Conspiracy theories: The flat earth
A month or two ago I wrote a post about conspiracy theories https://ecency.com/proofofbrain/@steemychicken1/conspiracy-theories
Last night as I was roaming on YouTube to find something good to watch I stumbled upon a video of vice talking about a community of people believing that their flat they are called flat earthers. I always knew that people believe that but never really watched or read more about their actual beliefs and feelings and the most outstanding thing was how many people believe it. Just in Greece there are 3 Facebook groups for flat earthers having combined 20.000 people so I will assume that around the world there are millions .
What are the beliefs
As I wrote in my first post the exact layout varies some believe that earth is like a disc in the center you've got the Arctic circle, then you've got all the continents of the world sort of splayed out to fill the circle. And an Antarctica is like the edge of the disc. Some others believe there's Arctic circle in the middle and there's the land masses around it. And then on Antarctica is the ice around the edge, but instead of it being a discreet disc, some people believe, in fact Antarctica just goes on forever in all directions. And so they believe that the earth is actually an infinite plane in all directions. That bisect reality. From what I could found there is an ongoing debate inside the community about how the earth is exactly and it’s a really heated one 😂
How it all started
Various civilizations, such as those of Babylon, ancient Egypt, pre-Classical Greece, pre-Golden Age India and pre-17th century China. they had notions of a flat Earth. Beginning with ancient Greek Astronomy, the spherical earth paradigm gradually spread throughout the world underpinning the cosmological belief in a flat Earth.
What Wikipedia says about the theory ?
The false belief that medieval Christianity believed in a flat earth is referred to as the flat earth myth.In 1945, the Historical Association (of Great Britain) listed it in a pamphlet on common errors in history as the second of 20.The myth that people in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat entered the popular imagination in the 19th century, largely thanks to the publication of Washington Irving's work of fiction The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828.Although the flat Earth hypothesis has long been generally rejected, there are still occasional modern proponents of the hypothesis.
The Greek video seems like a parody
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/flat-earthers-what-they-believe-and-why/
I really enjoyed writing and searching about these post I will probably try to find more about conspiracy theories and enrich my posts
I really dislike this flat earth subject.
The people who rage on about the earth being flat create a hostile environment that makes it difficult for lay people to discuss scientific ideas.
It is common for people who challenge any scientific dogma to be accused of being a flat earther.
For example, when I brought up the idea that COVID19 may have come from a lab and when I questioned the efficacy of forcing children to wear masks, I was accused of being a flat earther.
A couple of notes. The tiff between Galileo and the Vatican was not rounder earthers v. flat earthers. The Vatican supported the Ptolemaic system for calculating the calendar. Ptolemy was a Greek scholar in Egypt who created a remarkably accurate calculation fo the circumferance of the earth. People who calculate the circumference of the globe clearly do not believe in a flat earth.
This debate was somewhat strange. Galileo advocated a heliocentrenice model that assumed that planets orbited in perfect circles. The Ptolemaic method for calculating the positions of the planets use epicycles. At the time of the conflict, the Ptolemaic model was more accurrate than the heliocentric model.
The idea that the earth somehow conformed to a perfect Cartesian plane could not have existed prior to Descartes ( 1596 – 1650). The ideas that modern people have about "flat earth" really couldn't have existed before this.
Most of the ancient arguments regarding the nature of the earth were based on the baffling observation that gravity seems to be consistent around the planet.
To this day people don't know what gravity is.
The advent of non-Euclidean geometry shows that different types of geometries can exist on different surfaces; so it is logically possible to create a model of the surface of the earth that one claims to be flat. Notably, a person could sail a boat around the world. The boat will always be at sea level. A contrarian can use that experience to claim the earth is flat.
Open minded people who explore different models can develop a better understanding of the universe. Unfortunately we live in a world where people love controversy. People want to create controversy so they turn the discussion of different points of view into personal conflicts whenever possible.
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