By David Johnson
I heard on the radio a few years ago that scientists did a survey to find out how many Americans believe that the earth is flat and the results were that 2% of the population either believes that the earth is flat or at least are not sure and do not think that it can be conclusively proven either way.
I actually had a student in Business Ethics (of all subjects) who was really interested in conspiracy theories and we had talked about some of them a little bit outside of class. I guess he thought that I might be open to it, so at the end of the semester he sent me, along with his final paper, some links to various YouTube videos and other sources that were arguing that the earth is flat, and he asked me to take a look at them and tell him what I thought.
I definitely do not believe that the earth is flat, and I actually think it is pretty obvious that it is not, even if you do not believe all the photos of the earth that have been taken from outer space. A lot of people treat all conspiracy theories the same, as though they are all equally plausible (or maybe a better word is implausible) but I think there is a wide spectrum; some of them are quite likely to be correct, and are actually far more reasonable to believe than the official story. For example, the claim that Oswald acted alone to assassinate Kennedy is so ridiculous it is not even believable. There is a mountain of evidence that people in very high positions of power in the U.S. government were involved in that assassination and the attempted cover-up, but they did a very poor job of doing that. In addition to the magic bullet, the Zapruder film, the fact that no secret service agents were near him when he was shot, and a bunch of other evidence, my question for anybody who does not believe that it was a conspiracy is why did Jack Ruby (a nightclub owner with ties to the mafia) assassinate Oswald then? Obviously Jack Ruby was involved at the very least. By definition that is a conspiracy (at least two people were working together to kill Kennedy) but it is extremely likely that it goes far deeper than that. Considering that the CIA assassinated many political leaders in foreign countries in the 1950s under Eisenhower, and that is not even disputed, their MK Ultra program, etc., it seems very likely to me that they were involved, but it would not have only been them, they would have been carrying out the instructions of others in high government offices as well. There is so much evidence that it was a conspiracy that it would actually be irrational, or at least naive to believe that it was anything other than that. But sometimes people ignore or miss what is obvious and right in front of them because they cannot bring themselves to accept the truth.
But I am getting sidetracked. I am supposed to be talking about whether the earth is flat, which I think is one of the least probable conspiracy theories. I am 99.99999% sure (at least) that Oswald did not act alone to assassinate Kennedy, and was probably not even a conspirator at all, he was the patsy that they blamed it on and then murdered to keep him from telling the police and testifying about who had set him up. What the real assassins did to Oswald is as bad or worse than what they did to Kennedy. Not only did they murder an innocent man, who was probably told that he was working undercover to try to prevent the assassination and thus was actually one of the good guys, they also murdered Oswald’s reputation and ruined the lives of his family for generations. The people who did this must have been about as evil as one can possibly be. They had to have been psychopaths with no conscience at all.
But the claim that the earth is flat? I think the likelihood of that being true is 0.00000000000000000001% or less. It is practically zero, and that is being generous. I did not want to hurt my student’s feelings though. I tried to be really tactful and careful in how I responded to him. I did not insult his intelligence, because I really don’t believe that it is a matter of intelligence. One of the most intelligent people that I know also believes in the most conspiracy theories of anybody that I know. This particular student was a good student as long as I could keep him focused on the topic. I could tell that he was smart just from talking to him and from his papers and other assignments. It is not a matter of intelligence, it is a matter of trust. Some people do not trust the government or authoritative sources the same way that others do. Sometimes it is warranted, they have good reasons to not trust those sources, but other times it is not justified.
For me, it is more of a balance. We know that other governments lie to their citizens. Obviously the Russian and Chinese governments lie to their citizens all the time, let alone North Korea, and I doubt very many people here in the U.S. would even dispute that. But for some reason they don’t believe that the U.S. government would ever be lying to us, even though there are numerous historical examples of when they did just that. It is also true that prominent media outlets have either lied or withheld certain information from the public for various reasons. So obviously it does happen. We would be very gullible and easy to manipulate if we just believed whatever we were told without thinking critically about it. But at the same time, as I told my student, I don’t think that people in government could be lying about everything or else the general population would start to catch on, and on this particular issue I feel quite confident that they are not lying. Don’t believe me?
If you are not convinced yet (or you know someone who needs convincing and you want some ideas on how best to explain it to them) here is a simple way to think it through:
If the earth was flat then everybody on earth, or at least everyone on that side of it, would all experience sunrise and sunset at nearly the same time. Imagine that there is a flashlight that slowly rises above the surface of a pancake. Roughly all parts of the pancake on that side (and depending on the angle maybe the bottom side too) would be illuminated simultaneously and when the flashlight went below the surface all of that side would be dark.
Here is another example:
These are pieces of canvas that I was putting gesso on to prepare them for oil painting. They were not flat, but pretty close. (Certainly as close as the earth would be, with its mountain ranges and valleys.) The only light source is a ceiling fan with lights attached to it. Notice how the light hits the entire surface uniformly, or nearly so, as it also does for the floor.
Let’s compare this with how the light hits a round object, in this case a basketball:
In this photo the light is coming from the opposite side, but notice how it does not hit the entire surface of the ball equally. Part of the ball is in shadow because it is a three dimensional object and the light is blocked by the ball itself. The shadow is equivalent to night for earth.
We have different time zones because different parts of the world experience sunrise and sunset at different times. Sometimes when you are watching a live event on TV, such as a football game, one will notice that it is dark where you are but the sun still has not set on the West Coast, or in another instance one might notice that it is a different time of day and look much different outside in London than where you happen to be. And in case you think that is all just a big government conspiracy, and everyone in the media is in on it, I took a trip to South Korea once and while there I spoke to my parents on the phone. I asked them what time it was where they were, and whether it was dark outside, and they said that it was. It was still light outside for me at the time that I was talking to them. I have also been in Fairbanks Alaska during the summer and it never got completely dark the whole night. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and it still looked like it usually does just after sunset, about a half hour before it gets completely dark (twilight). That is for a little bit different reason than the time zones, but it is still related to how light is hitting a round three dimensional form. That does not happen when you are near the equator.
The fact that there is such a gradual transition from night to day and vice versa indicates that the earth is round. If it was a three dimensional form that was not round, say, if it was a square, then there would be a sharp edge and a very abrupt almost immediate change from light to dark and vice versa.
The sun, the moon, and other planets are all round. To me it is obvious that the moon is, roughly speaking, a sphere, you can see that even with the naked eye. I also looked through an ordinary guy’s telescope one time at the planet Saturn. It looked pretty much just like the illustrations of it in science publications. The telescope was not very powerful so it looked pretty small, but I could very clearly make out the rings and it looked like a little ball (sphere). If you believe that all of these other celestial objects are spherical then why the hell would earth be flat? It does not make sense. You would have to think that the earth was the center of the universe and that the stars were something other than what they really are, just tiny dots in the firmament or something, and I don’t even know if it would really make sense even then.
The gravitational force is the reason that the planets and stars are spherical in shape. The material is pulled toward the center of mass, and with very large objects, over time this tends to make them spherical, especially when it is composed mostly of gases. It is not a coincidence that nearly all of the larger masses are organized that way. Why would earth be different?
I have perhaps taken this issue more seriously than it actually deserves, but for those who are sincerely not sure what to believe or who they should trust, hopefully this helps. It may not feel this way at first, but this should actually be reassuring. It is a good thing to find out that the media and the scientific community and the government have not been lying to you. Maybe about other things, but not this.
2022