The Flat Earth Psyop

There is a growing conspiracy theory that claims the earth is flat, and it usually goes like this: Aliens or some other higher beings created the earth, which is a flat non-spinning disk, and which is covered by a dome. The north pole is at the center, and Antarctica rings the entire disk. The dome is a screen several thousand miles high on which all objects in space are displayed. Gravity does not exist. The earth is between a few thousand and a few million years old. All photos and evidence to the contrary are fake. Only 500 human insiders are part of the conspiracy.

Now, a scientifically minded person should be willing to consider any new evidence, and many conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, and we do know that governments and powerful people lie about ... well ... everything. However, after watching a few hours of video, any person of at least average mental abilities should be able to determine that the flat earth theory is both a weak argument and is simply not falsifiable because all evidence to the contrary is simply declared fake. Therefore, no rational person would believe it. Nor would anyone who cared about his reputation make such an extraordinary claim based on such weak evidence. A more scientifically informed person would also be aware that flat earthers do not address most of the evidence that contradicts their theory.

There is some excellent material that refutes the flat earthers, and which is easy to find, so this movement cannot last long.

It would thus be obvious to flat earthers that making such a poor argument for such an extreme position would permanently destroy their credibility on ... well ... everything, and that they would have little time left to profit from it, so they would do so only if they were getting a pretty large short term reward or a long term promise of some kind from a secret benefactor.

Perhaps the lowest level flat earthers get enough emotional benefit from believing to make it seem worth the cost – like from a religion or other addiction; however, the most prominent flat earthers, who exhibit substantial savvy, are even more likely to know it’s fake, and have even more to lose, and yet are not getting a sufficiently large short term reward ...

The only possibility for the most prominent flat earthers is that they have a long term expectation of reward from a secret benefactor. Therefore, they are part of a psyop intended primarily to tarnish real conspiracies while providing the fringe benefits of dividing conspiracy researchers and wasting their time. The psyop even causes people to self-identify as candidates for future eugenics programs.

The most prominent flat earthers also promote real conspiracies, so it is as if they are smearing poo all over their work on real conspiracies. This has been explained to them countless times, and yet, they keep doing it.

One of my favorite aspects of the flat earth psyop is its unintended indictment of government schools. Government has a monopoly on schools and sets the standards for all schools. The money provided to government schools has exploded in recent decades with no improvement in thinking skills. Their increasing budgets to teach kids to sit down, shut up, and believe what they’re told … seem to have produced no results at all – until now … We now see that the result of all that increased spending is a population more suceptible to believing the earth is flat – based on very weak arguments.

I am able to think, not because of my government school teachers, I am able to think … in spite of my teachers.

An ability to think is all one needs to dismiss the flat earth arguments I have found thus far. For example, one needs no special knowledge to see the weakness of the inductive argument that claims the earth is flat because no one made a sequel to the movie Apollo 13. Likewise, one needs no special knowledge to see that, unlike other conspiracies, a flat earth would require at least 10,000 humans to be in on it. Also, anyone should be able to see that, even if the moon landings were faked, which is pretty unlikely, then a flat earth would still be just as improbable.

The lighthouse claim requires a little more thought than usual, but anyone should be able to see through it if only they had the confidence to try. The claim is based on an article from the 1800’s describing a 300 foot tall lighthouse that was so impressive that sailors could see it from over 60 miles away. Flat earthers claim this would be impossible unless the lighthouse were several thousand feet tall. First, one should be immediatley very skeptical because the claim is based on a single article from the 1800’s, but the the real smoking gun is how flat earthers imply that sailors could see the lighthouse itself from that distance. Think about what sailors would see at the furthest point out where the lighthouse would be useful. We can deduce that they see a fuzzy blinking light on the horizon. It would appear each time the light passed in the direction of the ship and it might have a slight sweeping motion to it. Now consider that the light travels horizontally over the water and not straight up, thus giving it a further reach over a curved ocean surface. Then we can note that flat earthers try to lead us away from such thoughts. So, again we see that no special knowledge is necessary to defeat such claims.

Additionally, many of us do have special knowledge. By the time I got out of high school, I already knew (from independent study) about the following evidence that contradicts the flat earthers: the tides, gravity, redshifts, spectrometry, refraction, reflection, relativity, galaxies, nebulae, telescopes, super novae, evolution, radioactive dating, fossils, Foucault pendulums, water circling a drain, earth’s magnetic field from a spinning iron core, the tilt of the earth’s axis, the coriolis effect, phases of the moon, the earth's shadow on the moon, round planets having round moons, pictures and video of earth from space, circumnavigation of the globe, hundreds of kinds of satellites and space probes. The diameter of the earth was measured a couple thousand years ago by Archimedes. Since before Columbus, sailors knew the earth was round because ships would appear and disappear over the horizon a few inches at a time because the surface of the ocean is round. Rockets departing at the equator are already moving faster than from points further from the equator. I also learned enough to do the math to disprove some specific claims by flat earthers, such as the claim that it should be impossible to see Chicago across the great lakes.

Nevertheless, a scientific mind is always open to new evidence from sources that have not already proven themselves to be untrustworthy, and thus if a new source has new evidence, then I will hear it.