[title] Flat Earth: Blind Village Parable by Peter Markley
I. Introduction
Hey, everybody! Peter here.
I want to tackle the subject of flat earth theory in totally different way.
I hope this video will have something for you no matter which side you’re on.
I’m not trying to upset anyone, and I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind.
But there’s a few things I think need to be said, which so far I haven’t heard anyone saying.
And here’s the first:
A. The Blind Village
Once upon a time, there was a village.
Some of the people could see, and some of them were blind.
Some of the blind were ashamed that they were blind.
They wished so much to see, that they pretended to and fooled everyone.
Their blindness was a secret.
They listened very closely to the seeing people, and repeated everything they said.
The seeing people said there was a mountain on the north horizon. The secretly blind said so too.
The seeing people said it had three peaks, with a little cap of snow on one peak. The secretly blind said so too.
The seeing people said there were trees along the bottom. The secretly blind said so too.
They learned all the details and pretended so well, no one knew their secret.
And they believed that knowing these things took away the shame of their blindness.
But one day, an argument arose.
Some blind people said the mountain wasn’t real, and accused the seeing people of lying.
Now the secretly blind were in trouble. They didn’t really know who to believe, but if they said so, then everyone would know their secret.
Even worse, they believed that doubting the mountain was shameful, and now they were afraid they could.
They chose not to, out of fear. They argued back, saying the mountain was indeed real.
Some threw shame on anyone who did doubt, hoping this would help separate the shame from themselves.
Some grew angry, and said those who doubted were just trying to cause trouble.
And some chose to pretend that there was no real argument.
They said it was an elaborate joke, and they tried very hard to ignore it.
B. To Round-Earthers
Now, as you may have picked up, this little story is a parable of sorts.
In reality, I’m not sure how accurate it is.
But the point is to show one possible reason why so many round-earthers behave badly in this debate.
The mountain represents the spherical earth;
the seeing people represent astronomers, engineers, international airline pilots, etc.;
and blind people represent—well, everyone else. The laity.
Finally, the secretly blind people represent round-earthers who are ashamed to admit they don’t understand the science.
Sometimes they’re the same ones who just throw a bunch of dust when they hear the phrase “flat earth.”
My parable highlights the worst reason, but I know there are others.
Most of us probably understand the science on an instinctual level, and can’t verbally explain it to flat-earthers.
I’ve been there, and it is frustrating.
Trying to understand an opponent can be a serious test of patience, especially if it feels like they’re being irrational on purpose
and especially if the opponent is a close family relation that you care about and can’t get away from.
1. Be Nice
This is a good explanation … but a bad excuse.
You need to stop, take a deep breath, and remember that your opponent is a human being.
I don’t care what you think of their IQ, or what kind of lies you think they’re spreading; you have no right to bully or make fun of them.
It just poisons the air for everyone.
2. Be Brave
And for what? Could it really be to cover up your own fear?
Look, there is no shame in not understanding something.
There is no shame in needing to trust someone else who you think understands better.
All of us do that for one thing or another.
Maybe that’s a choice you can’t defend in an argument, but that does not make it an inherently wrong choice
and it doesn’t necessarily obligate you to drop everything and research.
What to believe is your choice, and your choice only.
Sometimes the bravest words we can say are, “I don’t know.”
It does, however, obligate you to respect you opponents because you’re no better than them.
They don’t know either, and that is equally valid.
They’re faced with the same choice as you about who to trust. They choose differently, and that is also valid.
Stop putting on airs, and maybe more people will listen to your side!
I may not be an astronaut, but for whatever you think my word is worth, let me reassure you.
The earth is a sphere
and I hope the rest of this video will help you understand more of the science why.
C. To Flat-Earthers
Okay, now I’m talking to flat-earthers: you’re right.
Not about the shape of the earth, but in your gut.
You say there’s a worldwide conspiracy to indoctrinate people about a fundamental aspect of reality.
You say it trickles down through the media, the classroom, the economy, everything.
Systematic, comprehensive, subversive propaganda.
I agree.
What if I told you the government was just another red herring?
A scapegoat, a smokescreen, a fall guy? You’re not thinking big enough yet!
There’s only one evil power big enough to pull this off.
The conspiracy I’m thinking of is run by Satan.
Now, I know a lot of flat-earthers out there are already Christian, and on this point we agree
—kind of. More on that later.
But for other flat-earthers, your skepticism toward popular opinion could be a real gift from God.
I would love to recruit you to the cause of Christianity.
I’m not going to dismiss you over some petty squabble about geodesy.
If that piques your interest, please find and message me. I would love to chat.
But for the rest of this video, I hope you’ll keep an open mind about the science I’m going to present.
D. Common Ground
Tackling a disagreement is useless unless we start with common ground.
What do we agree on? Let’s explore that first, and then work outward from there.
1. Self-Disclosure
We all have personal motives and biases.
The only way to overcome them is to be aware of them, so let me tell you mine.
I had never even heard of modern flat earth theory before two years ago, when I met a coworker who believed it.
He sent me ODD TV’s trilogy, a three-in-one video with a runtime of two hours.
I watched it and took exhaustive notes, which you can find in the video description below.
I spent about a month researching, and in that time
my confidence in the spherical earth was never even touched.
But this would not surprise you if you knew how much I love math and science.
I’m working on a graphic novel called Eithalica, which has great personal importance to me.
One of my early inspirations for it was my high school physics class
where I learned Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and the equation for Uniform Circular Motion.
So yes, I believe in the globe model, and I am fairly invested in it.
I don’t think this distorts my view, but I freely invite you to judge that for yourself.
2. Brothers
Regrettably, my former coworker was never able to meet me in friendly debate.
But shortly afterward I learned that [a much closer friend] was leaning toward flat earth theory.
He was willing to meet with me, which showed tremendous bravery on his part, and we had a wonderful discussion.
I believe it brought us closer together instead of farther apart.
I’m approaching this video with the same goal, and I hope you will too.
3. Non-Neutral Terms
In order to truly communicate, we also need to agree on what language to speak.
For example, I should not call flat earth theory a “pseudoscience,” as Wikipedia calls it
because flat-earthers don’t agree with that characterization.
It comes across as a senseless jab, asserting my point of view without communicating anything productive.
Conversely, I’m not going to agree if someone calls my view of earth a “theory” or “doctrine,”
because I believe it is simply an observed fact.
But the word “fact” would be too far on my side. So for the purposes of debate, I’ll call it the “globe model.”
I’m not personally aware of any flat-earthers who object to the term “theory” on their side, so I’ll stick with that when referring to their point of view.
II. Addressing the Issue
It’s unfortunate that what should be a plain scientific question has gotten buried under so much social and personal baggage.
After all that digging, we are finally ready to enter debated territory.
From here on out, I do not expect flat-earthers to agree with everything I say.
But we still aren’t ready for science!
There’s just a few more layers to peel back.
A. What’s in a Flat-Earther?
1. Ingredients
From what I’ve seen, it takes two things to be a flat-earther:
lack of insight, and lack of trust.
Like I said before, everyone has areas of ignorance which force them to choose who to trust.
Flat-earthers are like most people in their ignorance of math and science, which is nothing to be ashamed of.
They’re only different because they also lack trust in the majority view.
This is also nothing to be ashamed of!
Truth is not up for a majority vote.
Just because everyone says it doesn’t mean it’s true, and this is actually an element of critical thinking on their part.
What truly makes a flat-earther is the combination of both factors at once: lack of insight and lack of trust.
That puts them in a situation that is very understandable
—and also very unfortunate and miserable.
2. Resulting Traits
But it has telltale signs that totally wreck their credibility to others.
Let me emphasize: these next few observations are not by themselves evidence for a spherical earth.
We are not into science yet.
These are flaws in the credibility of flat earth theory as presented by its followers.
To explain these flaws, I’m sure flat-earthers would blame the globe conspiracy for keeping them marginalized, rather than the theory itself.
That is for you to decide.
a. Undisciplined Arguments
I’m just being honest here. The arguments of flat-earthers almost always lack detail and discipline.
What I mean is, they toss around these sciency buzzwords (fisheye; vanishing point; curvature)
but some of these are very complex ideas.
Flat-earthers never break them down or reference their parts in a way that actually communicates on a scientific level, or shows that they truly understand.
Was that gravity?
No.
The molecules of the air will not support the weight ... so it falls when you let go.
It's perspective, and it's obviously the limits of our eyesight.
But it's also conditions as well, quite clearly.
Yeah, heat haze condition, what have you.
... and that's how our eyes see. Everything rushes in from the sides, the top, and the bottom, to our point of focus.
And that's the vanishing point.
But you can't see the bottom of it, 'cause--seas and lakes, they wave!
They go up and down! They're not completely--
--I mean obviously, if it's completely flat and completely clear, then you'll see a lot more of it.
They rarely give actual measurements for their claims, let alone their observations
except maybe a map distance here and there, which they seem to just look up online.
And they change their story from one moment to the next, to whatever is convenient for the current argument.
As an opponent, sometimes I can barely even make sense of what they’re saying.
Sometimes my best listening efforts result in a lot of guesswork, as though I end up building their argument for them.
I saw this meme that said:
"On this cartoon world, it is dark in Tokyo, Moscow, London ... simultaneously."
I put this globe on a daylight map of earth.
That meme was more correct than my science textbooks.
It reveals entire continents that would be in darkness that should be in light.
With this, and a lot of evasion--
We're not gonna talk about that.
--appeals to emotion--
There is no use for you in this cause.
--and other shabby rhetorical tactics--
This is obvious nonsense!
Your eyes aren't fooled!
"[I] saw the curvature." No you didn't!
--they can seem just as trollish as round-earthers.
No video--real video, of the real earth spinning in space, which we would all like to see--actually exists.
This is clearly CGI!
b. Poor Consensus
There’s a lot of variation in flat earth theory that seems to fly under the radar, so to speak.
Is the sun a spotlight, or a sphere?
Is it at a fixed or variable height?
Is the earth stationary, or accelerating upward?
If you ask any round-earther—of any religious persuasion—what the radius of the earth is
they’re either going to tell you four thousand miles, or they’re going to look it up and read four thousand miles.
Why? Because we can measure it, and measurements don’t rely on worldview.
Flat earth theory is really not grounded in measurements, so it’s much more susceptible to variation.
c. Incomplete Model
In fact, ninety percent of the time, flat-earthers are arguing defensively.
They spend all their time trying to poke holes in the globe model instead of prove their own theory—or even develop it.
The first time I met a flat-earther, as we arranged to meet for the debate that never happened
I wanted to have an experiment prepared, so I asked him what source he trusted for the distance between two cities.
His answer?
The internet.
Just any random online distance calculator.
I pointed out to him that these all assume the earth is round, and use spherical trigonometry
—emphasis on “spherical.”
He said, “that’s what you think;” until I said, “I just reproduced their number using spherical trig;”
to which he said,
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
I was actually speechless.
Flat earth theory also throws out all space science as being part of the conspiracy, so it embraces a profound ignorance when it comes to the celestial bodies:
sun, moon, stars, planets, comets—and the whole cosmos.
Now let me reiterate once more: this by itself does not make flat earth theory wrong.
The opposite extreme is found in modern secular science strutting like it knows everything.
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded
because the elements--the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen ... weren't created at the beginning of time.
There can be virtue in admitting ignorance.
In fact, one flat-earther I heard expressed a competing idea of gravity:
basically that up is up, down is down, and things fall down.
I can just imagine the legions of science nerds feasting on their own ridicule for this idea
as though Newtonian gravity—or better yet, relativistic gravity—somehow demonstrates a deeper understanding of the universe.
I’d like to point out it really doesn’t.
Science can find a physical law which is the cause for some observation; but it cannot find a cause for the physical law.
Such a cause would not be physical; it would be metaphysical, and therefore not scientific.
The real problem with the flat-earther’s law of gravity is that it explains embarrassingly few observations compared with Newton’s.
Otherwise, in pure theory, it’s just as valid—and simpler!
B. Taking a Step Back
1. Motive
Just one more thing before we dive into science.
I was honest about my biases; it’s time to call out someone else’s.
Christian flat-earthers often find support for flat earth theory in the way they read the Bible.
Now, I am a devoted Christian, and had read the entire Bible cover-to-cover no fewer than eight times before I ever heard of modern flat earth theory
and have since completed it twice more.
Nowhere does it discuss the shape of the earth.
It uses certain figures of speech and metaphors while discussing completely unrelated topics.
And until recently, it had never even occurred to any Christian I ever heard of to take these figures of speech literally
—only atheists, who were misunderstanding on purpose so they could criticize the Bible.
Every new verse I hear from flat-earthers is used in a way that completely surprises me.
This is not a natural interpretation.
Yet somehow in their mind, the Bible is fused with flat earth theory.
It becomes a feedback loop:
their interpretation gambles their faith on the earth being flat;
this bias leads them to see evidence that it’s flat;
believing it’s flat, they now interpret the Bible as confirming this.
For an excellent survey of the issue on actual Bible verses, see the first portion of the documentary "Faith on the Edge" by the Creation Guys.
It’s fifteen dollars, and it does have a goofy and juvenile appeal—
So here we are on top of the world!
Why are we here? Is it a "Pokémon Go" stop?
—but I was surprised how much I learned from it. There’s a link in the video description.
I’ll just hit a few related points here.
a. KJV Controversy
You’ll find a strong correlation between Christian flat earth theory and another fringe belief sometimes called “King James only-ism.”
The Bible was not written in English; it was written mostly in Hebrew and Greek.
King James only-ism is the belief that the King James Version is somehow more authoritative than any other English translation.
The main argument I’ve heard goes something like this:
since the KJV was the only translation available to a large number of Christian believers for a large portion of history,
how could God allow this if the KJV has any mistakes in it?
Now, I always thought that was presuming quite a lot about God and what he would and wouldn’t allow.
But King James only-ism by itself is not all that harmful.
It’s just that, in my opinion, it’s wrong; and you’ll find that one wrong idea often leads to another.
In this case, King James only-ism seems to have helped establish Christian flat earth theory
which it turns out might be a little more harmful.
Now, I’m really not a scholar in either foreign language or church history.
There is a more advanced argument for King James only-ism involving the sources texts that were used.
For more information on that, I’ll point you to a book called "The King James Only Controversy" by James R. White.
b. Selective Approach
But unless you hang everything on how the word “firmament” in Genesis 1 sounds to King James readers like a hard substance,
even Bible translation is really a side issue.
The classic reading of passages like, for example, Joshua 10:12-13
is that it refers to how things look to a human observer.
This is called phenomenological language, but flat-earthers reject it.
They say this reading doesn’t take God’s word at face value.
Well, modern flat earth theory requires that the sun never travels below eye level,
but instead shrinks to a “vanishing point” from our perspective as it travels away horizontally.
So I recently confronted my flat-earth friend with Genesis 15:12, which begins with, “As the sun was going down …”
He said, “This is referring to how it appears to a human observer—”
and I said, “Ah!
“So we’re actually on equal footing when it comes to the Bible.”
Flat-earthers are very selective with the Bible.
In the aforementioned case, I even hesitate to call it “selectively literal,”
because technically a phenomenological reading is also literal.
The reading they’re forcing is even more narrow:
it’s called “ontological,” and they are selective about that.
It’s a selectively ontological reading.
c. Moral Appeal
And here it comes: Christian flat-earthers also believe the globe model is satanic.
It does make a certain kind of sense.
If it was wrong, it would have to be an overwhelming conspiracy;
and if so, it would have to be satanic, just like I mentioned earlier.
If, if, if …
This instantly appeals to our moral emotions, without offering any logical support to their case.
The danger is that someone might be carried along by those emotions into believing a flat earth.
Even worse, as a Christian round-earther I see satanic motive behind flat earth theory
so the moral appeal is actually mutual, and whichever side is wrong is a source of gruesome irony!
None of that helps us find out which side is wrong.
2. Context
And finally we come to science!
This is where the debate almost always gets waterlogged: trying to reproduce the Bedford Level Experiment;
burning money on high-altitude photography; squinting at blurry horizons; or bickering about conspiracies and evidence that’s out of budget.
All these things take the science out of our living rooms and backyards, and that is the problem.
This is an unofficial debate happening in pop culture among non-experts.
If they can’t see it, feel it, and touch it themselves, they won’t understand it; and if they don’t understand it, they won’t believe it.
I’m telling you, it can be solved with the phone camera in your pocket, at ground level, in almost any geographical area—even if you’re landlocked.
But in order to tear this wide open and make it as obvious as possible to everyone, I splurged all of seventy dollars:
ten for this welding glass,
ten for this magnetic compass,
and fifty for this sextant.
If you have seventy bucks to try to it yourself, there are product links in the video description. Otherwise keep watching for my footage.
But first let me put this into a little context.
a. Ancient Flat Earth Theory is Better than Modern
What I’m about to say has got to be the biggest elephant in the room.
Could it be, in our modern world, there’s an ancient philosophy that’s infiltrating the minds of millions?
I can answer that!
No.
No, this is not an “ancient philosophy.”
Actually, ancient flat earth theory has more in common with globe theory than it does with modern flat earth theory.
Let me explain.
The sun goes up and down.
It’s so obvious that we take it for granted, and the phrases “the sun comes up” or “the sun goes down” for sunrise and sunset
have been firmly embedded in human language since before English.
This phenomenon can only be explained two ways:
either the earth is flat, and the sun travels underneath it at night;
or the earth is round.
In principle, all ancient flat earth models I’ve ever seen agree with this phenomenon.
But, as society became connected enough to realize it could be day in one place and night in another at the same time
these models were abandoned.
The globe model was the next logical choice.
By the Middle Ages, the only argument left about earth itself
was whether there were people living on the other side—so-called “Antipodes.”
Modern flat earth theory is something completely different.
That all started in 1883 with the so-called “Zetetic Society,”
over two hundred years after the dawn of precision timekeeping, while the world was negotiating standard time zones.
The only way they could revive flat earth theory while that was going on was to deny the original phenomenon of sunrise and sunset.
So it is that ancient flat earth theory and the globe model are both founded on observation,
while modern flat earth theory is not.
b. Sunset Experiment
Let’s try observing it ourselves.
According to the globe model, sunrise and sunset are the result of earth rotating at a constant rate
and always approximately at the same distance from the sun.
This means the sun’s angular size never gets bigger or smaller, except by about three percent throughout the year;
and its angular path through the sky never slows or quickens, except by eight percent.
In stark contrast, flat-earthers say that sunrise and sunset are the result of linear perspective as the sun travels horizontally overhead.
What would that look like?
It’s very obvious flat-earthers don’t really know, because they don’t really understand linear perspective.
The term “vanishing point” can be deceiving.
What it actually means is the point where parallel lines appear to converge at infinite distance.
Yes, infinite.
If an object travels along these converging-parallel lines
it's impossible for it to actually reach the vanishing point,
until it’s smaller than the grains and flaws of the image.
For the sun to “set” by “reaching the vanishing point,” it would have to keep receding long after it looked smaller than a star!
And its movement toward the horizon would get slower in the same way,
practically coming to a stop before it disappeared.
Now, one flat-earther I’ve seen combats this by speculating about something he calls “atmospheric magnification:”
the idea that humidity in the atmosphere, or microscopic water droplets, are magnifying the image of the sun as it sets.
He demonstrates this in a very superficial way, using a plastic fresnel lens on a dining room table;
and as evidence, he offers a misconstrued quote from an expert--
So, the atmosphere really is acting like a lens?
Yes.
--and a false measurement of a skyline.
This building is significantly magnified!
But supposing there was a fantastical barometric lens to accomplish this
there is still no way it could reproduce his illusion for observers at more than one location at a time.
We know that at some basic level, sunrise and sunset look the same for all observers in all locations.
This means that, roughly speaking, any optical distortion from the atmosphere must be horizontally homogenous.
In order to magnify an image, rays of light must be converged toward a focal point,
which is by definition a heterogenous operation:
light falling on one side is turned one way, while light on the other side is turned the other way.
It would therefore be impossible to design or build an optical system
that magnified images in all directions the same way for observers in all locations at once.
If the sun were ever magnified like this, mankind would have to know more than one kind of sunset:
the normal kind, as seen from the normal angle;
and at least one other completely alien kind—probably dozens—as seen from all other angles.
But this is not so.
And thank goodness, because any poor soul standing in the path of convergence would burn to death,
exactly like a bug under a magnifying glass!
And even from the right location, the illusion would be incomplete.
According to linear perspective, the size and speed of a flat-earth sun would change all day—not just at twilight.
Let’s take a closer look at the geometry.
From this diagram, we can see that the angle of a flat-earth sun would change according to an inverse tangent function
—not a linear function like a globe-model sun.
Every tutorial on linear perspective accounts for this
and most of us are familiar with seeing it when a car passes on the road.
With a good working compass and sextant, the difference should be easy to spot anywhere in the sky.
Or, if you want to save money, a protractor and plumb line are a low-quality substitute for the sextant.
These instruments are necessary because for angular measurements, we don’t want to rely on pixels in a photograph.
Photography brings variables into the equation from both lens and image projection, not all of which we can precisely calculate.
In this debate, we all know what a sore spot fisheye distortion is.
A quick note: both compass and sextant are necessary to truly show the sun’s constant speed
unless, of course, you measure from the equator on the spring or autumn equinox.
The sextant will show the sun’s altitude, and the compass its azimuth
which are the components of its two-dimensional motion vector.
To find scalar speed, these two readings will need to be combined using spherical trigonometry (in this case for the shape of the sky, not the earth).
But to settle the debate, that much precision isn’t necessary.
The speed of the sextant alone should stay roughly constant,
not dramatically slow down as the flat earth predicts.
For size, a practical consideration is brightness.
Flat-earthers use footage like this to say the sun gets larger and smaller from our point of view.
But there’s obvious glare totally nuking the actual edge of the sun, and spreading into other parts of the image.
And considering the sun is bright enough to burn your eyes out, there’s no telling how far!
No photograph of the sun can show its true size unless it’s exposed low enough to show a solid edge.
That is why we need welding glass: to act as a lens filter for our camera.
What happens if we ... show-- ... ?
Oh! You can barely see my flourescent light there.
For my experiment, I have four cameras.
Two I set up with a typical view of the sunset, as nearly the same as I could—
one filtered with welding glass, and one without for comparison.
Nearby, I have the compass and sextant on a level spinning table.
A third camera shows the view through the sextant, which I will adjust to follow the sun
while a fourth shows the readings on both instruments.
Use the zero on the vernier scale to read the sextant.
All footage is synchronized to a common reference both before and after, so we can watch everything at once.
Ready?
Straightaway we see what a false impression flat-earthers give of the sun changing size!
You could see that in your own experiment with nothing but the welding glass
just like many people do for fun when they look at a solar eclipse.
And notice something else:
if we overlay frames from the timelapse at constant intervals,
we see not only constant size, but also constant speed!
This is plain to our eyes, and all the fuss with the compass and sextant was just to verify it numerically.
Both readings are as straight as an arrow!
Especially the sextant, owing to its higher precision.
The scalar speed, calculated from these two, definitely shows some noise, but even so stays fairly close to constant.
This number would be more important when measuring closer to midday, when the sextant reverses direction.
Honestly, I can’t imagine how these results could be any more conclusive.
The sun clearly goes below eye level
which forces us into that ancient dilemma:
either the whole world experiences sunset at the same time, because the sun travels underneath it;
or the definition of “eye level” is relative, because it’s a sphere.
If you know anybody across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans from your location,
Skype or FaceTime them!
Ask them where the sun is and compare it with your own location.
Try my experiment yourself—seriously!
C: Hi!
P: Hi!
P: Just filling in my audience here. This is Cat.
P: We met in Los Angeles at a conference, like, ten years ago, I think?
C: Yep, 2008.
P: And hopefully you can tell, it's pretty bright still where I am--the sun's pretty high, even though it's a little cloudy.
P: And what part of the world are you in, Cat?
C: I'm near Durham in northeast England.
C: It's about six miles behind me.
P: And that's a window facing outside, right?
C: Yeah, it's facing pretty much west.
P: The sun just went down, didn't it?
C: Yeah.
P: Alright.
P: I guess that's pretty solid evidence that it's different times of day in different locations at the same time, right?
C: I'd say so!
P: And just to go on record,
P: you're not being paid by NASA or the Freemasons to lie about this, right?
C: No, I wish I was cuz I'd get some money comin' in.
P: I feel almost like our two countries have a little bit of a ...
P: mutual responsibility for this flat-earth mess,
P: because I think it was started by this guy named Samuel Rowbotham in, like, 1883.
P: He started the first flat earth societies in London and New York.
C: What year was that again, sorry?
P: 1883, I think?
P: That's what I read.
C: Oh, sort of ... right in the middle of the eugenics rage as well.
P: (disgust)
P: Great!
C: Gotta love the Victorians!
P: They made pretty buildings though!
C: Yeah.
C: Crazy, but made pretty things.
P: Do you believe the earth is a sphere, Cat?
C: Yes I do.
P: Alright. Thank you so much, you've been a very good sport.
C: You're very welcome.
P: And hopefully we can chat again later!
C: Okay, take care!
P: You too.
A: Hello?
P: Hi, Aeric!
P: Just to fill in my audience here, I met Aeric online
P: because he was posting really cool artwork
P: drawings of Jesus and other Bible scenes, which I thought was pretty cool.
P: It's still pretty dark outside where I am right now.
P: It's about 6:25, got maybe another twenty minutes until sunrise.
P: So Aeric, what part of the world are you in?
A: I live in the United Arab Emirates, which is a country in the Middle East.
P: That's pretty cool. What time is it where you are?
A's Bro: 2:25pm!
P: Is that your little brother?
A: Yes.
P: Hi!
A's Bro: Hi!
P: Are the photos that you sent me-- were those taken just a few minutes ago?
P: Is it still daytime where you are?
A: Yeah, it's still daytime where I am.
P: Awesome. Do you believe the earth is a sphere, Aeric?
A: Yes.
P: Alright. And, just to be clear
P: You're not part of a conspiracy, are you? Like, NASA and the Freemasons aren't paying you to lie about this?
A: No, no.
P: Alright, cool.
P: My sister's cat is joining the conversation.
P: So, yeah. Thank you very much, Aeric
P: and Aeric's little brother!
A: No problem!
P: It was good to meet you both!
P: And hopefully we can chat again soon.
A: Alright then.
P: Alright, see you later.
A's Bro: Bye!
C. Understanding Geometry
There is so much more to this issue.
There are endless possibilities for studying the earth
and there’s no way I could answer all the arguments presented by flat-earthers.
Instead, I want to focus on building up your core understanding of certain areas of math and science—
the areas where it seems like it’s needed most
which is nowhere more than geometry.
1. The Celestial Sphere
Our world is three dimensional, but our primary perception is not.
When we see the world, whether through our eye or a camera lens, in principle we are taking a sample of light from a single point in space.
We know what direction each ray of light comes from to reach that point, but not how far it came.
Without magnitude, direction is a two-dimensional quantity, which can be represented by the surface of a sphere.
Surfaces without volume can exist in three dimensions, but only have two.
The world as we see it is this kind of surface,
a sphere centered on our sample point
—also called our perspective,
point of view, vantage point,
the observer, the camera, etc.
Astronomers call the surface the celestial sphere, a term we can borrow even for non-celestial observations.
I have sometimes called it the sphere of observation.
The celestial sphere is important because it’s the sum total of all possible observations from one location, expressed in their purest form.
For example, size cannot be directly observed in units of length, like feet or meters—
only units of angle, like degrees or radians.
Length in the real world must be calculated or deduced.
That’s why it’s so easy to fool the eye with “forced perspective.”
On the celestial sphere, the directions of “up” and “down” form two opposing points on the vertical axis.
“Eye level” forms what’s called an orthodrome, or a great circle, perpendicular to this axis.
A great circle is coplanar with the center of its sphere, and cuts the sphere in half like an equator.
The earth’s horizon also forms a circle on the celestial sphere.
At sea level, both round-earthers and flat-earthers agree that it’s a great circle, the same as eye level.
The question is whether it “drops away” as we rise through the atmosphere,
which on the celestial sphere would turn it from a great circle into a small circle:
one whose plane does not intersect the center of the sphere.
Considering these complexities, the argument about whether the horizon looks “flat” or “curved” becomes very silly.
These terms, as used, are highly ambiguous for a figure drawn on the celestial sphere,
a surface that is itself already curved.
We can only be certain of their meaning after we add another, much worse layer of complexity.
2. Image Projection
Inevitably, some portion of the celestial sphere is taken and projected into a non-spherical image.
This process dramatically complicates our discussion, because it completely transforms the observation, and is different from one imaging system to another.
It’s impossible for a flat image to show a true, undistorted observation,
because the celestial sphere is what mathematicians called a “non-developable surface.”
This means every flat image of a 3D world has an inherent projection type that determines how—not if—it transforms the observation.
For a single photograph, this corresponds with lens type.
The most common is called a rectilinear lens, which roughly follows a simple pinhole-camera’s gnomonic projection
but always imperfectly, with some degree of barrel distortion.
This projection type mimics that of our eye
—as closely as a flat image can, considering that our retina is curved.
A rectilinear image is the only context in which looking for a “curved” horizon can even be exactly defined as used in the debate;
and the number of variables is enormous.
The approach many flat-earthers seem to take, by judging or dismissing an image with a single glance, is staggeringly cavalier.
During my analysis of the ODD TV video, I spent an entire week developing a formula to predict horizon curvature
which accounts for all the variables except barrel distortion.
Here it is, in all its glory.
Honestly … just, please …
don’t debate about the horizon looking curved or flat until you know how to use this formula.
3. Cartography
Now that we understand images, let’s talk for a moment about maps.
If the earth is a sphere, then a flat-paper map of it is basically like a projected image.
All the same math applies, but when making a map it’s called cartography.
Every such map has a map projection for exactly the same reasons that an image has an image projection.
In fact, many of the same projection types are available, although the two disciplines developed different names for most of them and have different favorites.
For a world map, one ubiquitous kind is called Mercator projection.
This has lowest distortion at the equator and greatest distortion at the poles
—which become unhelpful and are usually somewhat trimmed.
The map some flat-earthers have adopted as true and undistorted
—which, you recall, is an impossibility for a flat image of a sphere—
is the azimuthal equidistant polar map.
This map was created by experts who understood the spherical earth,
but who wanted easier navigation in the northern hemisphere—at the expense of the southern.
Instead of lowest distortion at the equator, this map has lowest distortion at the north pole, and greatest distortion at the south pole.
Someone can measure this.
I don’t know how much the flat earth debate has affected Australia or New Zealand, but they are ideally positioned.
Here are satellite photographs of their countries
—or here they are on this schoolroom globe.
Compare with how they look on the map that flat-earthers claim is true and undistorted.
Well, which is it? On the flat-earth map, the whole continent is smashed!
Pick any two cities lying north-south of each other, and a nearby pair lying east-west, and compare distances.
For example
in Tasmania, the globe model says there’s about ten more miles (as the crow flies) between Port Arthur and Launceston than between Launceston and Smithton;
but find the corresponding points on the flat-earth map,
and the trip from Launceston to Smithton would be longer—by a huge margin.
If you live in Tasmania, and want to spend a day proving it, you could do it all by yourself with nothing but a car and a lot of gas.
Just drive as direct a route as possible from Port Arthur to Launceston, Trip A;
then from Launceston to Smithton, Trip B; and check your odometer after each one.
If the world’s a sphere, Trip A should be 260 kilometers, and Trip B should be 220
which couldn’t make sense, unless this map shows distortion.
4. iPhone Pano on Schoolroom Globe
Back to photography, let’s talk about panoramas.
These are usually “stitched together” from many photos; and are often mathematically rendered to a new projection type suitable for whatever purpose lies at hand.
With modern technology, this can be done dynamically on the fly—as in Google Street View or 360-degree videos.
Here, only the user’s viewing direction is taken, and rendered with gnomonic projection to reconstruct a natural experience.
But sometimes the whole panorama is shown “unwrapped” using any one in a category of highly unnatural projection types.
This category is called cylindrical projection.
It chooses an axis through the celestial sphere, usually vertical; cuts a straight line from pole to pole;
and “unwraps” the sphere from around the axis, so that longitudinal angle corresponds with horizontal distance in the image.
Circles of latitude turn into straight lines.
Remember that earth’s horizon forms a circle on our celestial sphere, regardless of the shape of the earth.
Any cylindrical image whose axis is vertical—i.e. perpendicular to this circle—will turn the circle into a straight line.
This happens no matter where or how big the circle is on the celestial sphere.
Great and small circles alike are unwrapped to be straight.
On purpose.
Here, the terms “flat” or “curved” as used in the debate are worse than ambiguous.
They are absolutely meaningless, and cannot be used without misleading.
One of the greatest frustrations for round-earthers (or sources of ridicule)
is how flat-earthers use cylindrical panoramas as evidence for a flat earth.
They say it looks flat in the image, therefore is not curved, therefore is not a sphere.
This is a pair of non sequiturs on either side of a non-statement
—an exquisite, multilayered breakdown in understanding.
To show how absurd it is, let me reproduce their evidence in an iPhone panorama using this schoolroom globe.
I guess my schoolroom globe is flat. I’d better get a new one.
5. The Real Horizon
What we actually want to look for is dropaway:
the angle by which the horizon deviates from a great circle on our celestial sphere, as we rise in altitude.
Recall that a great circle cuts the sphere exactly in half,
so a horizon at eye level means equal parts sky and earth on the celestial sphere,
while dropaway means more sky than earth.
A single photograph takes only a small part of the celestial sphere,
where this proportion depends entirely on how the camera is tilted.
To make matters worse, a photograph doesn’t capture gravity,
so by looking you can’t know how it was tilted, except by assuming the horizon to be eye level
—which invites circular reasoning in favor of a flat earth.
I am convinced the intuition of flat-earthers makes this error on a routine basis.
We can avoid the whole thing by taking a full panorama.
Late last year, my friend Victor Brewer of Aerial Image Solutions took panoramic footage of the horizon at an altitude of more than one hundred twenty thousand feet.
Victor’s work has gotten attention before.
One of his previous balloon launches was attended by Rob Skiba, a well known flat-earther with 170,000 YouTube subscribers.
Victor’s most recent launch was featured in the Creation Guys Faith on the Edge documentary.
I played a modest role this time, helping analyze his footage.
Links to both it and my analysis are in the video description.
With a full panorama, the orientation of the camera doesn’t matter.
To show dropaway, and a spherical earth, all we need is more sky than earth.
The panorama is half sky, and half land.
And if it's half sky and half land down near the ground, you have a base starting point.
Then you go up in altitude. Now, if you have the same amount of sky as you have of earth, there's a real problem.
But if you have less earth and more sky
you know that there's dropaway occurring.
if there's dropaway occurring, that can't occur on a flat plane.
P: I was pretty impressed with just the concept of sending up a panorama--
V: Yeah.
P: --er, a panoramic camera.
V: Well, I'll tell you what, you're forgetting that you saved my butt
V: because I couldn't do the math, or at least didn't have the time to, and
V: Peter did all the math, which is cool.
P: But that intuition was there from the beginning.
V: Yep.
According to flat earth theory,
the closest point from our camera to the supposed Antarctic “ice wall,” if it gave way to immediate void,
would produce horizon dropaway of less than 13% of one degree.
Even this generous figure would not be measurable by our method—
so if we measure any, it shows a sphere.
Victor provided me with six cubic faces of the panorama, matching at the edges and oriented upright.
All four sides showed more sky than earth.
In fact, they showed perfect balance, with the horizon quite clearly falling below the midpoint by the same amount on all four.
This amount was six whole degrees.
Does this agree with the globe model?
To answer that, we needed to measure the altitude.
The bottom face of the cube showed geographical features of known size, which allowed us to triangulate an altitude of 120,120 feet.
This was roughly corroborated with barometric data collected during the launch,
and puts the globe-model prediction for dropaway within 3.9% of our measurement.
This tiny error is well within the precision of the experiment.
If we wanted to increase the precision, we would begin accounting for well recognized, but normally negligible factors:
ground level above sea, oblateness of the earth, etc.
My belief is that most of our imprecision comes from atmospheric refraction.
But the fact that we measured any dropaway at all shows the earth to be a sphere
and the amount we measured shows a radius of four thousand miles.
6. Perspective
I wasn’t originally planning a whole section on this, because it seems so basic to me.
I figured it out on my own when I was fourteen.
But I’ve now seen three separate flat-earthers make this mistake.
And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because I also once had a teacher in college get it wrong
—in a course on computer animation, of all things!
We know things appear smaller when they’re farther away, but there’s more to it.
This happens because the rays of light we see must converge to reach our vantage point.
Tracing them backwards, we would say the rays of our vision diverge.
As previously mentioned, an object’s apparent size relates to the inverse tangent of its distance.
This means the farther away it is, the less the distance matters in how big it looks.
If you zoom with a camera lens, or look through a telescope, this is fundamentally different from traveling closer to your subject.
You’re taking a smaller subsample from your celestial sphere,
so the rays of your vision will be closer to parallel—or, less divergent
and size relationships at a comfortable distance will appear more uniform, like in an orthographic drawing.
Anyone acquainted with techniques for framing a film or photograph will know this,
and the effect is often exploited in cinema with a dolly zoom.
This is a disorienting type of shot with many famous examples.
Rob Skiba was the aforementioned flat-earther who speculated about “atmospheric magnification.”
He claims to show an example of such magnification by comparing size relationships between two images of Willis Tower in Chicago.
But it’s painfully obvious these images show radically different distances to the subject,
and therefore different size relationships.
He is correct that the tower is magnified—
but by his software and the telephoto lens on his camera
not the atmosphere!
D. Understanding Light
1. Foreshortened Sunrays
Most of us have probably seen sun rays through clouds like this.
This phenomenon can be a little confusing.
Once many years ago, before I heard of flat earth theory, I paused to puzzle over it.
The sun rays look fairly vertical, yet converge as though the sun is very close behind the clouds.
At that time, it took me only a few minutes to realize the rays must be vastly foreshortened.
Basically, clouds are often a fair amount bigger and farther away than we realize
and the feet of the rays where they touch ground are much smaller and closer than we realize.
True to linear perspective, the rays are parallel but appear to converge at infinite distance.
The sun is their vanishing point, and another angle on them would show them to be parallel.
It’s a very convincing illusion.
It basically works by a lack of reference points, and by false comparison to more familiar things.
There’s no solid object in our everyday experience that compares to the shape and arrangement of sun rays
and they’re usually the only intervening object between ground and cloud
and have no discernible texture or surface to provide distance cues.
We’re used to seeing parallel lines converge, as long as they do so on the horizon or in a single plane.
Sun rays do neither.
Their vanishing point is the sun, which is significantly higher than the horizon when they appear;
and the scattering medium is transparent, revealing the whole volumetric shape of shadows that are cast through it.
As a result, sun rays are too multilayered, and their angle too steep
for our brain to easily categorize them with train tracks, telephone wires, or other converging-parallel lines.
When it comes down to it, seeing is not always believing, because our eyes are too easily fooled by the unfamiliar.
Our brain does a lot more interpreting of sight than we realize,
and sometimes we have to let rational knowledge intervene.
2. Specular Highlights
Another mistaken impression comes from photos like this.
Flat-earthers point to the bright spot and say it shows the closest point on the clouds directly under the sun.
What they’re describing is diffuse reflection
like when you shine a flashlight on a sheet of paper.
They neglect to consider that this could be specular reflection
like when you shine it on a polished surface.
Considering that clouds are made of water droplets, it’s not surprising they could appear shiny.
We’re used to seeing them from below, where they look like cotton.
But on top, they flatten against a barometric “ceiling,” and who knows how often they look shiny there?
3. Atmospheric Refraction
Flat-earthers really love their horizon photos showing skyline that “shouldn’t be visible.”
What they never tell you is that these skylines across huge distances are only visible in the right weather conditions
and otherwise sink downward, obscured by the sea.
Now why, on a flat-earth, would that be?
We know light bends when it goes through water or glass.
Just put your finger in a bucket of water and see how crooked it looks!
Or think of a magnifying glass, which works by bending the light.
We also know it bends through air—just think of heat waves!
When meteorologists tell you that skyline photos are a mirage,
that’s not a hand-wavy magic word to explain the impossible.
We see light bend through air.
When you zoom in on the extreme distance, the light is traveling through a lot more air to reach you.
It’s complicated and a little unpredictable, but there’s nothing mysterious about it!
Light will sometimes bend through layers of atmosphere and follow the curvature of the earth,
causing that curve to appear like it straightens and then curls again depending on the weather
—a form of distortion which is totally horizontally homogenous.
What is mysterious is how, on a flat earth, the lowest hundred feet a skyline could be below the horizon
or why receding ships always disappear behind the ocean from the bottom upward.
When asked why we can’t see Mt. Everest from the tops of our houses in North America, flat-earthers blame atmospheric haze.
But haze would cause receding objects to fade until they were the same color as the sky
not sink below the horizon bottom first.
So-called “atmospheric magnification” can’t explain this either,
because it would supposedly cause the objects to get bigger and smaller
—not just bob up and down like in this timelapse.
The evidence is, and has always been, perfectly consistent with the globe model.
The great irony is that flat earth theory, which they tout as a simple return to the evidence of our eyes
must now invent a reason why that evidence is distorted in favor of a globe.
4. Total Internal Reflection
There’s another weird, unexpected thing light does, called total internal reflection.
When light meets a surface between thinner and denser media, it refracts according to Snell’s Law.
Its path will be shallower on the thin side, and steeper on the dense side.
But things get weird when it comes from the dense side
(which, for a solid or liquid against the air, is also the “inside”)
at an angle that’s already too shallow
and there’s no room for it to be the right amount more shallow after crossing the boundary.
What does it do instead?
Completely reflects.
That’s right, a transparent surface can act as reflective as a mirror.
But even weirder, it can do this suddenly
when the angle crosses an otherwise invisible threshold, between steep enough to refract, and not steep enough.
If you look up from underneath the surface of a pool, you’ll see a distorted image of the world above
but then a sharp line, and past that, only reflections of the world below.
The greater the difference in density between media, the steeper the threshold angle and the wider the area for total internal reflection.
Diamond is coveted not only for its rarity, but also for its beauty
because it’s so dense that the area for total internal reflection spans the majority of possible angles
and light that enters can bounce around dozens of times before escaping
—especially when the diamond is purposely cut into a shape that encourages this.
When light meets a change in the density of air, this change is usually far too gradual to act as a surface for total internal reflection.
But not always.
If you’ve ever driven on a hot sunny day, you’ve probably seen disappearing puddles in the road ahead.
This is called an inferior mirage, and is actually an example of total internal reflection on a surface between pockets of air.
They seem to have defined edges because of the reflection threshold
then vanish because this threshold is relative to your position and moves as you approach.
It’s like the underside of the pool surface, but flipped completely upside-down—and with no water involved.
An inferior mirage can also happen on the horizon, but for some of us this is so unexpected and unintuitive that we don’t recognize it.
As soon as we do, it seems obvious, because objects appear doubled, with one image upside-down
just like there’s a mirror lying under them.
In a way, there is—a mirror made of air.
One flat-earther I saw used this to explain why round-earthers sometimes see curvature.
But as far as I know, that’s a straw man argument.
And recognizing this phenomenon does not always work in their favor.
In Faith on the Edge, Kyle tried using a telephoto lens to glimpse Pat holding an American flag across seven miles of water.
But even twenty feet above sea level
Pat was hidden underneath the reflection surface!
I am right at the end of the bridge!
E. Understanding Space
1. What is a Vacuum?
I have heard flat-earthers say that the vacuum of space would suck the atmosphere away from the earth
that you can’t have a vacuum and a non-vacuum side by side without a solid barrier.
Well first of all, “suction” is not really a fundamental concept in physics.
It’s not really something. It’s like darkness: it’s actually the lack of something.
Gas has an expansion force that it exerts uniformly on all surfaces that it touches.
This is called pressure, and suction is the lower side of a difference in pressure.
When you drink through a straw, it’s actually the air pressure on the surrounding fluid that pushes it up into the bottom of the straw
not some inherent pulling force from your mouth.
If the fluid was not under pressure, the straw wouldn’t work.
Imagine a sealable plastic bag.
When it’s open, the volume of the bag is free to expand or contract
because the pressure inside and out will equalize by air flowing through the opening.
When it’s closed, however
the amount of air inside is fixed; none can enter or exit.
The air outside the bag is now crushing inward, while the air inside the bag is pushing outward.
If there’s any imbalance in these opposing forces, then the bag will succumb to the greater one.
If the pressure is greater outside, it will shrink, which also compresses the air inside and raises the inside pressure.
If the pressure is greater inside, it will grow, which also lets the air inside expand and alleviates the inside pressure.
One or the other will happen until the pressures are equal
and at equilibrium the bag will stop and remain the same size.
If you push all the air out of the bag and seal it empty
there will be no inside pressure to compete with the outside pressure.
The bag will remain collapsed because of the surrounding atmosphere
and you won’t be able to pull the sides away from each other to create volume inside.
But what if you removed the surrounding atmosphere?
In practice, some minute quantity of air is always present in vacuum chambers—and even in space.
But theoretically, if you sealed the bag in something near enough to a perfect vacuum that there was no pressure inside or out
then the bag would be slack and limp, and you could freely pull the sides apart to create volume inside
even while it was sealed!
This is because a vacuum doesn’t really “suck;”
it’s actually that air pushes, and there’d be no air to push it in either direction.
As flat-earthers observe, a solid barrier can restrain the expanding force of gas.
Technically this happens by the normal force in the barrier, which opposes the expanding force.
But any other type of force can oppose it just as well, like gravity.
Although flat-earthers don’t believe in Newtonian gravity, they still believe that things fall
which is still a force applied downward to all matter
whether by a Newtonian equation or not, and whether “downward” is absolute or relative.
If gas falls like all other matter, then its weight, though very very slight, will compress it downward—creating a pressure gradient.
Eventually, if you follow this gradient high enough, the pressure will get low enough to qualify by some definition of “space.”
That is what the vacuum of space is.
Some people seem to have some cartoonish idea that the atmosphere has a definable surface like the ocean
but this is not true.
It’s just a pressure gradient, and the boundary is completely subjective.
The word “vacuum” refers to anything close to zero pressure
and the word “space” refers to the vacuum above the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is prevented by its own weight from expanding upward to fill space.
It's that simple!
This actually has nothing to do with the shape of the earth.
It could almost work on a flat-earth model!
Flat-earthers attack it only in hopes of discrediting astronomy, and mainstream science in general.
But their attack doesn’t make any sense.
When they talk about mainstream science, it’s once again obvious they have no idea what they’re talking about.
2. Free-Falling Through It
Once you understand space, you realize how absurd some of their other claims are as well.
They say we don’t feel the motion of the earth, which they seem to take as evidence that it’s motionless.
But this would be a type of logical fallacy called an “argument from ignorance.”
If we don’t feel the earth moving, the best we can do is assume that it’s motionless.
This offers no actual evidence one way or the other.
And how could it?
When riding in a car down the freeway, once the car is up to speed
without using the speedometer our bodies and brains can sense that speed several ways:
seeing motion in the world outside the windows;
hearing and feeling bumps, vibration, and wind;
and knowing the context of having just accelerated.
Our awareness of speed is derived from other bodily sensations: sight, sound, touch, and balance.
It is not in itself a bodily sensation
partly because it’s not even an immediate physical property. It has to be defined in relation to something else.
If you’ve ever been a passenger on a long road trip, perhaps you’ve had the experience of waking gradually from sleep in a moving vehicle.
This experience can expose some intricate stages in the process of perceiving speed.
First, you just feel shaking and hear a dull, rushing roar.
Perhaps there’s a split second before you remember or recognize this as road noise.
In that instant … would you know that you’re moving?
Maybe not.
The earth is free-falling through a dark and frictionless vacuum.
There is no road for its “tires” to vibrate against; no air around it to produce wind;
almost no parallax in the world outside its “windows;” and certainly no observed context of it getting up to speed!
The only acceleration on it is that of the sun’s gravity, constantly bending its trajectory in a circle;
and you can’t feel the force of gravity while freely submitting to it.
Our sensation of gravity vanishes in a falling elevator or a parabolic plane.
Orbiting something in space is also free fall, and feels identical to not accelerating at all.
So I ask again: how would our casual senses offer evidence for any of this?
The debate over heliocentrism lasted far longer in history than the debate over the shape of the earth,
because observing the parallax of stars requires extremely disciplined study.
Either way, the bottom line is that our bodily sensations on earth do not contradict heliocentrism.
On that point, they are neutral at best.
3. Centrifugal Effect
Another argument I’ve heard is that, if the earth were spinning at a thousand miles per hour, everything would be flung off of it.
The actual concept in physics here is called the centrifugal effect.
The law of inertia states that objects require the exertion of force for their velocity to change.
If they’re moving, this means they will continue in a straight line until forced otherwise.
The centrifugal effect is what inertia looks like in a spinning frame of reference.
The straight-line velocity of an object in this frame of reference tries to pull it out of the circle along a tangent.
If a force is exerted inward to keep the object following the circle, it’s called a centripetal force.
Gravity is the earth’s centripetal force.
A thousand miles per hour sounds fast, until you realize how far we are from the center of that circular motion.
It takes twenty-four hours to make one rotation.
In angular speed, that’s 0.0007 rounds per minute.
Try playing a phonograph record at that speed!
What this means is that, despite the enormous linear speed,
a straight-line tangent to this circle would take a long time to reach a noticeable distance from the circle.
If you jumped off a building and fell for ten seconds, you would have fallen sixteen hundred feet.
By contrast, if earth’s gravity magically vanished, and everything started falling upward from the centrifugal effect
in the same ten seconds you would only travel five feet.
Basically, the centrifugal effect on earth is very slight compared to gravity.
The downward acceleration we feel, measured at 9.8 meters per second per second,
is actually the difference between these centrifugal and centripetal forces.
If they were equal, we would be in orbit around the earth, like the moon or the International Space Station—
not accelerating inward or outward, but following a circle.
When the centrifugal effect becomes great enough to fling something away from the earth, this is called escape velocity.
And no …
on the surface of the earth, a thousand miles per hour is nowhere near escape velocity.
4. Size and Scale
Let’s talk about orders of magnitude.
Did you know you can’t just make a picture of anything?
Take a map of the world, for instance.
Well, your house is somewhere on that map, right? Why can’t you see it?
Well obviously, it’s too small.
You might see it on a map of your city. But a map of your city won’t show someone else’s house in another country across the world.
What if you wanted to make one map big enough and detailed enough to show both houses?
How much paper would you need? And when you were done, how would anyone use it?
Totally unfolded, would it even fit indoors?
Okay, suppose you unfolded it outdoors.
Standing on one side, a person could see the mark representing your house.
But could they see the detail on the other side?
Okay, suppose they climbed onto something tall to see the whole map at once.
Well, now they’re too far from either side, and they’re no better off than if they had looked at a world map they could hold in their hand.
You see, we’re back where we started.
There’s a fundamental problem with size and scale.
Human faculties can only grasp a certain range of magnitudes at one time, even if other magnitudes are accessible.
A picture can easily have so much detail that nobody can see it
and if they zoomed in far enough they could easily get lost in relation to the picture.
There’s no solution to this problem.
We are not God, and we have limitations we will always have to work around.
There’s a reason the word “astronomical” can mean “big beyond comprehension.”
Any portion of outer space is inevitably outside the range of our immediate faculties.
We have enough trouble truly grasping the size of just the earth.
The orbits of most manmade satellites follow invisible circles (or ovals) that are between two and five times larger than this
but most satellites are no bigger than a person.
It’s the same old house-vs-world problem, except five times worse.
That’s why you never see satellites in photos of the earth.
And a photo of the entire solar system?
Forget it!
It would just look blank.
You would need a microscope to see the planets--and that's if the photo had infinite resolution, and no noise;
and if you could find them!
It blows me away when flat-earthers grumble about not having photos of these things.
Nobody's ever seen that. We've never seen a photograph of it.
And nobody's ever seen the solar system like this.
It's always graphics. It's always secondary knowledge.
What do they expect?
We are not God,
and that kind of “primary knowledge” in the heavenly realm is completely impossible!
I’ve seen two separate flat-earthers complain about this moon timelapse from NASA’s DSCOVR satellite.
This is so sad, because one of them actually says:
Very few people understand how the moon works on the heliocentric model.
then proceeds to question its authenticity using essentially sheer nonsense:
If this moon is traveling this far while these pictures are being taken, guess what?
This was more than just a little afternoon, with a quarter turn of earth or however far it moves here.
What does he mean by “this far?”
Does he honestly think these photos show the moon completing a quarter or half of its orbit,
just because it passes that much of the earth’s surface in the camera’s vision?
That logic barely parses.
“Very few people understand,” huh? Well he’s not one of them.
This goes back to size and scale.
These photos show the moon roughly three quarters of the way from the camera to the earth.
But what is that distance compared to their size?
He seems to think there’s, like, one or two earth radii between them, which couldn’t be more wrong.
These photos were taken from one million miles away.
That is two hundred and fifty earth radii.
The field of view is half of one degree
—comparable to that of a high-end super telephoto lens.
The full circle the moon will travel stretches hundreds of thousands of miles outside the frame on either side.
This is a tiny portion of that circle.
These numbers are very far outside our everyday experience, and they are difficult to comprehend.
But the math works out, and the photos are real.
5. Significance of Man
Flat-earthers also misunderstand why the heavenly realm defies comprehension.
I like to cut them some slack here, because the secular worldview on this is deafening.
Flat-earthers say the globe model teaches that man is not significant;
that if the universe were so vast beyond comprehension,
life on this tiny blue dot would be meaningless, accidental, and destined for oblivion.
This is what the secular world believes.
The universe looks more and more random.
Whether or not the universe has a purpose? The case against it is strong.
All evidence points to: we're on a one-way trip to oblivion.
Today's lecture is about outer space
and how it will eventually implode in on itself!
They are wrong, but not about the size of the universe.
It’s there, and it’s big.
It just doesn’t mean what they tell us it means.
Listen to these words from Psalm 8, penned over three thousand years ago:
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands.
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Does that really sound to you like a flat-earth cosmos?
David is specifically expressing tension between the significance of man, and man’s place in the universe.
We know we are significant, but the universe makes us feel the opposite.
Secular nihilism isn’t lying about the universe; it’s ignoring the evidence in man.
The universe tells us we don’t deserve to be significant, that it doesn’t come from us.
It’s supposed to teach us that our significance is bestowed on us by the sheer goodness of God,
and it teaches us to humbly worship him.
God created us to know him, and love him, and show him
and then he gave us a little hint of what he's like, called: the universe!
And it's an understatement.
That's why it's there.
If God’s creation spans so many orders of magnitude
that even taking a single picture to show an infinitesimal fraction of it is outrageously hopeless …
what does that say about God himself?
F. Blatant Misunderstanding
We’ve already seen that flat-earthers who claim “inconsistencies” in the globe model have no idea what they’re talking about.
But here’s a quick tour showing some of the very saddest examples.
1. Coriolis Effect
Now to be fair here, the Coriolis Effect is very confusing.
But I saw a flat-earther say that it should apply the same way to both bullets and airplanes.
A bullet is not in controlled flight.
That’s why it’s called a ballistic projectile.
The pilot of an airplane is making continuous adjustments to his attitude and trajectory while in flight.
There is no comparison between these two situations.
Coriolis Effect or not, a plane would only do what this flat-earth video shows if the pilot was dead or asleep!
2. Scientific Language
One flat-earther, in talking about how NASA lies to us
presents a document from their official website which he thinks accidentally admits that the earth is flat.
He shows the document and links to it in his video description. You can still follow this and find it.
He zeroes in on this quote at the end:
“This report derives and defines a set of linearized system matrices
“for a rigid aircraft of constant mass, flying in a stationary atmosphere over a flat, nonrotating earth.”
He reads the quote, and drops the mic.
He just moves on, as though that made his point.
What is his point?
Uh …
I think he must understand this quote to be stating that the earth is flat.
But that is not what it states.
For anyone accustomed to technical language, particularly math,
the real meaning couldn’t be more obvious:
that for the purpose of simplifying the math,
they chose to ignore certain real-life factors which are known to have only a marginal effect most of the time.
In this case, these factors are the motion of the atmosphere, and the curvature and rotation of the earth.
Give ‘em a break, guys, the math is already complicated enough!
3. “Flat” by Sea Level
Over and over I hear flat-earthers reference these geographical areas that are “flatter than a pancake” for miles and miles.
Let me ask: where did they hear that?
And how did the source define “flat?”
I would almost bet money the land surveys involved were not conducted for the sake of this debate, nor the findings reported.
I bet they took the curvature of the earth to be a totally unchallenged background assumption.
In other words, the word “flat” here is defined relative to sea level.
This whole debate is about the shape of sea level.
You can't use a claim with terminology relative to the outcome of the debate
as evidence in the debate.
This is a misunderstanding that results in circular logic.
G. Government Conspiracy?
1. Necessary Scope
In a time when there’s a manmade rover posting pictures from Mars to its own Twitter account,
flat earth theory is understandably predicated on conspiracy theory.
But not just any conspiracy—basically all of them
except maybe the ones involving aliens, ‘cause … that’s kinda contradictory.
But this is the big daddy. This would have to be the conspiracy to end all conspiracies. And flat-earthers will tell you that.
But I seriously doubt they understand how far it would have to reach.
Every time you got in a plane, anywhere in the world, the pilot would have to be part of this.
Because, as we saw from our discussion of cartography, you can’t navigate on the earth with the wrong shape in mind.
The developers who programmed your smartphone’s operating system would have to be in on it,
because you can’t program a GPS device without knowing if it really works by satellites or not.
This isn’t just government.
Every expert and engineer working for every private company in the world would have to be lying
—or staying quiet while everyone around them lied.
This doesn’t work.
2. Means, Motive, & Opportunity
The first time I met a flat-earther, I remember him crying, “You don’t realize that the government would lie to you!”
I just had to stop him right there
because my mom keenly remembers the long-standing hysteria after the JFK assassination.
They cried the same thing then—that the government is evil.
This mantra is nothing new.
The government is evil. Granted.
Because it’s run by people, and people are evil.
Politicians lie to get ahead; judges turn a blind eye for bribes;
policemen, legislators, and paper-pushers are all just as capable as anyone of lusting after money, power, and sex.
People are awful.
This is not a surprise.
But let’s borrow a concept from criminal investigation.
There are three fundamental indicators of suspicion:
means, motive, and opportunity.
Criminologists know that people are gross; but not everyone is a criminal,
because it generally takes all three factors at once for a crime to occur.
The presence of one or two indicators is not usually sufficient to establish guilt,
because if even one is missing it usually prevents the crime.
Can we establish these indicators for the government lying about the shape of the earth?
No. No, we can’t.
If you’ve ever gotten your taxes messed up by the IRS, you might have firsthand evidence of their sheer incompetence.
Even NASA has made some seriously embarrassing screwups, involving people dying.
And what would they gain by lying about the shape of the earth?
We don’t know!
They’ve supposedly covered their tracks too well, and flat-earthers dare not even speculate.
NASA certainly has some opportunities to lie, but not every time we hear that the earth is round!
Elon Musk would have to be in on it, as well as Apple and Google.
They can’t fake all the amateur photographs of satellites, unless the amateurs are fake or lying.
They can’t lie to airline pilots about world geography.
There’s not one seam on this bag that flat-earthers can sew closed!
3. Jews Didn’t Start It
So, I’ll cut right to the chase.
Powerful Jews are operating and manipulating this reality.
I have to appreciate the blunt honesty of this flat-earther, even though he’s clearly racist.
But I find it deeply ironic that they think Jews started the globe model.
It was actually started by Greeks at a time when Jews were on the verge of being conquered by the Babylonian Empire.
Just, you know, one of the low points in Jewish history.
When they were not powerful!
Flat-earthers claim the idea started with Ptolemy, but that’s not even true. It started with Pythagoras, six hundred years before that.
4. Masons are Not Scary
One flat-earth video I saw had an extended sequence detailing all the alleged Freemasons in NASA,
and speculating about there being many more.
It had sinister music in the background, and said this should “raise some serious suspicion.”
Not really.
People in secret societies derive a sense of importance from making other people scared of them.
The whole thing’s nothing but hot air.
This crop stuff is about a bunch of nerds who never had a girlfriend in their lives.
They're like thirty, and they work up little codes together, and they analyze Greek mythology
and make up secret societies where other guys who never had girlfriends before can join in.
What can they actually do in secret? Conspire us to death?
Their secrecy doesn’t give them power.
The most it could do is hide it if they did get power.
But if we take that potential as evidence that it’s true, that would be another “argument from ignorance” fallacy
on top of the appeal to fear—which, by the way, only helps feed the sense of importance for Freemasons and encourages their petty charades.
This is exactly what the nerds want.
Hey, maybe I could make my own secret hand sign, and get all my friends to do it too
until people start wetting their pants from us literally just lifting a finger …
Wouldn’t that be fun?
The ones who aren’t losers treat it like nothing but a snooty social club.
5. Garbage Evidence
Are you ready for flat earth theory’s silver bullet—the most damning evidence they have for a conspiracy?
Well, apparently not
because it’s a basically a few seconds of footage that they always show snipped up across minutes of breathless voiceover description of what you’re seeing
usually a specific voiceover that comes from a 2001 conspiracist documentary called "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon"
—originally not made to support flat earth theory.
In any case, all this narration primes you to prejudge the evidence with their interpretation,
because apparently they’re not confident you’d arrive at it just looking at the footage as it comes straight from NASA.
Let’s find out!
Duke: Hello, Apollo 11. Houston. Goldstone says that the TV looks great. Over.
Aldrin: [Faint] Roger. We're zooming in on Earth now.
Duke: Roger. Your transmissions the last couple of times have been about two-by. Over.
Aldrin: Okay. How do you read me now?
Duke: Rog. You're five-by now.
Duke: ... The f:22 looks good. Over.
Aldrin: Okay. Very good. Well, we shut out the Sun coming in from the other windows into the spacecraft, so
Aldrin: it's looking through a - the Number 1 window on Earth, and any reflected light [fades out]
Aldrin: so, it ought to be a pretty good picture.
Duke: Roger.
Armstrong: you can see on through Central America to the northern coast of South America, Venezuela, and Colombia.
Armstrong: I'm not sure you'll be able to see all that on your screens down there.
Duke: Roger, Neil. We just wanted a narrative such that we can -
Duke: When we get the playback, we can sort of correlate what we're seeing. Thank you very much.
Collins: I haven't seen anything but the DSKY so far.
Duke: Looks like they're hogging the windows.
Armstrong: You're right.
Duke: 11, Houston. The definition is pretty good on our monitor here.
Duke: Could you describe what you're looking at? Over.
Armstrong: United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America.
Armstrong: South America becomes invisible just off beyond the terminator ...
Aldrin: Trying to fit everybody into the window.
Armstrong: Unfortunately, we only have one window that has a view of the Earth and it's filled up with the TV camera
Armstrong: so your view now is probably better than ours is.
Duke: Roger. We copy.
Duke: 11, Houston. If you could comply, we'd like to see little smiling faces up there, if you could give us some interior views.
Armstrong: It appears you've taken the camera away from the left window now. Over.
Armstrong: That's correct. We're moving it back and reconfiguring for interior lighting.
Duke: Roger.
Duke: We can still see the Earth through the left window, and it appears that we can see a floodlight off to the left,
Duke: either that or some Sun shafting through the hatch window.
Armstrong: It's a floodlight.
Duke: Rog.
Duke: Now we're coming in. Can't quite make out who that head is.
Duke: That's big Mike Collins, there.
Collins: You got a little bit of--
Collins: Yeah, hello there sports fans. You got a little bit of me, plus Neil is in the center couch,
and Buzz is doing the camera work this time.
There’s … not a lot there.
The documentary states this footage was “received by mistake,” implying that NASA intended to hide it from the public.
If that’s true, why are they currently serving a copy from their own website?
Links to both it and the conspiracist documentary are in my video description.
It also says this:
This is a segment that they believed wasn’t even being recorded, much less suitable for broadcast …
and apparently the stop button popped back up on the recorder without notice.
This is pure fiction.
It wasn’t even being recorded onboard! It was being recorded by ground crew at Goldstone
and the astronauts are still chatting with Houston about what’s on the screen.
I hardly think I need to clarify this
but flat-earthers and conspiracists hinge everything on the claim that some kind of globe-shaped window insert was removed here
and this footage after the camera iris was opened shows open sky
—or, as the round-earth conspiracists believe, earth from low orbit.
But what happens to really bright objects on camera when you open the iris?
They get even brighter!
The earth hasn’t changed size, it’s just filling the window with glare!
III. Reality Check
Okay, so we’ve covered the controversy.
Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. Let’s come up for air and realize that’s okay.
Let’s get a reality check about why this whole thing matters—and why it doesn’t.
A. Calm Down!
1. Daily Life
I don’t know anybody who fundamentally cares what shape the earth is.
Obviously we all want to believe whatever is true—especially if you’re employed in a field where it has a technical impact.
But this is a totally material issue, and for most of us it has no direct bearing on our daily life.
So let’s all just calm down about it.
Christians: this is not dividing issue, and it is not a salvation issue.
My brothers in Christ who believe in a flat earth have a far deeper connection with me than any non-Christian round-earther
—no matter how much that person might enjoy, like, geeking out with me about math and science, for example.
2. Position of Strength
Besides, if you’re a round-earther, you actually bear a special responsibility to be gentle toward flat-earthers.
Not only are you on the side of the majority, but you’re on the side of reality.
If you took them up a thousand miles in a rocket, there’d be nothing but a pane of glass to separate the bare truth from their eyes!
That is one fragile opponent, if you ask me.
Take the example of Jesus: “A bruised reed he did not break, and a smoldering wick he did not quench.”
We’re in the position of strength here, and you ought to start acting like it.
I can’t help but wonder why some of us are more polite about politics and religion than the shape of the earth.
And don’t you say it’s because the shape of the earth is more objective!
Truth is truth, pal.
Maybe if we really believed that we’d be more accustomed to having others deny it—on both important and unimportant issues.
And that is all I’m gonna say about that.
B. Real Dangers
1. A Parasite on Your Faith
The only way the shape of the earth actually matters is what it says or doesn’t say about the Bible.
If the earth is a sphere, then I’m afraid Christian flat-earthers have a parasite on their faith that could be making them spiritually sick.
The Bible is our source of spiritual truth
and Satan has found a way to make them read it incorrectly, so that they’re receiving lies, mixed in with their very source of truth.
Jesus said “I am the vine, you are the branches.”
Christian flat earth theory is like a parasite sitting on the bark, injecting poison right into the joint
where the branch gets its vital nutrients.
It’s still getting nutrients. It’s still part of the vine.
But it could be getting sick
and if that Christian can’t distinguish between the source of poison and the source of nutrients,
there could be serious trouble down the road.
NASA and SpaceX are only going to continue exploring God’s creation.
Whether they credit him or not, God has given them the power to do that.
And it’s only a matter of time before some flat-earthers are faced with truly firsthand evidence that they truly can’t deny.
If they’re Christians, they’ll be rudely woken to the poison in their spiritual veins
and my greatest fear is that in that moment they won’t know where it really came from.
If you are a Christian flat-earther:
disagree with me, dismiss me, ignore me all you want.
But I beg you to promise me one thing, and also promise to yourself and God:
if your mind is ever forcibly changed in this way about the shape of the earth …
don’t give up the Bible.
Don’t give up your faith.
2. Discrediting Truth
But there’s one more danger:
Christian flat earth theory could be detracting from the Gospel.
We are fools to the world because of Christ,
but it is not a good thing if we look like fools for any other reason.
Jesus said “be wise as serpents, but innocent as doves.”
If we give the world a legitimate reason to call us fools, we could be damaging our witness.
So where does wisdom lead us, especially in light of the possibility that there’s some demonic conspiracy deceiving the world?
Let’s get something straight.
Satan is way more cunning and competent and powerful than any human government, but he is not all-powerful.
He cannot mute the voice of God.
Where do we hear the voice of God?
Two places: the Bible, and creation.
Even the most raging, God-hating atheist can be competent in a laboratory, because the evidence of his own eyes is a part of God’s creation.
Satan cannot lie about that.
It is much easier for him to lie about something not before our eyes—like the past.
We can take a picture of the earth.
We cannot take a picture of the origin of life, or the beginning of the universe.
That’s the real conspiracy: Darwinian evolution, and the Big Bang.
I believe the word "science" has been hijacked by secularists.
--and if you look up a dictionary, it'll say "science" means "state of knowing, knowledge ..."
but there's different types of knowledge, and I believe this is where the confusion lies.
There's experimental or observational science, as we call it.
That's using the scientific method: observation, measurement, experiment, testing ...
That's what produces our technology.
Doesn't matter whether you're a creationist or an evolutionist, you can be a great scientist.
But I want us to also understand: molecules-to-man evolution belief has nothing to do with developing technology.
You see, when we're talking about origins, we're talking about the past.
We're talking about our origins. We weren't there. You can't observe that.
Whether it's molecules-to-man evolution or whether it's a creation account.
There's a difference between what you actually observe directly, and then your interpretation in regard to the past.
We agree how radioactivity enables that to work.
But if you're then gonna use radioactive elements and talk about the age of the earth, you got a problem.
Cuz you weren't there.
We gotta understand parent elements, and daughter elements, and so on.
If you’d like to find out more about that, go to AnswersInGenesis.org.
They know their stuff. And they are not amused by flat earth theory
because they know it’s a satanic plot to discredit, divide, and disgrace young earth creationism.
It breaks my heart to see people who otherwise are very supportive of the ministry that we do
and many of them explicitly say that, and they say "But we wish you'd be flat earth too."
That, I think, is the insidious attack
and these people are unknowing, unwitting allies
in that attack on our ministry and other creation ministries.
It’s exactly the kind of gruesome irony that Satan loves.
He’s the master of confusion.
Picture an army receiving orders from its king to march against a city.
If you wanted to defeat that army without a fight, what more efficient or more entertaining way
than to spread a forgery of the king’s orders through the army,
just similar enough to fool everyone, but different enough to spoil everything?
I believe Christian flat earth theory is actually designed as a mocking parody of young earth creationism:
a rude, insulting prank to get Christians playing “Who’s on First?” like a bunch of clowns.
I’m sure Satan is rolling with laughter
—for a moment.
It will be a very brief moment. He always underestimates the king.
As a gesture of goodwill, and as a positive example for how real friends should treat each other in this debate
I had the idea to end my video by giving my flat-earth friend the last word.
He listened to my entire script, and I even had a segment recorded with him.
But at the last minute, he asked to be removed from the video.
He has family who does not believe in a flat earth,
and while he would be willing to make himself a target for more ridicule
he was afraid that would spread to his family.
Honestly, I can't blame him for that.
I wish the world was a more safe place to rationally discuss these things.
That’s it. Thank you so much for watching!
Usually when I talk about science people get bored and don’t care, so this has been a special privilege for me.
If you liked it, please hit the “like” button and subscribe. And comment below with what you think
but be kind and respectful.
See you around!
