As a YouTuber who debunks arguments, I’m forever receiving requests to take on certain
subjects, and most of the time they’re related to religion (thank you by the way), but recently
a great many of you have asked me to take on the Flat Earth movement – and I can only
assume that this is because you couldn’t get enough of Cosmic Skeptic’s excellent
video on the subject, because before Alex very kindly gave me a shout out (by the way,
thank you again Alex) I had never received a single request to take on this subject – but
now I’m inundated with them!
But then again, perhaps the flat earth movement has just become a hottest topic under the
sun… or firmament?
In either case, I’ve decided to oblige, and so this is the Flat Earth Conspiracy – Debunked.
For those of you unaware, the Flat Earth Conspiracy asserts that the earth is flat, and that consequently
all of the evidence for a global earth is either invalid or part of a grand conspiracy;
this includes all photos that depict the curvature of the globe, GPS devices; the trajectory
of the sun, moon, planets and stars; moon phases; lunar eclipses; and time zones.
But it doesn’t just stop there – by implicit extension, proponents also denounce Einstein’s
Theory of General Relativity, most of Physics and Astrophysics, and on occasion even Evolution
by Natural Selection!
It really is the motherload of conspiracies, because it insists that all scientists, from
all countries, and that all governments have, and are, perpetuating this enormous conspiracy
in order to either somehow profit financially, or, I kid you not, to make the average citizen
reject the Abrahamic god.
Now needless to say, there are thousands of “proofs” offered by Flat Earth proponents,
and to address them all would take a significant amount of time and would bore even the most
intrigued Flat Earth enthusiast, and so what I’ve decided to do is to address what I
believe is the root of the conspiracy, and at the same time cover a few of the most prominent
arguments.
This root is, in my opinion, one unfortunate fact, and two particular fallacies.
The unfortunate fact is that our educational system has failed us; or as Neil deGrasse
Tyson puts it, “This is a deep failure of our educational system [...] There’s something
deeper going on in our society that somehow enables people to believe they’re making
cogent arguments when they’re not.
You know what I think it is – the way we teach science is, you’re just some empty
vessel and we pour this science into you and then you regurgitate it on an exam – where
as science is a way of thinking; it’s a way of understanding and probing the operations
of nature.”
And the two particular fallacies are as follows: the first is the Common Sense Fallacy, which
occurs when someone appeals to first-hand sensory experience (normally being eyesight)
as if it’s infallible.
And the second is the Personal Incredulity Fallacy, which occurs when someone is either
unaware of how something works, or finds something difficult to understand, and therefore asserts
that it can’t be true.
For example, the Flat Earth Society states that, “The evidence for a flat earth is
derived from many different facets of science and philosophy.
The simplest is by relying on ones own senses to discern the true nature of the world around
us.
The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are
all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric
world.”
Now to be fair, many of these assertions are true – our senses do in general tell us
that the earth is flat, but here’s this thing – they also tell us that this image
is moving, but it’s not; they tell us that these two red lines are different sizes, but
they’re not; and they tell us that these lines are bent, but, again, they’re not.
The point being here is that arguments that appeal to our perception and senses, such
as the assertion that the “Earth Looks Flat”, that “Clouds Look Flat” and that “Stars
Don’t Move”, all commit the Common Sense Fallacy, because they act as if our senses
can’t be mistaken, when, as we’ve just proven, they clearly can; our senses can be
fooled, and therefore they are not reliable.
This is something that should be very clearly demonstrated in schools…
Moving on, and to highlight an example where both the Common Sense Fallacy and the Personal
Incredulity Fallacy are particularly potent, let’s take on perhaps the most common flat
earth argument – the assertion that the horizon is flat.
Whether we’re looking at the horizon from the ground, a high mountain, or even from
a plane, it appears to be completely flat – there is no curvature.
Now the problem with this argument is that proponents of the flat earth model, and indeed
many proponents of the spherical earth model, seem to think that we should be able to see
a horizontal curve, when we really shouldn’t; the earth is just too big, we are too small,
and our perspective won’t allow us to see a horizontal curve unless we are extremely
high up.
And indeed, if we go to extreme heights, we can clearly see a curved horizon.
Countless space enterprises, and even unbiased citizens using a camera tied to balloon, have
captured breathtaking non-fish-eye photos and videos of this curvature – but Flat
Earth proponents simply assert that they’re all part of the conspiracy – including inquisitive
children!
Luckily however, we don’t need these photos and videos to prove that the earth is curved
– just as those before the advent of these technologies didn’t either.
For example, one way in which you can personally see the vertical curvature of the earth is
to view an object that’s beyond the horizon, such as this island, from one height and then
again from another height.
As you can see, the only factor changing here is the height – the equipment and the zoom
are exactly the same, meaning that either the earth curves, or that the water is also
part of the conspiracy.
Hence, the argument that the horizon is curved, like most flat earth arguments, commits a
Common Sense Fallacy and a Personal Incredulity Fallacy.
It commits a Common Sense Fallacy because it asserts that because you can’t see a
curve in the horizon with your own eyes, it’s therefore flat.
And it commits a Personal Incredulity Fallacy because proponents are either unaware of how
to witness the earth’s curvature, or they don’t understand how to, and they therefore
assert that there isn’t one.
Another prominent Flat Earth argument that embodies the Common Sense and Personal Incredulity
Fallacy is the assertion that crepuscular rays (otherwise known as sunbeams) prove that
the sun isn’t ninety-three million miles away, but rather, it’s just above the clouds.
The argument is simple – as this photo shows, and as you’ve likely seen countless times
before, sunbeams clearly appear to converge at a point just above the clouds, and therefore
the sun is just above the clouds.
Now this argument commits a Common Sense Fallacy because it asserts that seeing a convergence
point just above the clouds proves, without a doubt, that the sun is indeed just above
the clouds.
And it commits a Personal Incredulity Fallacy because the proponents are either unaware
or don’t understand basic atmospheric optics, and they therefore denounce them entirely…
which brings us back to the problem with our education system.
With these fallacies clearly pointed out, let’s explain what’s really going on here…
in short, and as Alex very clearly explained in his video, it’s a matter of perspective.
If we look down a straight railway, such as this one, our perspective converges at a single
point on the horizon, and if we were to trust our eyes alone we would conclude that the
railway starts at this singularity, just as many conclude that the sun is just above the
clouds.
However, the reason we don’t conclude that the railway starts at this vanishing point,
is simply because we’ve experienced two-dimensional horizontal perspectives our whole life, and
we’ve evolved to unconsciously know that our vision is mistaken…
But on the other hand, we’ve rarely experienced three-dimensional perspectives that don’t
converge on the horizon, and we haven’t evolved to recognize them when we do, and
hence, this is why sunbeams can fool us into thinking that the sun is just above the clouds.
What’s more, and what just has to be said, is that this argument is just intellectually
lazy… if the sun was truly just above the clouds you could simply drive a couple of
miles towards the convergence point and be directly beneath the sun, meaning that you
could have one Flat Earth proponent viewing the sunbeams from one point, and another Flat
Earth proponent beneath the first proponent’s convergence point, and when the second proponents
says that the sun isn’t above him, they can both start arguing over which of them
is part of the conspiracy…
Now we could go on here indefinitely, slowly but surely debunking every Flat Earth argument,
but to reiterate what I stating earlier, this wouldn’t defeat the Flat Earth Conspiracy,
because the problem (the crux) isn’t these arguments – it’s the education system…
we need to teach people how to think and why they ought to value science, rather than what
to think and how to regurgitate science… if we do this, the Flat Earth Conspiracy,
like many conspiracies, will indeed collapse, but until then, they aren’t going anywhere!
So, to recap, the vast majority of Flat Earth arguments either commit a Common Sense Fallacy,
a Personal Incredulity Fallacy, both, and in some cases, if I’m honest, laziness…
if someone is truly serious about this conspiracy, they owe it to themselves to buy a decent
pair of binoculars and to go to the seaside and find an object that is beyond the horizon
(that is to say not on or near the horizon – it has to be beyond the horizon), and
then view that object by standing on a chair and then immediately afterwards by crouching
on the ground… but most proponents won’t do this, and that, in my opinion, is very
telling…
And finally, I want to address a potential elephant in the room… you might be wondering,
why on this spherical earth have I taken on this conspiracy?
Well, the answer is an exact echo of Cosmic Skeptic’s sentiments; likewise to most conspiracies,
absent healthy opposition, Flat Earth arguments can be quite persuasive, “and so credulous
people might be prone to the danger of adopting these beliefs because there’s no serious
opposition to them, and if we just laugh these things of, and say ‘well it’s ridiculous’,
let’s not waste our time on them, then people who are beginning to become seduced by flat
earth conspiracies for instance, […] might just fall all the way down the rabbit hole.”
Anyhow, as always, thank you kindly for the view, and I’ll leave with this amateur rocket
capturing the curvature of the earth at 121,000 ft.!