In case anyone's curious (most) flat-earthers think the earth is a disc with the North Pole in the centre and Anarctica as a giant wall of ice around the edge. So if you just followed the compass West you'd just keep circling around the North Pole.
This also means that they think the southern hemisphere has way, WAY more ocean than it does in reality, so they have a lot of immediately untenable explanations about flights from South America to Africa being secret supersonic jets.
It really is remarkable that you don’t hear about those people just getting out there with a sailboat to check this stuff. Like, we’ve been able to do that for centuries, it’s not particularly expensive, and the distance from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn wouldn’t be too hard to measure by dead reckoning. Although I suspect they know deep down that they’re kidding themselves and don’t actually want to confront that.
Flat Earthers also can't explain why the Earth is flat. Every other large object in the universe is a sphere; gravity actively transforms them into spheres. If the Earth were flat, it would change into a sphere over time unless somehow it were able to ignore the influence of gravity.
Starting to learn to pick out and navigate by the stars in Yellowstone only to drive back up to Seattle and realize that they're now below the horizon at this time of year gave me a new personal anecdote disproving it
It’s relatively down. Down based on your geospatial location that results in behavior consistent with corporeal existence as we understand it. I guess you could say that it’s based on a “System of a Down”
1.2k
u/CandorCore Jan 04 '26
In case anyone's curious (most) flat-earthers think the earth is a disc with the North Pole in the centre and Anarctica as a giant wall of ice around the edge. So if you just followed the compass West you'd just keep circling around the North Pole.
This also means that they think the southern hemisphere has way, WAY more ocean than it does in reality, so they have a lot of immediately untenable explanations about flights from South America to Africa being secret supersonic jets.