Am I really going to do this? Am I going to spend time on a topic so far from legitimacy as Flat Earth? Doing so risks affording a tiny bit of credibility to an idea that hasn’t earned it, as if I doth protest too much.

Reasons to bother: 1) illustrate direct observation in action; 2) emphasize the power of listening to what the universe tells us rather than insisting on insufficient mental models as “truth”; 3) provide examples of how mental models go wrong; and 4) I made some graphics worth sharing. While a bit of a tangent from my usual “serious” topics, I figure I can have a little fun once in a while.

The focus will be on conspicuous observations anyone can confirm, personally, without too much effort—even from memory, in fact. I’ll skip the literally dozens of ways I have personally measured and confirmed the spherical Earth, which would make for boring reading. Lots of things break in Flat-Earth scenarios, including GPS navigation (no satellites; broken math), gravity (would crumple a disk-Earth into a sphere in no time; plumb bobs would point more north the farther south one went), and what we’ll focus on here: sunsets. No more sunsets, folks—and any sunsets (or sunrises) you might believe yourself to have seen aren’t what you made them out to be, according to Flat-Earthers.

Rather than denigrating the people who subscribe to Flat-Earth beliefs, I’ll focus on observation. I’m not aiming to convince Flat-Earthers; nothing I say (as an obvious shill for the mega-conspiracy) can replace the sense of community and unconditional support they receive from their FE-family. Any of us might go to extremes of twisted and easily-refuted logic to preserve what’s most important to us. Modernity fails humans in countless ways—loss of intimate tribe being among them. We can forgive those seeking to recapture what’s been lost.

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