One Astronomer's Noise

First, a cool video from Steve on Twitter, tracking ships, taxis, planes, and even chatter across Britain, from the BBC… cool!

Next, BBC Magazine asks, do they really think the earth is flat? As NASA turns 50, we have to wonder…

Surely in our era of space exploration – where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars – no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?

Wrong.

Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the “conspiracy” that the Earth is round.

One of my first encounters with pseudo or anti-science on the internet, as a kid, was with the “Flat Earth Society.” And I was amazed that people could still believe that! Later someone told me that it was jut a fake and a joke. The reality is that even the ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was a sphere (okay, so it’s an oblate spheroid, but that’s just details…) and people at the time of Columbus did not believe that the Earth was flat even then.

Even before reading the latest BBC article, I had googled “Flat Earth Society” to see if my early recollection was correct. The first site to come up was nothing like the detailed website with testimonials and maps like I had remembered. There were lots of crazy-looking arguments, like:

Once again, picture in your mind a round world. Now imagine that there are two people on this world, one at each pole. For the person at the top of the world, (the North Pole), gravity is pulling him down, towards the South Pole. But for the person at the South Pole, shouldn’t gravity pull him down as well? What keeps our person at the South Pole from falling completely off the face of the “globe”?

But when the membership form asked for “Favorite Jellybean Flavor” and “Which is your favorite historical figure? - Rasputin – Napoleon Bonaparte – Tony Blair – Attila The Hun” I had to think it was a hoax. Then I found a flyer that circulated around in the 80s, from an apparently real Flat Earth Society. It seems as though most of it was propelled by a Charles K. Johnson, and that they may have had a decent handful of followers.

So it seems as though I was right in the first place, the Flat Earth Society is a real thing, and some tiny portion of the world’s population believe its claims. You don’t hear about it much, since they aren’t selling cure-all drugs or telling your horoscope, but they are there. Whether or not the website is actually a joke, that I don’t know. But according to the BBC, the Flat-earthers are alive and well.