Flat-earthers will always be with us
Considering that a slice of Americans believe that vaccines cause autism, an even larger slice believe climate change is a canard being hawked by grant-seeking scientists who hate capitalism, and a presidential candidate has peddled the notion that the Egyptian pyramids were grain silos built by Joseph, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some public figure would take the next step, wind the clock back hundreds of years, and proclaim, all evidence to the contrary, that the Earth is flat.
That’s what rap artist B.o.B has done. The Atlanta-area performer has recently taken to Twitter with images of clouds and stars and various other musings, all in service of the idea that the celestial orb we call home is not spherical but more or less level. All told, it doesn’t speak well for the school system in which B.o.B was educated.
On Jan. 24, for instance, B.o.B posted, “A lot of people are turned off by the phrase ‘flat earth’ … but there’s no way u can see all the evidence and not know … grow up.”
The astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a jovial figure who frequently turns up on television to explain scientific concepts in uncomplicated terms, couldn’t resist leaping into the fray. He responded, “Flat Earth is a problem only when people in charge think that way. No law stops you from regressively basking in it. Duude (sic) – to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music.”
Believe it or not, there is still a cohort of people out there who stubbornly cling to the conviction that the Earth is flat. In 2008, Britain’s BBC News reported on devout flat-earthers who say the photos of an unmistakably round Earth taken from space are fakes, and that governments, scientists and space agencies have masterminded a decades-long conspiracy to deceive the populace about the shape of the planet. Exactly why they would be inclined to do this, and why no one would spill the beans about such a wide-ranging deception is never quite explained.
John Davis, a computer scientist from Canada who had taken root in Tennessee, told the BBC he became interested in flat-earth theories after coming across literature from the Flat Earth Society.
Once schooled, he had an epiphany of sorts: “I came to realize how much we take at face value. We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses.”
And how is the planet configured? According to Davis, “the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite – it stretches horizontally forever.”
Apparently there are some differences of opinion among flat-earthers, however. Other devotees believe the planet is a disc, still flat aside from mountains and hills, and that it’s close to 25,000 miles in diameter.
Alright, then. There you have it.
Taking into consideration the vast leaps we have made scientifically, from virtually eradicating diseases that once laid waste to large swatches of humanity to traveling in space and being able to communicate with anyone in the most remote locales instantaneously, it’s startling in a way to realize that there are still people out there embracing a concept that was rapidly falling out of fashion in the 1300s. But there is apparently, yes, a scientific explanation for this. According to a study published last year in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, devout believers in conspiracy theories lack a sense of control over their lives. It’s a way for them to make sense of a sometimes senseless world, and seem like they are in the know.
So, it seems that as long as we have an Earth, there will be flat-earthers.