When I was in college, there was a student organization (it only existed on paper) that pretended to believe that the earth is flat, but they made it quite clear that they were just parodying people who reject the theory of evolution.
There was another one (an offshoot of the first) that did the same thing with the theory of gravity, explaining that it was actually “intelligent falling.”
I’ll bet that there are now people who genuinely believe in intelligent falling, just like flat earth. People will believe anything when the real explanation for phenomena is beyond their understanding.
Well…believe it or not, it’s back to Occam’s Razor. What requires fewer assumptions? That thousands of people are jokingly pretending to believe this nonsense for fun without one of them ever slipping up and admitting that they know it’s all bullshit? Or that thousands of people actually believe this nonsense. The second one requires only one assumption: that they are all sincere.
Follow space/science topics on Youtube will get a lot of this flat earth crap in the feed. I made the mistake of watching a couple, and didn’t use private mode (D’oh!).
Plus “none of these people actually believe in a flat earth, they’re just grifters running scams” doesn’t really make any sense because at least some people have to buy into the theories for any such grift to work.
I remember a similar story (now buried in the bowels of the internet–good!) of NASA astronauts that formed a Flat Earth club in the 60’s or 70’s. It was just a short-lived publicity gag/joke as “membership” was only open to those who had been in space.
the count of “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” which i was gormlessly making wasn’t predicated on the existence of abundant believers of crazy conspiracy theories, but this particular fine gentleman’s increasing number of requirements that his particular cosmic conception would be believable …that and he otherwise seemed capable of tying his shoelaces, so-to-speak. ah well, there are certainly folks out there who are utterly certain of their points of view however untenable whilst some of us can barely get our shoes tied correctly. so it goes.
The best comeback I ever heard someone give a Flat-Earther was “If the Earth was flat, and there was an edge, then by now there would be all kinds of hotels and casinos there to capitalize on it like they do with Niagara Falls, and like they wanted to do with the Grand Canyon.” This did seem to flummox him.
Of course with the guy in this video I’m sure he’d say “the edge of the Earth keeps moving farther away as you get near it, like with a rainbow” (which of course perfectly describes the actual fucking horizon.)
Jesus, dude, what the fuck did that mean? I’m in law school, and that was way more complicated a paragraph than I’ve seen in an Oliver Wendell Holmes opinion.
What I find odd when people say “They’re just having a lark” is that nobody ever comes forward and says “Nah, I was just pulling your leg, that look of disbelief on your face? Priceless!”
What gets me is that it’s a conspiracy layered on top of conspiracy, like a giant conspiracy layer cake. Even if a flat-earth is your starting point, it doesn’t logically follow that there would be multiple suns.
My favorite was on wait, wait don’t tell me, and one of the panelists said, if the earth really was flat, wouldn’t there be a bunch of cats there, pushing stuff off?
Sometimes I wonder if people like this are really just doing a long-term performance art piece, always upping the crazy in some kind of dadaist weirdo ballet.
“Of course the moon landing was a hoax, because the moon isn’t even real!! Moron.”
Weirdly, there is one branch of science, the study of gravimetrics and mapping out the differences of gravity on the earth’s surface, which does treat the earth as “flat,” at least according to one professor at UMass back in the 80s. His lecture went into details about how gravity as measured at the surface of any planet can be more easily visualized and understood if considered to be an unbounded flat plane with irregularities (which is what he was measuring and mapping). His maps were . . . pretty, all false-color and vivid primaries, and no doubt useful to someone.
