There’s a lot of people who believe, very passionately, that the Earth is flat – if you don’t believe us, just search ‘flat Earth’ on YouTube.
Then wait for your jaw to hit the floor as you see that people, including celebrities, believe – for instance – that Antarctica is a giant ice wall around the outside of our (flat) planet.
But astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has an answer, talking on his Star Talk YouTube channel.
He said, ‘For me, the fact that there’s a rise of flat-Earthers is evidence of two things. One, we live in a country that protects free speech. And, two, we live in a country with a failed educational system.’
Neil deGrasse Tyson features his interview with surfer Kelly Slater, then discusses the science of surfing with Chuck Nice and William Finnegan.
‘Our system needs to train you not only what to know but how to think about information and knowledge and evidence. If we don’t have that kind of training, you’d run around believing anything.’
He says that evidence that the Earth isn’t flat is all around us – with one proof being lunar eclipses, where you can actually see the circular shadow of Earth on the moon.
Another famous proof comes from Eratosthenes who showed that the shadows in different cities were shaped differently – showing that the Earth was curved.
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But Flat Earthers are often quite self-aware about why they believe the Earth is flat – and it’s to do with comfort, one expert has said.
It’s far less scary to believe that we’re on a snow globe created by God than to believe, as Douglas Adams put it, that, ‘we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal.’
Michael Wood, a psychology lecturer at the University of Winchester said, ‘One thing I’ve found interesting in my own adventures on the flat-Earth side of YouTube is, people are often pretty upfront about their motives.
‘They’ll say that they find it more appalling to believe in the universe as a huge, uncaring place, and that it seems more reasonable to imagine Earth was made for humans like a perfect snow globe.’