No. This is not going to be a tiresome debunking essay about how Flat-Earthers are wrong. But in a deeper perspective, this toxic agenda promotes the negation not only of a scientific process of understanding the world – a futile, but legitimate stand, but of the very idea of understanding. Keeping this in mind, in the following list there are not ten flaws, but ten dangers that the Flat Earth discussion infects the mind with.
Oren Ben Yosef
Sin No. 1 – Scientific research ranks lower than gut feelings.
As an art teacher, I am often faced with the following accusation: Once, in the good ol’ days, art meant something. People were working hard to create magnificent masterpieces that are remembered today, putting inhuman effort and creating artworks that were realistic in a way that could make us lose our breath. Even paintings that were not so technically proficient were comforting us in other ways, when artists painted landscapes or anything else that was beautiful or relatable. But art today, what is this thing? It seems like art has taken a different trajectory which left those who are not 100% into new artistic developments completely out of the loops.
This article is not about art, and there is a good answer to this claim (“Yes, you’re right, but there’s a good reason for this, which is – “). I mention this problem in order to show that science is not the only field in which we, with basic to no understanding in this field, might feel a little neglected. Even while using the very top of civilian technology, most of us still live with 19th century science in our mind. We don’t know exactly how mobile phone works, how the weather is predicted and how the airplanes we may fly with navigate, let alone fly. Yes. We can learn all this, but you know – we have lives to lead. This is why, while everyone else is encouraged to join the debate about a flat earth, scientists, who present a universe that is simply beyond our (and their) ability to understand, are banned from it.
Blocking the scientific channel is an ideological countermeasure and the prevention of the understanding that the world is not flat. The result is a discourse of ignorance, where only empty speculation is permitted. Science is replaced by folk science (or mob science), research by gut feeling. The conversation then is promoted not by the accumulation of knowledge, but by the spreading of controversy.
Sin No. 2 – Rhetoricalism of the argument.
Imagine the following scenario: There is an old flat earth website, which – for years – have gathered around audience with extensive texts about the idea of the flat earth, and about how the idea of a globe is, in fact, false. Now, after years of being an important voice within the global (!) flat earth community, the website publish a huge article under the title: We were wrong. After a ten-years-long research, we found out that we do live on a globe. Here is a 50-pages-long document showing how dedicated to the truth we were, and how the world is not flat. This kind of article, we can imagine, would split the readers of the website into two groups. One group will quickly dismiss this website as a sellout, as taken over by the Illuminati, or just as plain wrong. The other, more serious group, will take a deep dive into the 50 pages article with one aim – to find where the article is wrong. The number of readers who will be convinced that the world is globe-shaped, we can imagine, is negligible. This happens because we, all of us, rarely look for a truth that will change our view, but for a truth that will be comfortable for us.
When we truly investigate the world, we ask questions in order to find answers. But questions asked to prove the world is flat are not genuine, neutral questions. They are rhetorical tools meant to confirm an already existent claim. These questions are usually asked in an accusatory tone, demanding the kind of answers that strengthen the flat-earth position. These are not questions born of curiosity but of entrenchment. If scientists are excluded from the discourse, now even the way questions are asked is manipulated to control the answers.
Sin No. 3 – What are you doing? Don’t you know that Mercury is in retrograde??
The ancient Greeks already understood that we live on a massive sphere, rather than on a flat plane. It was understandably harder to grasp that Earth is not the centre of the cosmos, since the sun, the planets and the stars appear to circle us daily. However, planetary motions revealed undeniable and complicated contradictions within the geocentric system, eventually leading to the heliocentric model.
On a geocentric model of the cosmos, the other planets in the solar system appear to move to one direction, then go backwards and move forward again, at fixed intervals. It took time and different mathematical arguments by several astronomers, but eventually this type of problematic, impossible movement, was solved with the Heliocentric model. Flat-earth claims, very non-elegantly ignore such problems, as well as gravity, the composition of the moon and sun, meteors, and more. As conventional knowledge grows, unanswered questions for flat-earth theory multiply, increasing ignorance rather than reducing it.
In other words, the next time a flat earther asks you, “have you ever seen water curve?”, simply reply with the following question: “What do you think the sun and the moon are made out of, and have you ever seen this material curve?”.
Sin No. 4 – I don’t know how, therefore I am being lied to.
In 1919, the British astronomers Frank Watson Dyson and Arthur Stanley Eddington conducted an observational experiment that showed Enistein’s theory of general relativity to be true. Simply put – the Gravity (the word that is forbidden in the Flat Earth discourse) of stars like our sun, pull light and make alter its course. So, if we imagine a single star shining on us from a certain direction at night, when the sun “rises” in the morning and stands between us and the star, the star seems to change its position, as its light is being deflected by the sun. The only problem is that you can’t prove this, because you can’t see any stars when the sun is shining. You can’t unless there’s a full solar eclipse. This is what Dyson and Eddington waited for, and so with the solar eclipse of 1919, the sun’s gravitational pull was shown.
Flat-earth discourse, however, operates very differently than scientific discourse. In this sort of discourse – which is very toxic and infects other kinds of discourses online – ignorance itself is taken as proof. In other words, if I don’t know how, in vacuum, air clings to a planet, this alone “proves” that the belief in an atmosphere is false. If I don’t understand airplane navigation, it “proves” Earth isn’t round. This destructive dynamic spreads into politics and other areas, echoing the rise of “alternative facts.”
Sin No. 5 – The Annihilation of the Universe
For me, this is the vilest of all sins: The flat-earth agenda is an agenda for the erasure of an entire universe of wonders—vast and tiny, slow and fast, near and billions of light years away. In its place, we are left with a small, limited, dull and mechanical cosmos; a simple mechanical cosmos that is devoid of surprises.
Here lies the core of the flat earth argument: The belief, no, the demand that the universe will be anthropocentric. In the flat earth cosmos, it is us who sit in the centre of creation, and it is for us that the entire cosmological system works. Simply put – the flat earth agenda is an agenda to re-enthrone mankind as the centre of the universe, after being marginalised over and over, by Copernicus and then by Darwin.
Sin No. 6 – No wait, Let’s take that Back
Because this erasure is so severe, we can see how flat-earth maps invent new continents beyond the supposed ice ring, which used to be the impenetrable border of the flat earth model. But where does this knowledge come from? It recalls religious inventions later revoked, like purgatory or limbo, which caused centuries of suffering before being declared non-existent. Flat-earth expansions similarly fabricate worlds without evidence, perpetuating falsehoods. If you get to read such elaborated (and, to be honest, beautiful!) map of a flat earth world with numerous circles of continents and ice-walls beyond the world that we all know (and that some of us imagine as flat), you will see two important groups of land masses: planets and stars that are being translated to flat earth continents (Mars, Sirius), and mythological places (Olympus, Asgard). After annihilating the entire model of the universe, with its endless galaxies and super clusters, the realization that being alone on a flat world has its lonely, gloomy consequences, the flat earth grows to be endless as well.
Sin No. 7 – I can tell you, but then I must kill you
One of the reasons I really like the movies of John Wick, is that we discover in the movie that everyone belongs to a hidden order or mafia. This process is subtle. At first – there are ordinary people. Then, these ordinary people behave like zombies, who remain oblivious even to gun fights taking place next to them. At the end, no trace for ordinary people remains, and everybody is involved in the underworld, which is no underworld anymore, but the world.
In a similar way, flat-earth conspiracies require more and more people to be complicit: astronauts, NASA, airlines, shipping companies, even engineers building bridges. Eventually, everyone is part of the plot, leaving only “heroes” to resist the global agenda.
Sin No. 8 – The hubris of thinking that these villain masterminds are that stupid
Yet such a vast conspiracy turns out to be easy to disprove by the heroic flat earth agenda. Over and over again, all around the social media, the supposed masterminds, rulers and architects of the global lie always seem clumsy, to a criminal degree, when it comes to hiding their traces. Flat-earthers claim to find “holes” in the narrative from a mere photo or video, granting themselves the heroic importance. As the world becomes small and limited, the only discoveries left to discover are flaws and holes within the storyline.
Sin No. 9 – Video killed the star
Interestingly enough, while the flat earth agenda promotes gut feelings and the simple senses over a more complicated science, it sometimes favour strange videos over a simple look out of the window. Almost anyone (except maybe in the northern parts of the globe) watching a sunset sees the sun “sink” behind the horizon. In fact, I remember that as a child in kindergarten, I had the embarrassing situation of asking why how come the sun is not extinguished, if it falls into the ocean every evening.
Flat-earth videos, on the other hand, show the sun shrinking as it “moves away.” This is how digital imagery erases reality for people who can just look and see what a sunset is, effectively replacing it with a simulation. The problem extends beyond flat-earth claims to our entire culture of images replacing the real.
Sin No. 10 – This movie is about me
At the core of flat-earth belief lies the desire to restore humanity to the centre of existence. For two millennia we’ve slowly learned that we are not the main subject and aim of the universe: Earth is but one planet orbiting one star among countless galaxies. The wish to return to the centre stems from identity and ego. To justify identities, we bend reality—here, Flat Earth “Theory” is the bending the entire universe—just to place mankind back at its center.
Oren Ben Yosef 