But would they fall off it? 
If the Earth were really flat, I’d think there’d be so much perimeter that competition would keep any one person from making much money off their location. Even if 70% of the perimeter was ocean-adjacent.
I have never personally encountered a flat-Earther. But if I did, I’d ask him to tell me where the edges are. If the Earth were really flat, identifying where the perimeter was should be a cinch.
If the regular rising and setting of the sun weren’t proof enough, then there is no proving it. I mean, why would it be flat is what I would ask. Where in everyday experienced nature is “flat disc” a default shape?
The problem with that is that flatbrains do not believe in gravity (some like to call it “grabbity”). Things fall down or don’t because of “density and buoyancy”, or some gibberish about an electrostatic gradient or perhaps some other incomprehensible bullshit wrapped in impressive-looking erroneous math.
In reality, gravity would not even work correctly on flat earth, its force vectors would not match what we see, so they have to come up with some alternative for it.
In the versions I have seen, they use the Gleason map, which places the north pole at the center of the pizza (cf the UN logo) and Antarctica as the surrounding crust. This means that the edge is all ocean adjacent (the southern ocean surrounds Antarctica) and the outer circumference would have to be around 70,000 miles.
And you cannot “fall off the edge”, partly because gravity is a myth but also because somewhere beyond Antarctica is the “firmament”, a huge dome, thousands of miles high at the peak: their assertion is “you cannot have a gas under pressure next to a vacuum”. All the stars in the sky are lights embedded in or showing through the dome.
And, naturally, some of them extend the dome out to one or two additional rings of ocean studded with far, mystical lands: that we are straining our natural resources is merely because we have not crossed the icewall to exploit those far places.
I’ve seen them claim that Lemuria is one of these places. I’ve seen others claim the earth goes on forever. I’m not sure if these are the same people who believe in the firmament - it wouldn’t surprise me. Consistency is not their long suit.
I got interested when I found that a woman in my critique group was a flat earther. She believes in every CT out there - chemtrails, lizard people. Her novel involved evil furriners from the UN taking over the country. (My father worked for the UN. The UN being able to take over anything is the biggest joke out there.)
It is fascinating what crap people believe.
The part I struggle with is why reality itself is so hard for so many to believe in. Reality seems to me like a pretty obvious and consistent system that works really well.
It would be interesting to study the psychology of CT belief. FE is largely religious in basis, misreading biblical scripture, but there is more to it than that. It is driven by distrust of those one guys who are deceiving us and getting rich or something thereby.
IOW, CTs are at least in part a social/cultural affect. There is a lot of something going on “behind the scenes”, and CTists are the people who want to claw back some control over their lives from those one guys.
I like science. I regularly read popular science books and subscribe to science magazines. I also read about pseudoscience and hoaxes about science, because that’s a critical way to appreciate how others in the world look at science, explaining why so much backlash has arisen.
Once I started hearing about flat-earthers, reading anything about science makes me pause in the middle of a paragraph and wonder about how flat-earthers would explain it away - and whether I could put together a coherent refutation. Any science. Science is completely and wonderfully integrated. Gravity, space, deep time, and a global earth is integral to geology, physics, meteorology, astronomy and cosmology, biology and botany and therefore genetics and medicine. General relativity is baked into our lives now because of GPS, which also depends on satellites. Globes made ocean travel viable and led directly to western civilization as we know about it now.
Yet here is a very loud group, taking an old bit of pseudoscience and shouting it in everybody’s faces. Martin Gardner, in his ever-classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, started with the Flat Earth promugated by Wilbur Volina a century ago. Volina wrote:
The idea of a sun millions of miles in diameter and 91,000,000 miles [146,000,000 km] away is silly. The sun is only 32 miles [51 km] across and not more than 3,000 miles [4,800 km] from the earth. It stands to reason it must be so. God made the sun to light the earth, and therefore must have placed it close to the task it was designed to do. What would you think of a man who built a house in Zion and put the lamp to light it in Kenosha, Wisconsin?
Volina should have laughed off the edge of the earth after Sputnik, but those exact words are widely upheld as truths by the flat-earthers.
Those of us dedicated to education, science, and reason need to know about the fringe haters and deniers. Not just these cranks, but creationists, anti-vaxxers, end-timers, and all the rest. They now have the greatest propaganda machine in world history to spread their lies and craziness. Know your enemy is always a good slogan.
First, let me state that the Earth is absolutely a sphere (or close enough). However, there is nothing in my everyday life that is affected by that fact. If I take a long enough flight I hope the navigator is aware, but beyond that? Not a daily worry. Much like Newtonian physics gives answers sufficiently accurate for 99% of measurements, my daily life works perfectly fine if the earth is flat.
And I know I directly or indirectly use orbiting satellites that pretty much need a sphere to stay in orbit (although if the Earth were flat, then line-of-sight transmissions could presumably handle most of what satellites are doing).
I agree. I mentioned a documentary in a post upthread called Behind the Curve that somewhat illuminated the psychology behind FE belief. It seems to be driven by a need to feel like they are part of an exclusive ‘in the know’ club and yes, feelings of distrust and paranoia regarding others. It also showed how FEers and CTers in general have an amazing. almost acrobatic ability to twist, cherry-pick or rationalize facts and evidence in ways that support their beliefs.
It is hard to understand how they can believe that it’s a lie that the Earth is spherical when we’ve known it to be spherical since the time of Aristotle. Why, if this was a lie, would the lie have been maintained for over 6 centuries? And for what reason or purpose?
That’s not my issue; it’s the total lack of ANY open-ended mindset, zero interest in any true explorative initiatives. If they were to go in with no preconceptions, hey, they might actually learn something cool about how the world actually works! My example of a fairly easily done round Earth test is the one that Eratosthenes commissioned, measuring the length of a stick’s shadow at 2 different latitudes, very simple (even if back then it required a long trip by his partner to pace off the distance, without a ruler, just estimating the total length of a great many strides). This can be easily replicated anywhere (2 anywheres of course required) on the planet, note.
My own personal proof was seeing supertankers in the far distance on Chesapeake Bay on a very clear day, clearly tilted a bit away from me, bottoms of their hulls not visible. The next time I am on the Bridge-Tunnel I’ll be sure to take some photos. So-they could go, “Hey cool! I wonder what is causing that?” Vs. “Harumph: not looking, not looking…”
I try to imagine living a life like they do, and I simply CANNOT.
People post these pictures and videos all the time. At best, you might get a response declaring that you faked the images.
The subreddit r/flatearth is a good place to see claims from flat-earthers. It is absolutely not where they post themselves, but posts garnered from across the internet. Sometimes the claims are merely mocked, but often the science is corrected and explained in true Doper fashion.
I work for a global company with headquarters in Japan. I have multiple Webex meetings every week. They are all scheduled in the early evening here in California, starting 5 to 6 PM which is morning in Japan. The round earth is a major factor in my daily life.
So if there’s a dome I guess that eliminates the possibility of peeing off the edge of the earth. What a letdown.
So we’re all under the dome? &#$@, I hated that book!
I’d say a sunset. On a globe it does what everyone is familiar with and anyone can witness on a day with clear skies. The sun drops below the horizon. On a flat earth it would not do that. It would shrink in size till it was gone and it was nighttime.
The other is call someone in (say) India when it is noon where you are (for this assuming the US) and ask them if they can see the sun. Of course, it is night time in India then so dark there and light here. Wait 12 hours and try again and it reverses itself. This would not happen on a flat earth.
I know someone like that! He, as far as I can tell, believes in literally every conspiracy theory. I try to be polite, but I want to cut our conversations short, not hear about them and how great Donald Trump is.
You (and I) understand the integration. Flat earthers don’t even have that concept. The Gleason map clearly doesn’t work for a number of reasons but they ignore the evidence against. Just look at the response to the final experiment. It was all filmed in a VR video globe in Las Vegas, or assembled in Antarctica. There were two suns.
They ask for pictures of the globe earth, you give them, and they say they are CGI. Even from before CGI existed.
Some are grifters, but I think many of the followers lack logical reasoning skills. My friend does. Not just for CT stuff, but her novel was full of illogical stuff.
Example: she had UN tanks occupying nearly every street corner in cities. How did they get there? They drove out of WalMart garages where they had been stored. How did thousands of tanks get to the WalMart garages with no one noticing? Oh, they build tunnels all over the country and they drove through them.
Why wouldn’t there be some kind of Gaussian curve for logic? And some people are on the left tail.
Flat Earth is one of the few examples of the follies of faith that religious people are willing to listen to.
Globes were known but extremely rare before the 16th century, when proper mapping to prevent people sailing across the Atlantic from DYING became essential across western Europe. And every single one of those globes that we know of was made by various flavors of bible-thumping Christians who were so religious and devout that they would burn all the modern flat-earthers quoting the Bible as heretics and blasphemers.