theories and findings, such as development, that contradict a strict interpretation of the Bible.
How nosotros know the World is NOT flat?
Despite the claims from flat-earthers, at that place are plenty of ways to know that the world is round. One quick option is to check out NASA's image library, which is chock-total of nice, curvy pictures of the globe taken from the International Space Station. If NASA is hoaxing everyone, they're committed to the bit.
Don't trust NASA? The Russians also snap pictures of the round Globe, Space.com reported. So does Nippon's space agency. And Mainland china's.
For the flat-earther convinced that all these countries put aside their political tensions in order to maintain the fiction of a spherical Earth, in that location are too ways to check on the planet's shape with one's own eyes. One of the simplest is to go to a harbor and watch the ships depart. Every bit a transport disappears over the horizon, the bottom of the ship will become first, followed gradually by the mast.
Related: viii ways life would get weird on a flat Globe
Yous can also take a page out of the ancient Greeks' volume. Ancient Hellenistic philosophers figured out that the earth had to be a globe based on a few observations. One was that the stars aren't the same in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: From opposite halves of the World, you lot're conspicuously looking out at unlike quadrants of space. Some other was that Earth's shadow on the moon's surface during lunar eclipses is curved.
The Greeks even figured out how to calculate an approximate circumference of the Earth with no fancier tools than a stick and the calorie-free of the lord's day. Past measuring the angle of a shadow cast by the sun at the aforementioned fourth dimension and day in two cities a known distance autonomously, the philosopher Eratosthenes was able to calculate that the planet's circumference was between 24,000 and nigh 29,000 miles (38,600 and 46,670 kilometers). (It's actually 24,900 miles.) The very fact that the angle of the sunday differs on different parts of the planet indicates that we're all sitting on a globe.
Conspiracy theory psychology
As inconceivable as their belief system seems, it doesn't actually surprise experts. Karen Douglas, a psychologist at the Academy of Kent in the U.k. who studies the psychology of conspiracy theories, says flat-earthers' beliefs cohere with those of other conspiracy theorists she has studied.
"It seems to me that these people do more often than not believe that the World is flat. I'm not seeing anything that sounds equally if they're only putting that idea out there for any other reason," Douglas told Live Science.
She said all conspiracy theories share a basic thrust: They nowadays an culling theory about an important outcome or event, and construct an (frequently) vague explanation for why someone is covering upwardly that "true" version of events. "One of the major points of appeal is that they explain a big event only frequently without going into details," she said. "A lot of the power lies in the fact that they are vague."
The self-bodacious way in which conspiracy theorists stick to their story imbues that story with special appeal. After all, flat-earthers are more adamant that the World is flat than well-nigh people are that the Earth is round (probably because the rest of us experience we accept nothing to prove). "If you're faced with a minority viewpoint that is put along in an intelligent, seemingly well-informed way, and when the proponents don't deviate from these strong opinions they have, they tin can be very influential. Nosotros call that minority influence," Douglas said.
In a study published online March 5, 2014, in the American Journal of Political Scientific discipline, Eric Oliver and Tom Wood, political scientists at the University of Chicago, establish that virtually half of Americans endorse at least 1 conspiracy theory, from the notion that nine/xi was an within chore to the JFK conspiracy. "Many people are willing to believe many ideas that are directly in contradiction to a dominant cultural narrative," Oliver told Alive Science. He says conspiratorial conventionalities stems from a human being tendency to perceive unseen forces at work, known equally magical thinking.
However, apartment-earthers don't fit entirely snugly in this general picture. Most conspiracy theorists prefer many fringe theories, even ones that contradict each other. Meanwhile, flat-earthers' only hang-upward is the shape of the Earth. "If they were similar other conspiracy theorists, they should be exhibiting a tendency toward a lot of magical thinking, such as assertive in UFOs, ESP, ghosts the Devil, or other unseen, intentional forces," Oliver wrote in an email. "It doesn't sound similar they practice, which makes them very dissonant relative to most Americans who believe in conspiracy theories."
Editor's Note: This article was first published on Oct. 26, 2012, and updated by Stephanie Pappas on Dec. 16, 2021.
Originally published on Live Science.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/24310-flat-earth-belief.html
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