As objects recede from you, they begin to look smaller and slowly disappear in a very unique way: first their bottoms become hidden, and then their tops. If you've ever watched a ship on the horizon, you've seen this for yourself. Similarly, from a great distance, the tops of tall objects like mountains are visible well before their bases. On YouTube, there are videos pointing to shadows in pictures of the moon and arguing that the moon is transparent, and thus just a light. One speaker at the 2018 conference attended by a Guardian reporter made a case for the moon as a projection. What is the Zetetic Method? Today the Earth is mostly solid with a liquid outer core, but when the planet was forming, some 4.5 billion years ago, it was very hot and behaved like more like a fluid—and was subject to the squishing effects of gravity. I don't think this discussion is really about the actual evidence or the scientific process, however. ARMYs feel that Suga chose the t-shirt for its satirical punch, which ended up creating a full-circle moment after BTS took a jab at their words being twisted by the media during the concert. Some also feel that the shirt ended up being complimentary to the controversial event that the concert itself had become over the past few months.

Those details make the flat-earthers' theory so elaborately absurd it sounds like a joke, but many of its supporters genuinely consider it a more plausible model of astronomy than the one found in textbooks. In short, they aren't kidding. Dean Burnett covers the neurological mechanisms leading to conspiracy theories and more in his debut book The Idiot Brain, The only way to always cast a circular shadow is if the thing casting the shadow — in this case, Earth — is a globe. It's a matter of geometry. Either that, or the human brain has a habit of looking for patterns in innocuous or coincidental occurrences, ascribing great significance to any connection it can find and trying to make sense of them despite the absence of any concrete evidence. But seriously, that’s a bit of a far-fetched claim isn’t it?yoongi wearing from a collection that criticised our new age of spreading conspiracy like virus,, then mentioning how their authentic words were twisted for an online phenomena with zinger words like “old, stop group activities” by media,, there are dots that connect there She said all conspiracy theories share a basic thrust: They present an alternative theory about an important issue or event, and construct an (often) vague explanation for why someone is covering up that "true" version of events. "One of the major points of appeal is that they explain a big event but often without going into details," she said. "A lot of the power lies in the fact that they are vague." The Andes Mountains, 287 miles [462 kilometers] away, and although taller than the plane's altitude, lay below the sensible horizon, marked by the white horizontal line in the photograph," NASA officials wrote in a description of the flight. "The Earth's curvature explains this phenomenon, as described in the diagram accompanying the photograph. The Earth's curvature is also visible laterally in the photograph, although the effect is subtle as the image encompasses only 1/360 of the Earth's circumference." The photograph showed the troposphere-stratosphere boundary and the actual curvature of the Earth and demonstrated the potential for long-range reconnaissance from high-altitude balloons," NASA officials wrote. To put it bluntly, we know more about the curvature of Earth than almost any other topic in the realm of physical science. There are so many experiments, observations and demonstrations that have, time and time again, revealed the curve of the Earth.

Karen Douglas is professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the U.K., specializing in the psychology of conspiracy theories. Karen’s research regularly features in the media, and she gives public talks. She is a founding member of an international network of conspiracy theory scholars. But in reality, humans have circumnavigated the planet in planes and ships, and no one has fallen into space. Rather, when ships traveling large distances on the ocean do appear and disappear on the horizon, they do so either mast or hull-first, respectively. If the Earth was flat, and you had the right optics, you could watch a ship sail from New York to Africa without losing sight of it. You can’t because the curve of the Earth makes the ship dip below the horizon. The question of belief 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 Earth Society and Flat Earth 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." Editor's note: This article was originally published on Sept. 8, 2020. An updated version was posted on Feb. 4, 2022. For instance, what’s the tallest supposed mountain on Earth? Everest. Except it isn’t. The name is a giveaway; it’s clearly a morphing of “never rest”, because if you wanted to go to the biggest mountain you’d literally never rest, because it isn’t actually there. What about all those people who have climbed it, you say? Well, consider all the people who have died supposedly doing so. How do you die climbing something that isn’t there? You can’t. They were obviously killed to protect the conspiracy, whereas those who “survived” were willing to play ball.

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Our curved Earth also aligns perfectly with all of physics. Additionally, all of the other planets ever discovered also appear round, because that's how gravity likes things.

In Zetetic astronomy, the perception that Earth is flat leads to the deduction that it must actually be flat; the antimoon, NASA conspiracy and all the rest are just rationalizations for how that might work in practice. The ancient Greeks also knew Earth's size, which they determined using the Earth's shape. In the 2nd century BCE, a thinker named Eratosthenes read that on a certain day, the people of Syene, in southern Egypt, reported seeing the Sun directly overhead at noon. But in Alexandria, in northern Egypt, on that same day at the same time, Eratosthenes had observed the Sun being several degrees away from overhead. If the Earth were flat, that would be impossible: The Sun would have to be the same height in the sky for observers everywhere, at each moment in time. By measuring the size of this angle, and knowing the distance between the two cities, Eratosthenes was able to calculate the Earth's diameter, coming up with a value within about 15 percent of the modern figure. In fact, the ninth century Abbasid Caliph al-Ma-mun sent an expedition to do exactly that and used those observations to measure Earth's circumference.

The moon is not Earth's only companion

The ancient Greeks figured out that Earth was a sphere 2300 years ago by observing the planet's curved shadow during a lunar eclipse, when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon. Some flat-Earth believers claim the world is shaped like a disk, perhaps with a wall of ice along the outer rim. (Why no one has ever seen this supposed wall, let alone crashed into it, remains unexplained.) Wouldn't a disk-shaped Earth also cast a round shadow? Well, it would depend on the orientation of the disk. If sunlight just happened to hit the disk face-on, it would have a round shadow. But if light hit the disk edge-on, the shadow would be a thin, straight line. And if the light fell at an oblique angle, the shadow would be a football–shaped ellipse. We know the Earth is spinning, so it can't present one side toward the Sun time after time. What we observe during lunar eclipses is that the planet's shadow is always round, so its shape has to be spherical. There’s no such thing as a mountain, they’re just optical illusions caused by light refracting off all the mind-altering chemicals in the air. Photograph: PR You can learn more about the first photographs that clearly showed Earth's curvature in this NASA story. This explainer from Arizona State University lays out clearly and concisely the plentiful evidence for our planet's spherical shape. (Nearly spherical, rather: Earth's rotation causes it to be slightly squashed at the poles and swollen at the equator, a shape known as an oblate spheroid.) And this piece by fivethirtyeight.com explains why people believe in conspiracy theories such as the flat-Earth idea. Bibliography

People who believe that Earth is flat aren't coming to that conclusion from the same types of observations. Instead, they believe that we are being misled and lied to, that scientists (including me) want you to believe that Earth is round, despite its flatness. This flat Earth map drawn by Orlando Ferguson in 1893 is also considered the Bible Map of the World. (Image credit: CalimaX/ Alamy) Eric Oliver is a professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on American politics, public opinion, political psychology, local politics, racial attitudes and self knowledge. He has published a number of books, the most recent of which was Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (The University of Chicago Press, 2018). He has also authored numerous articles in journals.And when Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492, the question wasn't "Would he fall off the edge of the world?"—educated people knew the Earth was round—but rather, how long a westward voyage from Europe to Asia would take, and whether any new continents might be found along the way. During the Age of Exploration, European sailors noticed that, as they sailed south, "new" constellations came into view—stars that could never be seen from their home latitudes. If the world were flat, the same constellations would be visible from everywhere on the Earth's surface. For those who might not know, a “flat earther” refers to people who believe in the conspiracy theory that planet earth is flat, not spherical. But what could lead someone to believe that Suga was a part of such an absurd belief?