How the Internet Made Us Believe in a Flat Earth
The movement was dying out right around the time Facebook showed up
--
The Earth is a sphere—or rather, an oblate spheroid. A horrible, horrible oblate spheroid. It would be so much better if it were flat. For one, there’d be no pesky lunar eclipses without the Earth’s terribly round shadow to obscure an otherwise perfect view of our one and only moon. Even better, all the stars in the sky would be in perfect view every single night, unblocked by the loathsome horizon of a miserably spherical world. And, as any cartographer knows, a flat Earth would be so much easier to render on a two-dimensional map.
But, unfortunately, the Earth is not flat.
And yet, contrary to all scientific evidence, there are people who believe the Earth is flat. They even have their own club, the Flat Earth Society. And its support is growing and counts NBA stars and reality show celebrities among its followers.
In the 1990s, the Flat Earth Society was bankrupt and all but dead. Then the internet happened, and it made people want to believe in a flat Earth again.
The images below are the first photographs of Earth from more than 100 miles in space. The U.S. military took them in 1947 using a V-2 rocket captured from the German Wehrmacht. It was one of the first times we really saw the Earth from a distance. And it was clearly round.
Less than a decade later, the Flat Earth Society convened for the first time and espoused a view of the planet that didn’t fit with the new images being sent from space and that had already been rejected by much of the scientific community for nearly half a millennia. According to the Flat Earth Society’s ideas, the Earth was a flat disk with the Arctic at its center and a towering wall of ice all along its circumference. The sun, moon, and stars, they said, were no further away than New York is from London.
They also asserted that everything NASA was showing us was an elaborate deception.
