Forward: before answering, please consider that the modern incarnation of the Flat Earth movement has grown largely out of North America, where people are on the whole poorly traveled. 60% don’t have a passport, and a generation ago, that was around 90%: but they now have the internet. Be careful whom you follow. Remember also there are a lot of credibility traps being planted to test our critical thinking.

Is the earth round, or is it flat?

Actually, it is round, but it is far stranger than most people realise.

The flat/sphere earth dichotomy could be misleading. I’m pretty sure we could check it out the way the ancients did, with basic time pieces, long rulers and stout walking boots; using maths we can do on paper from first principles so not having to rely on the occult workings of computers. [It would make good TV as well: anybody with funding up for it?]

But what if geometry itself were very much less than fixed. The universe is distorted: and the distortion manifests with perspective. Perspective depends on the position of the viewer, and without all that the heavenly bodies themselves might not even exist. In other words, what if an object like the earth could quite literally be flat when you are close to it, and spherical from far away? Could our brains handle it?

All the same, there is one question that leaves flat-earthers completely stumped every single time. With just a plane ticket, you can see with your own eyes that the stars circle two points on the sky (putative poles) at the same time. They go clockwise in the southern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the north. It is consistent and repeatable year after year. Can somebody please explain to me how this can be possible on anything other than a rotating three-dimensional body? Leaving all else aside, this for me proves on its own that our earth is and must be a three-dimensional object, rotating relative to everything else. And since there are no sharp corners it would have to be round. And this we can all test with our own senses.

The late Liam Scheff is brilliant on the nature of the universe. His book “Official Stories” is a must read for anybody who realises that we humans are being lied to constantly about nearly everything. Anyone with counterconventional ideas who dies the way Scheff did – prematurely and mysteriously – deserves a little attention. He notes Neal Adams’ work on the shape of the earth, who concluded that it has to be in fact… get this… expanding.

Ramifications, ramifications…

~

[Writer’s Note: please do not send me yet another three hour video of “irrefutable” proofs without first reading up a little on physics, mechanics, mathematics, drawing/drafting and perspective, and, most especially, camera optics. Anyone with a sound grasp of high school science can quickly pick holes in most of it. And much of the rest is manifestly nonsense if you bother to look. And no, the fact that I went to university does not prove I am brainwashed.

One thing about an education in Newtonian physics is that everything up to graduate level is empirical, ie. you learn how to test your theories, not just against other theories but against the real world. You learn to trace all proofs back to first principles, like 2 + 2 = 4 and/or things you can actually touch, see and hear. You are required to test your theories in the real world and justify the method. You do not learn to “trust NASA”, whom I agree are as shady as anything. I’ve been “out of the basement” and quite literally around the world, starting and finishing in the same place. I’ve lived in the north and south hemispheres and sat and watched the heavens from many angles. I’ve also worked as a skydiving videographer and so I have a little understanding of that phenomenon quaintly labeled by many as “the curvature of the earth”.

But you don’t need any of that to simply lie on your back on a hilltop and gaze straight upwards and – with your own peripheral vision – see that the horizon is a circle. Try it, and if curiosity grabs you, take it from there.]