Tag: flat earth theory

Sportswear Company Challenges Flat Earthers to Photograph Planet’s Edge

A clever new marketing campaign from sportswear company Columbia offers Flat Earthers a sizeable prize if they can produce a photograph of the edge of the planet. The amusing challenge was reportedly put forward by CEO Tim Boyle in an open letter published in the New York Times and a video released on Monday. “This is a message to Flat Earthers,” he wrote in the missive, “I’ve seen your manifestos, admired your diagrams, watched you stand proudly on your, well, flat ground. So here’s the deal: it’s time to put your map where your mouth is.”

Boyle subsequently announced the launch of what the company has dubbed ‘Expedition Impossible,’ a challenge to the controversial conspiracy theorists to “do what no one in history has ever done: find the edge of the Earth.” Should someone manage to pull off the unfathomable feat, the CEO said, they would receive “everything owned by the company.” To those who might attempt to win the prize, Boyle smartly advised that they make the journey to the frosty ‘forbidden zone’ in Columbia gear because it’s “tough enough for pretty much anything, except maybe falling into the abyss.”

While Boyle’s amusing video shows him promising all manner of materials found at the Columbia headquarters, a disclaimer attached to the contest notes that “the company refers to ‘The Company, LLC’ with assets which are valued at $100,000.” Additionally, to prevent any shenanigans from possible participants, Columbia stressed that “the Edge of the Earth” is a visible, physical end to the planet Earth. We’re talking infinite sheer drop, abyssal void, clouds cascading into infinity.”

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Prominent Flat Earther Admits He Was Wrong

In a surprise conclusion to a project dubbed The Final Experiment, several well-known believers in a non-spherical Earth have had a change of heart

“All right, guys, sometimes, you are wrong in life,” announced Jeran Campanella, a prominent flat-Earth theorist who joined an all-expenses-paid expedition to Antarctica to see the Sun circle the sky for an entire day.

“And I thought that there was no 24-hour Sun, in fact I was pretty sure of it.”

For the past three years a pastor from Denver, Colorado, named Will Duffy has worked to bring together a selection of ‘globist’ and ‘flat-earther’ YouTube content creators to “settle the shape of the Earth” in a single act of observation.

Traveling to Union Glacier Camp – a full-service private facility just 1,138 kilometers (707 miles) from the South Pole – the two ‘teams’ gathered to see with their own eyes whether reports of a non-setting Sun were fabrications of some greater conspiracy, or truthful observations of planetary physics at work.

Throughout history, various cultures have held mixed views on what lies over the horizon, and how the land beneath our feet connects with what we see over our heads.

In a modern sense, flat-Earth beliefs emerged in the 19th century as a counter to scientific fact, often buoyed by religious convictions or aligning with political values in a shared distrust of an academic authority.

Today, social media has given voice and community to a legion of people who doubt what most of us take for granted as a well-supported fact.

“It’s really about the power of knowledge, and that increasing distrust in what we once considered to be the gatekeepers of knowledge – like academics, scientific agencies, or the government,” University of Melbourne communications expert Jennifer Beckett told Anders Furze in a 2019 article on the topic.

Though there’s no agreement on what this non-curving world looks like from afar, most descriptions need to account for what can be experienced as individuals.

Phenomena such as the changing position of the Sun, or differences in the heights of objects as we travel towards a horizon, still need to make sense if Earth is a huge pancake rimmed in Antarctic frosting.

Scientific explanations of the Sun’s seasonal shifts are relatively straight-forward. Perched on opposing ends of a tilted globe, each pole experiences alternating periods of uninterrupted sunlight or endless night as Earth completes laps of the Solar System.

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The Case Against Flat Earth Theory

You might say, “John, do we REALLY need a column explaining why the Earth can’t be flat?” Unfortunately, yes we do. Why? Well, because among others, here are some of the celebrities who have come out at one time or another and said that the Earth is flat or at least, that they’re not sure about it: Shaquille O’Neal, Kyrie Irving, B.O.B., Tila Tequila, Thomas Dolby, A.J. Styles, Sherri Shepherd, and Draymond Green. There are also millions of other people, most of whom were probably convinced by the YouTube algorithm, who also believe that we live on a flat Earth:

Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.

Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing.

Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. “The only person who didn’t say this was there with his daughter and his son-in-law and they had seen it on YouTube and told him about it,” said Asheley Landrum, who led the research at Texas Tech University.

The interviews revealed that most had been watching videos about other conspiracies, with alternative takes on 9/11, the Sandy Hook school shooting, and whether Nasa really went to the moon, when YouTube offered up Flat Earth videos for them to watch next.

Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.

Typically, most people just roll their eyes at this kind of thing, but I am from the mindset that it’s a mistake not to counter conspiracy theories. Maybe at one point in time, when there were a handful of gatekeeper news sources, that was a viable strategy, but today? Bad ideas can spread easily among like-minded thinkers if people aren’t exposed to counterpoints.

So, let’s start with the basics. First of all, the Flat Earth Theory IS NOT being offered in a vacuum. There is a popular competing theory that has been around for thousands of years (around 500 BC, the Greeks figured out that the world was round and at around 240 BC, Eratosthenes figured out the circumference of the Earth) that has large amounts of scientific proof undergirding it. So, for the Flat Earth Theory to be viable, it has to make more sense than the idea that the Earth is round. That is not an easy task because of some very big, very obvious flaws in the Flat Earth Theory.

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The Flat Earth Psyops

Never in my wildest dreams before joining the Freedom Movement, did I think I would be debating with people who sincerely believe the Earth is a motionless flat disc, floating in space. Discussing this topic is uncomfortable for many people in the movement, and understandably, they distance themselves from it, claiming it does not matter if the Earth is round or flat.

Yet, we call ourselves truthers. The truth about 9/11 is very important to our community; the truth about the pandemic, the PCR test, and the mRNA injections are also critically important. Should we waste time fighting over issues that only divide us?

Yet, the fervent and repeated promotion of the Flat Earth theory is a constant on social media, especially on Facebook. The Flat Earth followers are aggressive and generally derogatory towards the “globies” — who in their view are brainwashed by NASA and the media. The secondary conspiracy theory, (and let’s call a spade a spade, it is a conspiracy theory), that NASA faked the Apollo missions, is always part of the Flat Earth theory. In fact, the two theories can be said to be one.

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What If the Earth Was Flat?

To shape a cosmic body into a disk (rather than a sphere), you’ve got to spin it very fast, says David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. This would, unfortunately, destroy the planet by tearing it into tiny particles. In the 1850s, astronomer James Clerk Maxwell showed mathematically that a solid, disk-like shape isn’t a stable configuration in the cosmos, in work he conducted regarding Saturn’s rings. Maxwell’s research predicted that Saturn’s rings would be made of lots of small, unconnected particles; he turned out to be right. His math also explains why there are no planet-size disks floating around the galaxy.

To flatten Earth without spinning it very rapidly, you’d need magic, or perhaps a galactic panini press. At any rate, a stamped-flat Earth wouldn’t last for long. Within a few hours, the force of gravity would press the planet back into a spheroid. Gravity pulls equally from all sides, which explains why planets are spheres (or nearly so – depending on the speed of a planet’s rotation, those forces may work against gravity to create a bit of a bulge at the equator). A stable, solid disk-like Earth just isn’t possible under the actual conditions of gravity, as Maxwell’s math showed. 

And once you get rid of gravity, everything about our planet rapidly stops making sense. 

The atmosphere? Gone, because it’s held to the planet by gravity. Tides? Gone. They’re caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, which tugs on the oceans and causes them to subtly bulge out as it swings by. 

The moon itself? Also gone, since every explanation of the moon’s existence involves gravity. In the most widely accepted scenario, the moon was created when a giant, planet-size body crashed into the early Earth; debris from the crash was captured by Earth’s gravity. Another scenario suggests that the moon formed at the same time as Earth did (again, thanks to gravity). Or, Earth’s formidable gravity attracted and snagged the traveling hunk of space rock as it went hurtling by. 

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Wisconsin Vaccine Saboteur Steven Brandenburg Is a Flat-Earther, FBI Document Reveals

The Wisconsin pharmacist who intentionally sabotaged hundreds of doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine because he thought COVID-19 was a hoax, also believes the earth is flat and the sky is actually a “shield put up by the Government to prevent individuals from seeing God.”

That’s according to a newly-unsealed FBI search warrant application obtained by The Daily Beast, which the bureau filed earlier this month requesting permission to analyze an iPhone, a laptop, and a thumb drive seized from Steven Brandenburg when he was arrested in late December.

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Italian Flat Earthers’ Journey to the ‘Edge of the World’ Goes Wildly Awry

An Italian couple who believe that the Earth is flat wound up on a wild misadventure after they decided to put the theory to the test by embarking on a journey to what they suspect is ‘edge of the world.’ The incredibly strange saga reportedly unfolded back in April, but was only revealed to the Italian media by authorities this week. It began when the pair broke the country’s then-stringent coronavirus travel restrictions and set off in their car towards the coast of Sicily.

Amazingly, when they reached the seaside town of Termini Imerese, the pair sold their car, purchased a boat, and set sail for the island of Lampedusa which, for reasons unexplained, they believe to be the edge of the Flat Earth. Either due to a lack of nautical navigation skills or an ill-conceived travel plan, they ultimately arrived at the island of Ustica, which is located north of Sicily and approximately 225 miles in the opposite direction of where they wanted to go.

According to officials on the island, the two weary travelers were found “tired, thirsty, and risking shipwreck.” A doctor who attended to the duo understandably found some amusement in their predicament, noting that “the funny thing is that they oriented themselves with a compass, an instrument that works on the basis of terrestrial magnetism, a principle that they, as Flat Earthers, should refuse.” The pair were then taken by escort to the Sicilian capital of Palermo, where they were told to remain in their boat under quarantine for 15 days.