Recently, NBA star Kyrie Irving shocked the sports world (and the world in general) by saying in a post-game interview that he believes the world is flat.  Shortly thereafter, Shaquille O’Neil, former NBA star and noted actor/pitchman/rapper/monotonic NBA analyst agreed with Irving, before quickly changing his tune, “I’m joking, you idiots”, he quipped.  It’s not entirely clear if Irving was really serious, but Neil deGrasse Tyson found it necessary to respond to Irving’s statement.  Like all things deGrasse Tyson does, this was awesome*.

This got me wondering.  Are there really people who believe the earth is flat?  The answer, depressingly, is “yes”.  There is a whole society, aptly called the Flat Earth Society, dedicated to the spreading the word that “experts” are lying to us about the globe.  They propose a conspiracy theory of such massive scale that it would need to include astronauts from all countries (lying about space and the pictures they took of the round Earth), the airline industry (lying about their trans-continental routes and actually seeing the curvature of the Earth), telecommunications (satellites can’t orbit a flat plane), and anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex.  They even go so far as to say that the theory of gravity is false.  In their defense, it would pretty much have to be false to accommodate a flat Earth, but to repeat – they don’t believe in gravity.

I visited the Flat Earth Society’s website, and it’s actually pretty funny.  Here are some highlights:

– Under “FAQs”, the first question is “Are you Serious?”  Their answer is yes.

– They are also pretty sure we faked the moon landing

– They believe the Earth is a round disc with the arctic at the center!

– Their explanation for the seasons is awesome.  (Don’t read it too many times or your head will explode.)

– There is no edge to our flat Earth – it goes on indefinitely!  No word on what the underside of the flat Earth looks like.  We’d like to imagine there are dinosaurs!

– Their president founded the society in London, but now lives in Hong Kong – he apparently failed to notice the curvature of the Earth out the window of his plane on the way to Hong Kong.

– Their secretary enjoys epistemology, which is basically the philosophy of knowledge: how do we know what we know.  Now that’s funny.

Luckily, there are not many members of the Flat Earth Society, and for good reason.  They are wrong, and their beliefs require a combination of conspiracy theory acceptance and willful ignorance that the vast majority of people would find laughable.  I suspect (and hope, and pray!) most readers found the contents of their site more amusing than informative.

Still, it is depressing that there are people who still hold these beliefs.  We may laugh at the Flat Earth Society, but it is no less ridiculous to say that evolution isn’t real, vaccines cause autism, and the globe isn’t warming.  We have mountains of evidence to disprove all of these statements, it’s just not quite as easy as showing someone a picture of the round Earth.  Science advocacy is important.  If you meet someone who holds any of these “beliefs”, take the time to educate them.  We can wipe out flat Earthers just like we did smallpox – with science.

*We at useyourbrianforscience.com would like to take a moment to state, for the record, that we are big fans of Neil deGrasse Tyson.  It is conceivable that certain members of our advocacy community would literally pay to watch him eat corn flakes in the hopes this would make us smarter.