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I don’t know if it’s just an illusion cast by the internet giving voice to billions who otherwise would have none, but it feels like there are more and more conspiracy theorists every day. From anti-vaxxers, to chemtrail cloud shouters to the 9/11 truthers who show up once a year every September to remind us that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams (but they can weaken their integrity to the point where they can no longer support thousands of tons of concrete but don’t tell them that).

But there’s one conspiracy that stands alone in its abject stupidity, it’s denial of reality and its absurd self confidence.

And that would of course, be Flat Earth.

Welcome to my first Fired Up Friday on this blog.

Most popular conspiracies at the very least have a somewhat plausible raisin dee etra. Fine. Raison d’etra. Reason to be. A motivation that, if I don’t believe it, can at least see as having at least a modicum of truth or logic to it.

As an example, antivax. I abhor antivax. I hate medical pseudoscience, it gets people killed. But does it seem plausible to me that big pharma would push vaccines on people so they can rake in billions of profit? Of course it does. Big Pharma is, after all, complete unethical trash. However countless independent scientific studies have repeatedly come to the same conclusions. Vaccines are safe, effective, and don’t cause autism.

Or the moon landing. Is it believable that the CIA would create an elaborate ruse to convince the Soviets that we landed on the moon? Yes. But given the incredible difficulty to pull off such a stunt in the late 1960s, and the simple facts that the Soviets observed the whole thing from beginning to end and that the lander and other items are still on the moon, proves that we went.

But Flat Earth? Why? Why in the name of fuck would anyone fake the shape of the earth? For what purpose?

Flerfs (flat earthers) like to propose a variety of reasons, each of which are hilariously stupid. They’ll claim that NASA or whomever is faking the shape of the earth to “hide god” and drive us away from religion. Flerfs are after all almost entirely fundamentalist Christians. But like, 90% or more of all Christians know the earth is a globe. So if driving people away from Christianity is NASA’s secret mission, they’re doing a pretty bad job of it. I’d contend that the rampant pedophilia from priests and preachers drive people out of Christianity faster than any claims about the shape of the earth. Not to mention, there are far easier ways to drive people away from god if that’s what some secret organization was trying to do.

Flerfs claim that the shape of the earth is faked to control us. Which again, laughably stupid. This is a conspiracy that would have to be maintained in perfection for centuries, consisting of millions of participants around the globe. In this day and age of social media, there are far easier ways to control people. Just ask TikTok.

This is a stupid conspiracy with no plausible motivation, for something any child with even a Planck’s volume filled with common sense could debunk.

I mean, shit, just look at a map. Cartography proves the earth is a globe. It’s all you need. If the Earth was flat, creating an accurate map would be trivial. Your scale would be simple. Every inch represents 100 miles (or whatever) and its true in every direction at every location. Easy. So if I have 8 inches between Chicago and New York on my map, I should be able to drive between the two cities and find it to be a roughly 800 mile drive (roughly because roads aren’t perfectly straight of course.)

This cannot be performed on any map of the earth. Not consistently. It might work in one place, but fail in another. This is why every single map of the earth is a projection, the surface of a sphere cannot correspond 1:1 with the surface of a rectangular plane. Therefore there must be distortion and/or there must be tearing. And because these things must exist in any accurate map of earth, then the Earth is not flat.

But of course, that’s only scratching the tip of this iceberg of stupidity.

Related to cartography is geometry. A sphere has a number of properties. First, it can be constructed by a number of concentric circles all sharing an axis through their center. We call these latitudes. As we go south from the North pole, lines of latitude, circles rather, get larger and larger and larger, until we reach the equater, the largest circle of latituden.

Then, to the dismay of flerfs across the globe, they proceed to get smaller and smaller again as we approach the south pole. Every year, there’s a race around Antarctica. That race is some 15,000-16,000 miles around, near the 30th parallel. The exact numbers don’t matter, what’s important is that it’s decidedly smaller than the 24,000 mile circumference of the equator.

Oops.

Sorry Flat Earthers, looks like Earth is a globe.

But lets keep going and continue to demolish these chuckleheads. Flerfs believe Antarctica to be this ridiculous Game of Thrones style ice wall around the Earth. They also believe there’s a ridiculous treaty stopping anyone from approaching that wall. The treaty does exist of course, but it says none of the ridiculous bullshit Flat Earther’s say it does. The Antarctic Treaty merely states that you can’t declare Antarctica for a country or harvest its resources and that you need a permit to explore. That’s it.

But flerfs would have you believe the governments of the world (you know, those squabbling idiots who fight over oil and territory and religious belief) are all using their militaries to guard this ice wall for . . . reasons.

If their bullshit was true though, Antarctica would be around 48,000 miles around, which is roughly three times larger than its actual coastline. There’s no military force on earth that could protect such a coastline with perfect OPSEC and INFOSEC and remain completely invisible and undetected by the countless scientists and explorers who are on Antarctica right now.

There’s no reason why an intrepid flerf couldn’t find a way to sneak onto Antarctica and show evidence of this supposed ice wall or the supposed lands beyond. And when given a chance for a free trip to Antarctica, offered by a millionaire named Will Duffy, most of them declined to go, and they mocked and disowned the few flat earthers who did go (and one of those flat earthers dropped his delusion and came back to knowing the Earth is a globe.

We know Antarctica isn’t a ring. People have explored it, they crossed it. It doesn’t conform with flat earth fantasy. Why? Because earth is a globe.

Of course knowing the Earth is a globe is a lot simpler than going to Antarctica. Just look at the sun. Well, don’t look directly at it but track it’s movement across the sky. It doesn’t follow the laws of perspective if the earth was flat. It doesn’t change its apparent size except at dusk and dawn (and that’s due to refraction.) It remains the same size. It also forms a figure eight, an analemma, if you track its position in the sky at the same time every day for a year, a phenomenon perfectly well explained if the earth is a globe and without explanation if the earth is flat.

I mean, I could go on for days and days and days. If I wanted to list out every stupidass thing that proves the earth is a globe, I’d be typing into next week, because the earth is a globe and a toddler could figure that out.

But the final evidence? WE TOOK A DAMN PICTURE OF THE EARTH. FROM SPACE. People have gone into space, with cameras. In an era before CGI, before photoshop. We know the Earthrise photo from 1968 is real, the film negatives still exist. We know the blue marble photo from 1972 is real, the film negatives still exist.

I am amazed and appalled by the lengths some people will go to, to believe some of the stupidest things one could belief. And I wish it was just a meme. I wish it was ragebait trolls on the internet being trolls. But no. Many of these people are dead serious.

And they vote.