Top five reasons I’ve heard people believe in flat Earth

First year is a golden time for learning and exploration—learning how to navigate this huge, beautiful campus of ours, to not put your already shrunken jeans in the dryer on high heat, and to AVOID 9 AM classes at ALL COSTS. For me, however, it was also about getting in touch with my undercover online sleuth persona to unravel one of the deepest online mysteries of our time—the emergence and growing popularity of the pseudoscientific ideology most commonly known as ‘Flat Earth.’

We’ve all believed some bogus rumours at some point in our lives—that the moon landing was fake, that Northrop Frye has a McDonald’s in its basement (just kidding, that one’s true!!), or that Margaret Atwood gets to hunt one Vic student a year (JK that’s also true). But we do so for gits and shiggles usually (I hope). Flat Earthers, on the other hand, are dead serious, and they WILL fight you with their fake calculus if you try to explain to them that just because a textbook image of the horizon is flat, it does not mean the actual Earth is flat (real conversation I’ve had).

I went undercover in my first year on Facebook as ‘Judy Green’—who’s just looking to make friends on FB and learn more about the Flat Earth Society—and in doing so, I’ve encountered some WILD defences of pseudoscience, which I shall present to you right now.

1. If Earth is a globe, then how come I can see the end of my kitchen when I stand on the other side of the house?
   a. This Flat Earther had trouble grasping the difference between a literal 6400-km radius planet and a seven-meter-long hallway. Someone failed eighth grade geometry!
   
   
2. The textbook image of the Earth’s landscape is flat, therefore, the actual Earth is as well.
   a. Some people have trouble grasping the concept of print and infographic simplification. Just because the children’s books you read when you were five had stick-figure characters with dots for eyes, doesn’t mean real humans look like that too! Some people, smh.
   
   
3. NASA is indoctrinating everyone to believe in ‘Globe Earth.’
   a. Genuinely, I cannot imagine what the motive here would be. Like, what do you get out of lying to people about Earth’s shape? What would the benefit be? It would be cool to get a Steven Spielberg movie out of this—one the Flat Earthers could use as ammo for the serious debates they hold in FB comment sections.
   
   
4. Gravity is not real.
   a. No comment on this tbh. Physicists around the world are crying in a corner right now. Isaac Newton is rolling in his grave.
   
   
   This last one’s a personal favourite:
   
   
5. If the Moon’s supposed craters were caused by stuff smashing into it for the last million years, then it should’ve been crushed by now, but it’s still there!! NASA is lying to us.
   a. I genuinely have no idea what this has to do with Globe Earth, but apparently the MOON is under fire for existing too. How DARE the Moon still be up there when it should have been smashed to bits over the last couple million years? The audacity, the gall, the gumption.
   b. I think they think the Moon is fake. Perhaps what we’re seeing now is a hologram of the Moon? Maybe someone drew it into the sky? I think that’d be mad talent. Gotta love what people’s minds come up with nowadays!
   

Anyway, I’ve heard plenty more, but I worry that sharing more of their theories will convince some of you of their pseudoscience, and I can’t risk that happening! Take their words with a grain of salt and stay sceptical of random people on the internet telling you about scientific facts they found in a Facebook group chat moderated by a guy who can’t tell a textbook image from reality.

Stay safe my friends, the internet is a wild place.

Adriana