Despite overwhelming evidence and scientific consensus, there is a growing number of people who believe that the Earth is not a sphere but a flat, pancake-shaped object.
In this episode, we'll explore the Flat Earth Theory and its origins, why people believe it, and why it is more popular than ever.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Flat Earth Theory, the idea that the Earth is not in fact a circular ball, but a flat, pancake-shaped object.
[00:00:34] It might sound ridiculous, given the fact that as a human race we have never before had a better understanding of science and physics. But there have never been more people alive who believed that modern science is simply wrong, it’s all a huge conspiracy.
[00:00:51] So in this episode we are going to explore the Flat Earth Theory, we’ll look at where it came from, why people believe it, despite all the evidence, and why it is more popular now than ever before.
[00:01:06] OK then, the Flat Earth Theory.
[00:01:10] On February 22nd, 2020, a 64-year-old American stood in the Californian desert, looking up to the sky. He boarded a homemade space rocket, getting ready for lift off.
[00:01:27] It was a windy day, as the onlookers stood by, waiting for this daredevil to pull off his next stunt.
[00:01:36] The man in question was Mike Hughes.
[00:01:40] His target that day was to reach the Karman line, the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.
[00:01:49] The reason for wanting to do this, so he told the press and anyone who would listen, was because he wanted to see the Earth for himself.
[00:02:00] When he got all the way up there he was going to look down, and what he believed he would see was not the circular globe that we see in geography or physics textbooks.
[00:02:13] He thought he would see a big, round disc, like a large plate or a pancake.
[00:02:21] He had his camera with him, ready to take a picture and share it with the world.
[00:02:26] He was going to be the first person to reveal the truth, that the earth is, in fact, flat like a pancake.
[00:02:36] Unfortunately he would never manage to take this picture.
[00:02:41] Seconds after the space rocket took off there was a malfunction. A parachute burst out prematurely and ripped on a ladder. causing the rocket to be thrown off its trajectory. For a split second, it looked like the rocket might flip on its head and land directly into the small group of spectators, but it looped the other way before crashing down in the desert.
[00:03:09] The entire flight took less than twenty seconds, and Hughes was killed instantly when the rocket exploded on impact.
[00:03:18] Mike Hughes might have been a daredevil, prepared to put himself in all sorts of dangerous situations, including one that would cost him his life. And, in fact, his press agent would claim that he only professed to believe the Flat Earth theory in order to attract attention and funding to his amateur rocket-building.
[00:03:38] But there have never been more people who believe that the Earth is not round, with one recent survey suggesting that 16% of Americans believe that the Earth isn’t round, rising to 34% of Americans aged 18-24.
[00:03:56] That’s…a lot of people, right?
[00:03:59] So how did we get to this point?
[00:04:02] Well, there is a popular misconception that everyone thought the world was flat until relatively recently, anywhere from Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century up to the 17th and 18th centuries.
[00:04:17] And there is a myth that Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 to prove that the Earth was round.
[00:04:25] This simply isn’t true. Going back all the way to the ancient Greeks, mathematicians have hypothesised that the surface of Earth is, in fact, curved, thereby making it one massive sphere, a globe, round ball.
[00:04:43] There were a few reasons they thought this, and they all come from observing the world around them, seeing things that you or I can see anywhere in the world without any kind of complicated scientific equipment.
[00:04:57] One is from looking at a ship sailing over a horizon.
[00:05:02] If you look at a ship as it’s sailing away from you and it appears to drop off the edge of the sea, but then it returns and you ask someone on the boat, “did you drop off the edge of the Earth?”, and they say “err, no, we just sailed on a bit and then returned”.
[00:05:19] Or by looking at a lunar eclipse, where the Earth comes between the sun and the moon and forms a circular shadow against the moon.
[00:05:28] Or by climbing a tree or a high mountain and seeing that you can see further than you can on ground level.
[00:05:35] There are lots of different ways in which, even without any kind of modern technology, using simply your eyes and a rudimentary understanding of mathematics, you can come to the conclusion that the Earth is spherical.
[00:05:50] Despite this, there were, of course, plenty of societies and cultures that did believe that the Earth was flat.
[00:05:58] From Early Greek philosophers to Chinese astronomers, many wise men and women subscribed to the theory that the Earth was either flat or some kind of either circular or rectangular shape, normally with the heavens in a spherical shape above it.
[00:06:17] Again, you can understand why someone might have come to this conclusion. If you look at the Earth when you’re standing on it, it does look kind of flat. The idea that it might be spherical is kind of scary.
[00:06:32] What happens on the other side? Do you slide around? What happens if you go upside down?
[00:06:40] The point is, it’s easy with the benefit of hindsight, a basic understanding of mathematics, and all the evidence that we have today, it's easy to look back and say “how did anyone believe it was flat?”, but at the same time, it’s not so hard to understand why this might have been a tricky thing to get your head around.
[00:07:02] But, fast forward several thousand years, to the mid 19th century, it’s a bit harder to imagine why someone would believe the Earth was not round.
[00:07:13] Countless scientists and astronomers had proven it, map makers had charted much of the globe, we had a pretty robust understanding of gravity and of the movements of the planets.
[00:07:26] Debate over the shape of the Earth was almost non-existent, because there simply was nothing to debate. There was near unanimous agreement. It was round.
[00:07:39] But this all changed with the ideas of an Englishman called Samuel Rowbotham.
[00:07:47] He published a 16-page pamphlet in 1849 called Zetetic Astronomy, which was later turned into a book, and in it he proposed something revolutionary.
[00:08:01] According to Rowbotham, who was in fact writing under the pseudonym Parallax, the Earth was not a circular ball, but a pancake-shaped flat disc.
[00:08:15] This disc, according to Rowbotham, has the North Pole at its centre, the rest of the world going out from there, and at the edge of the world going all the way around, the crust of the pizza might be one way of thinking about it, there is Antarctica.
[00:08:33] Now, what about the sun, moon, planets and the stars, you might be thinking?
[00:08:39] Well, they are only a few thousand kilometres above the Earth, and they’re much smaller than we think they are, this was Rowbotham’s theory.
[00:08:49] If you've seen The Truman Show, the film with Jim Carrey where he discovers that his entire life is a simulation for reality TV, that is essentially what Rowbotham proposed we all live in, a flat surface with a dome above it where the sun, moon and stars were.
[00:09:08] So, was Rowbotham mad, a fraud, some kind of religious zealot, what was he trying to do by publishing this theory?
[00:09:19] Well, much like I described earlier, with the example of you or I being able to observe our surroundings and come to the conclusion that the Earth is round, Rowbotham did the same but came to a different conclusion.
[00:09:35] His was at least more scientific than our basic experiment of seeing a ship go over the horizon.
[00:09:42] Rowbotham found a long and straight canal outside Cambridge, in England.
[00:09:48] He got into the canal with his telescope, and watched as a boat went further and further away from him.
[00:09:57] If the Earth were round, Rowbotham pointed out, the boat would look like it was going down. But, shock horror, Rowbotham looked through his telescope and the boat seemed to be at a similar height no matter how far away he got.
[00:10:14] Therefore…the Earth must be flat!
[00:10:18] Now, even though this can be explained through an understanding of physics, and how light refracts, Rowbotham was convinced that he was right.
[00:10:29] He got very excited about this idea, published this pamphlet, then the book, becoming the father of the modern “Flat Earth” movement.
[00:10:40] After him came people like Lady Elizabeth Blout, a social activist who founded something called the Universal Zetetic Society, and then Samuel Shenton, another Englishman who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society.
[00:10:56] Strangely, perhaps, the first and most influential trio of Flat Earthers were all English, but it would be across the pond, in the United States, where these ideas would be accepted most welcomingly.
[00:11:11] See, in the early days of modern Flat Earth ideas, it was a super fringe movement, with only a handful of supporters.
[00:11:21] But with the internet it spread like wildfire.
[00:11:26] Google Searches for “flat earth” had been relatively consistent, but started to grow quickly from mid 2015 or so, reaching a peak in late 2017.
[00:11:40] And flat earth videos on sites like Facebook and YouTube would often gather tens of millions of views.
[00:11:48] Now, as to the question of why, well this brings us into some interesting territory.
[00:11:55] Firstly, with recommendation-driven algorithms, they will tend to show you videos which you will continue to watch for long periods of time, or which will lead you down rabbit holes to watch other, related videos. Often, these videos will contain shocking or surprising information, even if that information simply isn’t true. And what more shocking or surprising fact could you be presented with than someone proving that the planet you live on isn’t a ball, it isn’t round, but a flat pancake?
[00:12:32] YouTube, after all, is a business that exists to make money, the longer it can keep a user on the website, the more money it makes. Flat earth videos were very good at keeping users on the website, so YouTube had a strong incentive to recommend Flat Earth videos to people.
[00:12:53] Secondly, and on a related note, the fact that these videos were so popular meant that people knew that they could make money by creating new videos about them, even if they didn’t believe the flat earth theory themselves.
[00:13:08] People saw how many views other flat earth videos were getting and thought, well, I’ll create one too and get in on the action. So, it wasn’t just the YouTube algorithms that were pushing users to the videos, real people were making more flat earth explainer videos in order to profit from the interest that they knew there was in the subject.
[00:13:32] The end result was, as you might imagine, lots of people being suggested Flat Earth videos, which were excellent at converting new people to the movement. In fact, in one article where a journalist went to a Flat Earth conference and asked the people there how they had got into the Flat Earth theory, 39 out of 40 said they had been recommended a video on YouTube.
[00:13:59] Now, it should be said that Facebook and YouTube have now started suppressing these kinds of videos, so they say, but for quite some time they were everywhere.
[00:14:10] And in terms of societal reasons for this increasing belief, well, as you’ll know the world over, but certainly in the United States, there is increasing distrust of authorities, and an increasing idea that people should "do their own research”.
[00:14:28] The end result is that there is now a small but growing proportion of the population that is either sceptical about whether the Earth is a sphere or is 100% sure, utterly convinced, that it is flat.
[00:14:44] It has got to the stage that it is almost like a religion. Flat Earthers talk about going to Flat Earth conferences, socialising with other Flat Earthers, and losing friends and damaging relationships over their steadfast insistence that the world is flat.
[00:15:02] Now, this might be easy to ridicule if you don’t believe it.
[00:15:07] But if you believed something from the bottom of your heart, if you had spent hundreds of hours researching it, and this thing wasn’t a trivial question of how to make the best chocolate cake or how to improve your English pronunciation, you had “discovered” that what practically every human believes to be true about the planet they live on…is a lie, well I can certainly understand why you might want to share that information with people, and how it would become something that could take over your life, permeating every aspect of your existence.
[00:15:44] And it would, I imagine, make life in normal society kind of tricky. You might wander around and think “I can’t believe those people really believe the Earth is spherical”, and if you tried to talk to them they would probably say “I can’t believe you think it’s flat”, and the conversation wouldn’t get anywhere.
[00:16:07] And then you have stories like the one you heard at the start of the episode, of the American daredevil who wanted to fly a rocket up into the sky so he could observe the Earth. Or there was a story on Reddit of a person who joined the Navy specifically so that he could sail the high seas and observe the Earth’s flatness for himself, only to spend some time at sea and reach the conclusion that the Earth was indeed round.
[00:16:34] It is, in some ways, the most seductive of all of the conspiracy theories, simply because of its extremity. Other perhaps smaller scale conspiracy theories, involving things like the assassination of JFK or the moon landing or 9/11 or even, more recently, theories about where COVID came from, these are not quite so binary, there are different layers to them, where perhaps it’s easy to believe that reality is slightly different from the official version of events.
[00:17:10] The Flat Earth Theory is completely different.
[00:17:13] There is no halfway point, no middle ground, between the Earth being a globe and it being a pancake. And the scale of it is unprecedented. It would be a conspiracy, a secret, that likely millions of people knew and were keeping secret right now: the pilots who were flying over the flat Earth, the astronomers who pretended to look at the solar system but knew full well that the truth was different, every employee of NASA, it would be the most monumental conspiracy involving the very nature of our planet.
[00:17:49] And it’s for this reason that it’s said that once you go down the Flat Earth rabbit hole and decide that you believe it, it’s harder to return to reality than almost any other conspiracy theory.
[00:18:02] Now, even within the Flat Earth theory, there are different theories about the makeup of the Earth. They all, as far as I can see, subscribe to the idea that it’s a disk with the North Pole in the centre, the continents going out from it. But the differences come about what happens at the edge.
[00:18:23] Some people think that there is a snowy, icey wall, the Antarctic wall, and that’s where it stops, that’s the end of the Earth.
[00:18:33] Some people even think that there are armed guards at Antarctica, stopping people from looking over the edge and discovering “the truth”.
[00:18:43] Others believe a similar thing, but that Antarctica continues forever, there is no “end” of the Earth.
[00:18:52] Now, to wrap things up, it’s often said that the reason people believe conspiracy theories is because they offer a unique framework to view the world, that they by definition go against the mainstream view, that they can help people identify with a particular group or belief, and give people a new way of looking at the world.
[00:19:15] If we take this as true, the Flat Earth theory is the ultimate conspiracy theory, giving its believers a literal new way of looking at the world.
[00:19:25] In the case of Mike Hughes and his home-made space rocket, he was prepared to go up as far as he could to look down and see for himself.
[00:19:36] Who knows, if he had made it all the way up there, what he would have seen might well have changed his mind.
[00:19:45] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Flat Earth theory, the most seductive, the most extreme and perhaps the most unusual of the popular conspiracy theories of the modern era.
[00:19:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:01] Do you know anyone who is a Flat Earther? Are you a Flat Earther? If so, why do you believe the Earth is flat?
[00:20:10] Why do you think that this conspiracy theory is so popular? What do you think it tells us about modern society?
[00:20:17] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:20] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Flat Earth Theory, the idea that the Earth is not in fact a circular ball, but a flat, pancake-shaped object.
[00:00:34] It might sound ridiculous, given the fact that as a human race we have never before had a better understanding of science and physics. But there have never been more people alive who believed that modern science is simply wrong, it’s all a huge conspiracy.
[00:00:51] So in this episode we are going to explore the Flat Earth Theory, we’ll look at where it came from, why people believe it, despite all the evidence, and why it is more popular now than ever before.
[00:01:06] OK then, the Flat Earth Theory.
[00:01:10] On February 22nd, 2020, a 64-year-old American stood in the Californian desert, looking up to the sky. He boarded a homemade space rocket, getting ready for lift off.
[00:01:27] It was a windy day, as the onlookers stood by, waiting for this daredevil to pull off his next stunt.
[00:01:36] The man in question was Mike Hughes.
[00:01:40] His target that day was to reach the Karman line, the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.
[00:01:49] The reason for wanting to do this, so he told the press and anyone who would listen, was because he wanted to see the Earth for himself.
[00:02:00] When he got all the way up there he was going to look down, and what he believed he would see was not the circular globe that we see in geography or physics textbooks.
[00:02:13] He thought he would see a big, round disc, like a large plate or a pancake.
[00:02:21] He had his camera with him, ready to take a picture and share it with the world.
[00:02:26] He was going to be the first person to reveal the truth, that the earth is, in fact, flat like a pancake.
[00:02:36] Unfortunately he would never manage to take this picture.
[00:02:41] Seconds after the space rocket took off there was a malfunction. A parachute burst out prematurely and ripped on a ladder. causing the rocket to be thrown off its trajectory. For a split second, it looked like the rocket might flip on its head and land directly into the small group of spectators, but it looped the other way before crashing down in the desert.
[00:03:09] The entire flight took less than twenty seconds, and Hughes was killed instantly when the rocket exploded on impact.
[00:03:18] Mike Hughes might have been a daredevil, prepared to put himself in all sorts of dangerous situations, including one that would cost him his life. And, in fact, his press agent would claim that he only professed to believe the Flat Earth theory in order to attract attention and funding to his amateur rocket-building.
[00:03:38] But there have never been more people who believe that the Earth is not round, with one recent survey suggesting that 16% of Americans believe that the Earth isn’t round, rising to 34% of Americans aged 18-24.
[00:03:56] That’s…a lot of people, right?
[00:03:59] So how did we get to this point?
[00:04:02] Well, there is a popular misconception that everyone thought the world was flat until relatively recently, anywhere from Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century up to the 17th and 18th centuries.
[00:04:17] And there is a myth that Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 to prove that the Earth was round.
[00:04:25] This simply isn’t true. Going back all the way to the ancient Greeks, mathematicians have hypothesised that the surface of Earth is, in fact, curved, thereby making it one massive sphere, a globe, round ball.
[00:04:43] There were a few reasons they thought this, and they all come from observing the world around them, seeing things that you or I can see anywhere in the world without any kind of complicated scientific equipment.
[00:04:57] One is from looking at a ship sailing over a horizon.
[00:05:02] If you look at a ship as it’s sailing away from you and it appears to drop off the edge of the sea, but then it returns and you ask someone on the boat, “did you drop off the edge of the Earth?”, and they say “err, no, we just sailed on a bit and then returned”.
[00:05:19] Or by looking at a lunar eclipse, where the Earth comes between the sun and the moon and forms a circular shadow against the moon.
[00:05:28] Or by climbing a tree or a high mountain and seeing that you can see further than you can on ground level.
[00:05:35] There are lots of different ways in which, even without any kind of modern technology, using simply your eyes and a rudimentary understanding of mathematics, you can come to the conclusion that the Earth is spherical.
[00:05:50] Despite this, there were, of course, plenty of societies and cultures that did believe that the Earth was flat.
[00:05:58] From Early Greek philosophers to Chinese astronomers, many wise men and women subscribed to the theory that the Earth was either flat or some kind of either circular or rectangular shape, normally with the heavens in a spherical shape above it.
[00:06:17] Again, you can understand why someone might have come to this conclusion. If you look at the Earth when you’re standing on it, it does look kind of flat. The idea that it might be spherical is kind of scary.
[00:06:32] What happens on the other side? Do you slide around? What happens if you go upside down?
[00:06:40] The point is, it’s easy with the benefit of hindsight, a basic understanding of mathematics, and all the evidence that we have today, it's easy to look back and say “how did anyone believe it was flat?”, but at the same time, it’s not so hard to understand why this might have been a tricky thing to get your head around.
[00:07:02] But, fast forward several thousand years, to the mid 19th century, it’s a bit harder to imagine why someone would believe the Earth was not round.
[00:07:13] Countless scientists and astronomers had proven it, map makers had charted much of the globe, we had a pretty robust understanding of gravity and of the movements of the planets.
[00:07:26] Debate over the shape of the Earth was almost non-existent, because there simply was nothing to debate. There was near unanimous agreement. It was round.
[00:07:39] But this all changed with the ideas of an Englishman called Samuel Rowbotham.
[00:07:47] He published a 16-page pamphlet in 1849 called Zetetic Astronomy, which was later turned into a book, and in it he proposed something revolutionary.
[00:08:01] According to Rowbotham, who was in fact writing under the pseudonym Parallax, the Earth was not a circular ball, but a pancake-shaped flat disc.
[00:08:15] This disc, according to Rowbotham, has the North Pole at its centre, the rest of the world going out from there, and at the edge of the world going all the way around, the crust of the pizza might be one way of thinking about it, there is Antarctica.
[00:08:33] Now, what about the sun, moon, planets and the stars, you might be thinking?
[00:08:39] Well, they are only a few thousand kilometres above the Earth, and they’re much smaller than we think they are, this was Rowbotham’s theory.
[00:08:49] If you've seen The Truman Show, the film with Jim Carrey where he discovers that his entire life is a simulation for reality TV, that is essentially what Rowbotham proposed we all live in, a flat surface with a dome above it where the sun, moon and stars were.
[00:09:08] So, was Rowbotham mad, a fraud, some kind of religious zealot, what was he trying to do by publishing this theory?
[00:09:19] Well, much like I described earlier, with the example of you or I being able to observe our surroundings and come to the conclusion that the Earth is round, Rowbotham did the same but came to a different conclusion.
[00:09:35] His was at least more scientific than our basic experiment of seeing a ship go over the horizon.
[00:09:42] Rowbotham found a long and straight canal outside Cambridge, in England.
[00:09:48] He got into the canal with his telescope, and watched as a boat went further and further away from him.
[00:09:57] If the Earth were round, Rowbotham pointed out, the boat would look like it was going down. But, shock horror, Rowbotham looked through his telescope and the boat seemed to be at a similar height no matter how far away he got.
[00:10:14] Therefore…the Earth must be flat!
[00:10:18] Now, even though this can be explained through an understanding of physics, and how light refracts, Rowbotham was convinced that he was right.
[00:10:29] He got very excited about this idea, published this pamphlet, then the book, becoming the father of the modern “Flat Earth” movement.
[00:10:40] After him came people like Lady Elizabeth Blout, a social activist who founded something called the Universal Zetetic Society, and then Samuel Shenton, another Englishman who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society.
[00:10:56] Strangely, perhaps, the first and most influential trio of Flat Earthers were all English, but it would be across the pond, in the United States, where these ideas would be accepted most welcomingly.
[00:11:11] See, in the early days of modern Flat Earth ideas, it was a super fringe movement, with only a handful of supporters.
[00:11:21] But with the internet it spread like wildfire.
[00:11:26] Google Searches for “flat earth” had been relatively consistent, but started to grow quickly from mid 2015 or so, reaching a peak in late 2017.
[00:11:40] And flat earth videos on sites like Facebook and YouTube would often gather tens of millions of views.
[00:11:48] Now, as to the question of why, well this brings us into some interesting territory.
[00:11:55] Firstly, with recommendation-driven algorithms, they will tend to show you videos which you will continue to watch for long periods of time, or which will lead you down rabbit holes to watch other, related videos. Often, these videos will contain shocking or surprising information, even if that information simply isn’t true. And what more shocking or surprising fact could you be presented with than someone proving that the planet you live on isn’t a ball, it isn’t round, but a flat pancake?
[00:12:32] YouTube, after all, is a business that exists to make money, the longer it can keep a user on the website, the more money it makes. Flat earth videos were very good at keeping users on the website, so YouTube had a strong incentive to recommend Flat Earth videos to people.
[00:12:53] Secondly, and on a related note, the fact that these videos were so popular meant that people knew that they could make money by creating new videos about them, even if they didn’t believe the flat earth theory themselves.
[00:13:08] People saw how many views other flat earth videos were getting and thought, well, I’ll create one too and get in on the action. So, it wasn’t just the YouTube algorithms that were pushing users to the videos, real people were making more flat earth explainer videos in order to profit from the interest that they knew there was in the subject.
[00:13:32] The end result was, as you might imagine, lots of people being suggested Flat Earth videos, which were excellent at converting new people to the movement. In fact, in one article where a journalist went to a Flat Earth conference and asked the people there how they had got into the Flat Earth theory, 39 out of 40 said they had been recommended a video on YouTube.
[00:13:59] Now, it should be said that Facebook and YouTube have now started suppressing these kinds of videos, so they say, but for quite some time they were everywhere.
[00:14:10] And in terms of societal reasons for this increasing belief, well, as you’ll know the world over, but certainly in the United States, there is increasing distrust of authorities, and an increasing idea that people should "do their own research”.
[00:14:28] The end result is that there is now a small but growing proportion of the population that is either sceptical about whether the Earth is a sphere or is 100% sure, utterly convinced, that it is flat.
[00:14:44] It has got to the stage that it is almost like a religion. Flat Earthers talk about going to Flat Earth conferences, socialising with other Flat Earthers, and losing friends and damaging relationships over their steadfast insistence that the world is flat.
[00:15:02] Now, this might be easy to ridicule if you don’t believe it.
[00:15:07] But if you believed something from the bottom of your heart, if you had spent hundreds of hours researching it, and this thing wasn’t a trivial question of how to make the best chocolate cake or how to improve your English pronunciation, you had “discovered” that what practically every human believes to be true about the planet they live on…is a lie, well I can certainly understand why you might want to share that information with people, and how it would become something that could take over your life, permeating every aspect of your existence.
[00:15:44] And it would, I imagine, make life in normal society kind of tricky. You might wander around and think “I can’t believe those people really believe the Earth is spherical”, and if you tried to talk to them they would probably say “I can’t believe you think it’s flat”, and the conversation wouldn’t get anywhere.
[00:16:07] And then you have stories like the one you heard at the start of the episode, of the American daredevil who wanted to fly a rocket up into the sky so he could observe the Earth. Or there was a story on Reddit of a person who joined the Navy specifically so that he could sail the high seas and observe the Earth’s flatness for himself, only to spend some time at sea and reach the conclusion that the Earth was indeed round.
[00:16:34] It is, in some ways, the most seductive of all of the conspiracy theories, simply because of its extremity. Other perhaps smaller scale conspiracy theories, involving things like the assassination of JFK or the moon landing or 9/11 or even, more recently, theories about where COVID came from, these are not quite so binary, there are different layers to them, where perhaps it’s easy to believe that reality is slightly different from the official version of events.
[00:17:10] The Flat Earth Theory is completely different.
[00:17:13] There is no halfway point, no middle ground, between the Earth being a globe and it being a pancake. And the scale of it is unprecedented. It would be a conspiracy, a secret, that likely millions of people knew and were keeping secret right now: the pilots who were flying over the flat Earth, the astronomers who pretended to look at the solar system but knew full well that the truth was different, every employee of NASA, it would be the most monumental conspiracy involving the very nature of our planet.
[00:17:49] And it’s for this reason that it’s said that once you go down the Flat Earth rabbit hole and decide that you believe it, it’s harder to return to reality than almost any other conspiracy theory.
[00:18:02] Now, even within the Flat Earth theory, there are different theories about the makeup of the Earth. They all, as far as I can see, subscribe to the idea that it’s a disk with the North Pole in the centre, the continents going out from it. But the differences come about what happens at the edge.
[00:18:23] Some people think that there is a snowy, icey wall, the Antarctic wall, and that’s where it stops, that’s the end of the Earth.
[00:18:33] Some people even think that there are armed guards at Antarctica, stopping people from looking over the edge and discovering “the truth”.
[00:18:43] Others believe a similar thing, but that Antarctica continues forever, there is no “end” of the Earth.
[00:18:52] Now, to wrap things up, it’s often said that the reason people believe conspiracy theories is because they offer a unique framework to view the world, that they by definition go against the mainstream view, that they can help people identify with a particular group or belief, and give people a new way of looking at the world.
[00:19:15] If we take this as true, the Flat Earth theory is the ultimate conspiracy theory, giving its believers a literal new way of looking at the world.
[00:19:25] In the case of Mike Hughes and his home-made space rocket, he was prepared to go up as far as he could to look down and see for himself.
[00:19:36] Who knows, if he had made it all the way up there, what he would have seen might well have changed his mind.
[00:19:45] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Flat Earth theory, the most seductive, the most extreme and perhaps the most unusual of the popular conspiracy theories of the modern era.
[00:19:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:01] Do you know anyone who is a Flat Earther? Are you a Flat Earther? If so, why do you believe the Earth is flat?
[00:20:10] Why do you think that this conspiracy theory is so popular? What do you think it tells us about modern society?
[00:20:17] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:20] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Flat Earth Theory, the idea that the Earth is not in fact a circular ball, but a flat, pancake-shaped object.
[00:00:34] It might sound ridiculous, given the fact that as a human race we have never before had a better understanding of science and physics. But there have never been more people alive who believed that modern science is simply wrong, it’s all a huge conspiracy.
[00:00:51] So in this episode we are going to explore the Flat Earth Theory, we’ll look at where it came from, why people believe it, despite all the evidence, and why it is more popular now than ever before.
[00:01:06] OK then, the Flat Earth Theory.
[00:01:10] On February 22nd, 2020, a 64-year-old American stood in the Californian desert, looking up to the sky. He boarded a homemade space rocket, getting ready for lift off.
[00:01:27] It was a windy day, as the onlookers stood by, waiting for this daredevil to pull off his next stunt.
[00:01:36] The man in question was Mike Hughes.
[00:01:40] His target that day was to reach the Karman line, the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.
[00:01:49] The reason for wanting to do this, so he told the press and anyone who would listen, was because he wanted to see the Earth for himself.
[00:02:00] When he got all the way up there he was going to look down, and what he believed he would see was not the circular globe that we see in geography or physics textbooks.
[00:02:13] He thought he would see a big, round disc, like a large plate or a pancake.
[00:02:21] He had his camera with him, ready to take a picture and share it with the world.
[00:02:26] He was going to be the first person to reveal the truth, that the earth is, in fact, flat like a pancake.
[00:02:36] Unfortunately he would never manage to take this picture.
[00:02:41] Seconds after the space rocket took off there was a malfunction. A parachute burst out prematurely and ripped on a ladder. causing the rocket to be thrown off its trajectory. For a split second, it looked like the rocket might flip on its head and land directly into the small group of spectators, but it looped the other way before crashing down in the desert.
[00:03:09] The entire flight took less than twenty seconds, and Hughes was killed instantly when the rocket exploded on impact.
[00:03:18] Mike Hughes might have been a daredevil, prepared to put himself in all sorts of dangerous situations, including one that would cost him his life. And, in fact, his press agent would claim that he only professed to believe the Flat Earth theory in order to attract attention and funding to his amateur rocket-building.
[00:03:38] But there have never been more people who believe that the Earth is not round, with one recent survey suggesting that 16% of Americans believe that the Earth isn’t round, rising to 34% of Americans aged 18-24.
[00:03:56] That’s…a lot of people, right?
[00:03:59] So how did we get to this point?
[00:04:02] Well, there is a popular misconception that everyone thought the world was flat until relatively recently, anywhere from Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century up to the 17th and 18th centuries.
[00:04:17] And there is a myth that Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 to prove that the Earth was round.
[00:04:25] This simply isn’t true. Going back all the way to the ancient Greeks, mathematicians have hypothesised that the surface of Earth is, in fact, curved, thereby making it one massive sphere, a globe, round ball.
[00:04:43] There were a few reasons they thought this, and they all come from observing the world around them, seeing things that you or I can see anywhere in the world without any kind of complicated scientific equipment.
[00:04:57] One is from looking at a ship sailing over a horizon.
[00:05:02] If you look at a ship as it’s sailing away from you and it appears to drop off the edge of the sea, but then it returns and you ask someone on the boat, “did you drop off the edge of the Earth?”, and they say “err, no, we just sailed on a bit and then returned”.
[00:05:19] Or by looking at a lunar eclipse, where the Earth comes between the sun and the moon and forms a circular shadow against the moon.
[00:05:28] Or by climbing a tree or a high mountain and seeing that you can see further than you can on ground level.
[00:05:35] There are lots of different ways in which, even without any kind of modern technology, using simply your eyes and a rudimentary understanding of mathematics, you can come to the conclusion that the Earth is spherical.
[00:05:50] Despite this, there were, of course, plenty of societies and cultures that did believe that the Earth was flat.
[00:05:58] From Early Greek philosophers to Chinese astronomers, many wise men and women subscribed to the theory that the Earth was either flat or some kind of either circular or rectangular shape, normally with the heavens in a spherical shape above it.
[00:06:17] Again, you can understand why someone might have come to this conclusion. If you look at the Earth when you’re standing on it, it does look kind of flat. The idea that it might be spherical is kind of scary.
[00:06:32] What happens on the other side? Do you slide around? What happens if you go upside down?
[00:06:40] The point is, it’s easy with the benefit of hindsight, a basic understanding of mathematics, and all the evidence that we have today, it's easy to look back and say “how did anyone believe it was flat?”, but at the same time, it’s not so hard to understand why this might have been a tricky thing to get your head around.
[00:07:02] But, fast forward several thousand years, to the mid 19th century, it’s a bit harder to imagine why someone would believe the Earth was not round.
[00:07:13] Countless scientists and astronomers had proven it, map makers had charted much of the globe, we had a pretty robust understanding of gravity and of the movements of the planets.
[00:07:26] Debate over the shape of the Earth was almost non-existent, because there simply was nothing to debate. There was near unanimous agreement. It was round.
[00:07:39] But this all changed with the ideas of an Englishman called Samuel Rowbotham.
[00:07:47] He published a 16-page pamphlet in 1849 called Zetetic Astronomy, which was later turned into a book, and in it he proposed something revolutionary.
[00:08:01] According to Rowbotham, who was in fact writing under the pseudonym Parallax, the Earth was not a circular ball, but a pancake-shaped flat disc.
[00:08:15] This disc, according to Rowbotham, has the North Pole at its centre, the rest of the world going out from there, and at the edge of the world going all the way around, the crust of the pizza might be one way of thinking about it, there is Antarctica.
[00:08:33] Now, what about the sun, moon, planets and the stars, you might be thinking?
[00:08:39] Well, they are only a few thousand kilometres above the Earth, and they’re much smaller than we think they are, this was Rowbotham’s theory.
[00:08:49] If you've seen The Truman Show, the film with Jim Carrey where he discovers that his entire life is a simulation for reality TV, that is essentially what Rowbotham proposed we all live in, a flat surface with a dome above it where the sun, moon and stars were.
[00:09:08] So, was Rowbotham mad, a fraud, some kind of religious zealot, what was he trying to do by publishing this theory?
[00:09:19] Well, much like I described earlier, with the example of you or I being able to observe our surroundings and come to the conclusion that the Earth is round, Rowbotham did the same but came to a different conclusion.
[00:09:35] His was at least more scientific than our basic experiment of seeing a ship go over the horizon.
[00:09:42] Rowbotham found a long and straight canal outside Cambridge, in England.
[00:09:48] He got into the canal with his telescope, and watched as a boat went further and further away from him.
[00:09:57] If the Earth were round, Rowbotham pointed out, the boat would look like it was going down. But, shock horror, Rowbotham looked through his telescope and the boat seemed to be at a similar height no matter how far away he got.
[00:10:14] Therefore…the Earth must be flat!
[00:10:18] Now, even though this can be explained through an understanding of physics, and how light refracts, Rowbotham was convinced that he was right.
[00:10:29] He got very excited about this idea, published this pamphlet, then the book, becoming the father of the modern “Flat Earth” movement.
[00:10:40] After him came people like Lady Elizabeth Blout, a social activist who founded something called the Universal Zetetic Society, and then Samuel Shenton, another Englishman who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society.
[00:10:56] Strangely, perhaps, the first and most influential trio of Flat Earthers were all English, but it would be across the pond, in the United States, where these ideas would be accepted most welcomingly.
[00:11:11] See, in the early days of modern Flat Earth ideas, it was a super fringe movement, with only a handful of supporters.
[00:11:21] But with the internet it spread like wildfire.
[00:11:26] Google Searches for “flat earth” had been relatively consistent, but started to grow quickly from mid 2015 or so, reaching a peak in late 2017.
[00:11:40] And flat earth videos on sites like Facebook and YouTube would often gather tens of millions of views.
[00:11:48] Now, as to the question of why, well this brings us into some interesting territory.
[00:11:55] Firstly, with recommendation-driven algorithms, they will tend to show you videos which you will continue to watch for long periods of time, or which will lead you down rabbit holes to watch other, related videos. Often, these videos will contain shocking or surprising information, even if that information simply isn’t true. And what more shocking or surprising fact could you be presented with than someone proving that the planet you live on isn’t a ball, it isn’t round, but a flat pancake?
[00:12:32] YouTube, after all, is a business that exists to make money, the longer it can keep a user on the website, the more money it makes. Flat earth videos were very good at keeping users on the website, so YouTube had a strong incentive to recommend Flat Earth videos to people.
[00:12:53] Secondly, and on a related note, the fact that these videos were so popular meant that people knew that they could make money by creating new videos about them, even if they didn’t believe the flat earth theory themselves.
[00:13:08] People saw how many views other flat earth videos were getting and thought, well, I’ll create one too and get in on the action. So, it wasn’t just the YouTube algorithms that were pushing users to the videos, real people were making more flat earth explainer videos in order to profit from the interest that they knew there was in the subject.
[00:13:32] The end result was, as you might imagine, lots of people being suggested Flat Earth videos, which were excellent at converting new people to the movement. In fact, in one article where a journalist went to a Flat Earth conference and asked the people there how they had got into the Flat Earth theory, 39 out of 40 said they had been recommended a video on YouTube.
[00:13:59] Now, it should be said that Facebook and YouTube have now started suppressing these kinds of videos, so they say, but for quite some time they were everywhere.
[00:14:10] And in terms of societal reasons for this increasing belief, well, as you’ll know the world over, but certainly in the United States, there is increasing distrust of authorities, and an increasing idea that people should "do their own research”.
[00:14:28] The end result is that there is now a small but growing proportion of the population that is either sceptical about whether the Earth is a sphere or is 100% sure, utterly convinced, that it is flat.
[00:14:44] It has got to the stage that it is almost like a religion. Flat Earthers talk about going to Flat Earth conferences, socialising with other Flat Earthers, and losing friends and damaging relationships over their steadfast insistence that the world is flat.
[00:15:02] Now, this might be easy to ridicule if you don’t believe it.
[00:15:07] But if you believed something from the bottom of your heart, if you had spent hundreds of hours researching it, and this thing wasn’t a trivial question of how to make the best chocolate cake or how to improve your English pronunciation, you had “discovered” that what practically every human believes to be true about the planet they live on…is a lie, well I can certainly understand why you might want to share that information with people, and how it would become something that could take over your life, permeating every aspect of your existence.
[00:15:44] And it would, I imagine, make life in normal society kind of tricky. You might wander around and think “I can’t believe those people really believe the Earth is spherical”, and if you tried to talk to them they would probably say “I can’t believe you think it’s flat”, and the conversation wouldn’t get anywhere.
[00:16:07] And then you have stories like the one you heard at the start of the episode, of the American daredevil who wanted to fly a rocket up into the sky so he could observe the Earth. Or there was a story on Reddit of a person who joined the Navy specifically so that he could sail the high seas and observe the Earth’s flatness for himself, only to spend some time at sea and reach the conclusion that the Earth was indeed round.
[00:16:34] It is, in some ways, the most seductive of all of the conspiracy theories, simply because of its extremity. Other perhaps smaller scale conspiracy theories, involving things like the assassination of JFK or the moon landing or 9/11 or even, more recently, theories about where COVID came from, these are not quite so binary, there are different layers to them, where perhaps it’s easy to believe that reality is slightly different from the official version of events.
[00:17:10] The Flat Earth Theory is completely different.
[00:17:13] There is no halfway point, no middle ground, between the Earth being a globe and it being a pancake. And the scale of it is unprecedented. It would be a conspiracy, a secret, that likely millions of people knew and were keeping secret right now: the pilots who were flying over the flat Earth, the astronomers who pretended to look at the solar system but knew full well that the truth was different, every employee of NASA, it would be the most monumental conspiracy involving the very nature of our planet.
[00:17:49] And it’s for this reason that it’s said that once you go down the Flat Earth rabbit hole and decide that you believe it, it’s harder to return to reality than almost any other conspiracy theory.
[00:18:02] Now, even within the Flat Earth theory, there are different theories about the makeup of the Earth. They all, as far as I can see, subscribe to the idea that it’s a disk with the North Pole in the centre, the continents going out from it. But the differences come about what happens at the edge.
[00:18:23] Some people think that there is a snowy, icey wall, the Antarctic wall, and that’s where it stops, that’s the end of the Earth.
[00:18:33] Some people even think that there are armed guards at Antarctica, stopping people from looking over the edge and discovering “the truth”.
[00:18:43] Others believe a similar thing, but that Antarctica continues forever, there is no “end” of the Earth.
[00:18:52] Now, to wrap things up, it’s often said that the reason people believe conspiracy theories is because they offer a unique framework to view the world, that they by definition go against the mainstream view, that they can help people identify with a particular group or belief, and give people a new way of looking at the world.
[00:19:15] If we take this as true, the Flat Earth theory is the ultimate conspiracy theory, giving its believers a literal new way of looking at the world.
[00:19:25] In the case of Mike Hughes and his home-made space rocket, he was prepared to go up as far as he could to look down and see for himself.
[00:19:36] Who knows, if he had made it all the way up there, what he would have seen might well have changed his mind.
[00:19:45] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Flat Earth theory, the most seductive, the most extreme and perhaps the most unusual of the popular conspiracy theories of the modern era.
[00:19:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:01] Do you know anyone who is a Flat Earther? Are you a Flat Earther? If so, why do you believe the Earth is flat?
[00:20:10] Why do you think that this conspiracy theory is so popular? What do you think it tells us about modern society?
[00:20:17] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:20] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
