Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I have to admit,
when I first saw the stack of sources for today,
I had a moment of hesitation. I looked at the
title and I thought, OK, really, are we going
there? Because usually when you see this topic
online, it's well, it's a comment section war.
It is usually a very loud, very angry argument.
Yes, it gets heated. To put it mildly. Exactly.
But then I started reading through the materials
you pulled, the historical records, the ancient
cosmology papers, the studies on psychology.
And I realized pretty quickly that this isn't
actually a debate about the shape of a planet.
I mean, it is, but that's the boring part. That
is the least interesting part of the conversation,
honestly. The real story is so much bigger. Right.
What this actually is, is a massive sprawling
story about human perception. It's about history.
It's about how we know what we know. And honestly,
it's about the stories we tell ourselves to feel
smart. It is a journey through the evolution
of thought. We are going to look at how humanity
figured out where we are in the universe. And
the road to getting there is much stranger than
just people used to be dumb and now we are smart.
That is the vibe I want to shatter today. We
are diving into the flat earth, but we aren't
doing the YouTube debunking video thing. No,
no, not at all. We are going back to ancient
Mesopotamia. We are going to the royal courts
of the Ming Dynasty. And we are definitely going
to spend some time in the 19th century to figure
out who lied to us about Christopher Columbus.
That is the part that usually surprises people
the most, that big reveal. So let's set the stage
with a bit of a double twist hook just to orient
you. Twist number one, the ancients, and I'm
talking the really ancient civilizations, absolutely
thought the world was flat. It was intuitive.
It was obvious. And we are going to talk about
why. But twist number two, the people you think
thought it was flat, the medieval Europeans,
the peasants, the church, the people in the so
-called dark ages actually didn't. That is the
big myth. If you grew up thinking Columbus sailed
to prove the world was round while everyone else
was terrified he'd fall off the edge, you were
told a lie. You were told a story. A literal
fiction invented hundreds of years later for,
you know, political reasons. My entire third
grade history class feels like a betrayal right
now. We are going to fix that. But the mission
for this Deep Dives is to unpack what historians
call this archaic conception. We need to understand
why the flat Earth model existed in the first
place, why it vanished in the West, why it stuck
around in the East for so long, and the really
fascinating, somewhat terrifying reasons why
it has suddenly returned in the 21st century.
And we have a really diverse stack of sources
today. We've got translations of Babylonian tablets.
We've got analysis of Chinese astronomy. We've
got the specific history of the modern flat Earth
resurgence from Wikipedia and some sociological
studies. So let's start at the very beginning.
The floating log. The floating log. This brings
us to Thales of Miletus. I read that in the notes,
Thales of Miletus, around 550 BC, and the image
is just so specific. He didn't say the earth
was a rock or a mountain. He said it was a log
floating in water. It sounds funny to modern
ears, but we have to put ourselves in the headspace
of an early observer. We need to distinguish
between ignorance and observation. Okay. If I
asked you to forget everything you learned in
school, Forget the globes, forget the NASA photos,
forget satellites, and just walk outside and
describe the world based strictly on your sensory
data. What would you say? Well, if I'm standing
in a field, it looks flat, maybe a bit bumpy
with hills. But generally, the horizon is a straight
line. It doesn't curve. Precisely. If you're
on a boat looking at the ocean, the horizon is
a flat line 360 degrees around you. Yeah. If
you're in the desert, it's a flat plane. The
intuitive view, the default factory setting for
the human brain is a flat earth. It is what your
eyes tell you every single day. So early civilizations
weren't being anti -science. They were being
empiricists. They were trusting their primary
data source. They were being literalists. They
were building a model of the world based on the
evidence they could gather themselves. And this
connects to the floating log. Why water? Right.
Why always water? If you look at the ancient
Near East, Egypt, Mesopotamia. Their entire existence
depended on water. The Nile, the Tigris, the
Euphrates. Water was life. And the ocean surrounding
the land. Right. So in the Near Eastern mythology,
and specifically in the Egyptian texts, the world
is portrayed as a disk that rose out of a massive,
infinite, chaotic ocean. The cosmic ocean. In
Egypt, they called it Nun. It was the primordial
waters. The earth was just a bubble or a mound
of dry land floating in this endless sea. It
makes sense, right? If you dig down into the
earth, what do you eventually hit? Water, groundwater.
And if you travel far enough in any direction,
what do you hit? The ocean. So logically, the
land must be floating on top of the water. There's
water below and water all around. It's a very
coherent, if incorrect, picture. That actually
makes a disturbing amount of sense if you don't
know about gravity or geology. But the part of
this ancient worldview that I found most beautiful
and also kind of claustrophobic is the sky. They
didn't see the sky as empty space. No, the concept
of space is very modern. For the ancients, the
sky was a solid object. This is the firmament.
The rakia in Hebrew, right. I saw that word in
the sources. Yes. The word implies something
hammered out, like a metal sheet or a dome. In
the biblical view, and the Babylonian view before
it, the sky is a solid, arched structure. It's
like a glass snow globe. So the Earth is the
flat bottom of the snow globe, and the firmament
is the glass dome over the top. Exactly. And
its job is to hold back the waters above. Wait,
waters above? So there's water on top of the
sky dome? They believed there was water up there,
which explains why the sty is blue, like the
ocean, and why it rains. Of course. The firmament
had windows or sluice gates that God could open
to let the water in. Rain wasn't a meteorological
cycle. It was a deliberate opening of the cosmic
plumbing. That is such a cozy, enclosed image.
It's like living in a house. The floor is the
earth. The roof is the firmament. And the stars.
What about the stars in this model? In this model,
the stars aren't distant suns billions of miles
away. They are lights embedded in the dome. Think
of jewels set into a ceiling or lamps hanging
from a roof. The sun and moon were also just
larger lights moving along tracks set into this
dome. It's interior decorating on a cosmic scale.
It creates a universe that is focused entirely
on humanity. We are in the center, on the stage,
and the whole universe is just the theater building
around us. Very anthropocentric. And the Greeks.
I feel like we always give the Greeks a pass
as the smart ones, the math guys. But the early
Greek poets were right there with the Babylonians
on this. Oh, absolutely. If you read Homer or
Hesiod, we're talking 8th century BC, way before
the philosophers we know. They described the
shield of Achilles. This is a famous passage
in the Iliad where Hephaestus makes a shield
and on it he depicts the entire cosmos. And it's
a dis. A flat circle. A flat circle surrounded
by the river Okeanos. Okeanos wasn't just a body
of water to them. It was a titan. A god, a river
that flowed back into itself in a circle, bounding
the edges of the world. It was the begetter of
all life. That word edges is doing a lot of work
there. That's the scary part. If there is an
edge, there is a drop. And that fear of the edge
is something that permeates these early cosmologies.
It's why the cosmic ocean is often seen as dangerous
or chaotic. It's the boundary between the known
world and the unknowable abyss. This brings us
to the pre -Socratic philosophers. This is a
group I've always found fascinating because they
are trying to move away from Zeus did it to here
is a physical explanation, even if the physical
explanation is wild. They're the bridge between
mythology and science. They're asking the right
questions, even if they get the wrong answers.
We mentioned Thales and his log, but then you
have his student, Anaximander, and his theory
is, well... It's industrial. It's very specific.
The cylinder. He didn't think it was a flat,
thin disk. He thought the Earth was a stone column
or a cylinder, like a drum. And we live on one
of the flat surfaces, the top. The height was
about one -third of its diameter, according to
him. So the Earth is a hockey puck, a very thick
hockey puck suspended in space. A hockey puck,
yes. But here is the genius of an axemander,
even though his shape was wrong. He had to answer
the question, what is holding the puck up? Right.
Thales said water. But Anaximander asked, what
is the water resting on? It's turtles all the
way down, right? Right. You need a base. You
always need a final turtle. Anaximander said,
nothing. He said the Earth stays in place because
it is equidistant from everything else in the
universe. It is in the center. Because it is
in the center, it has no reason to move up, down,
left, or right. It is held in place by equilibrium.
That is actually incredibly sophisticated. He's
talking about forces, essentially, rather than
a giant turtle or a pillar. He's using logic,
not just an image. Exactly. It's a huge leap
in abstract thinking. He's the first person we
know of to imagine the Earth floating freely
in space. But then you have Anaximenes, who comes
along and says, no, that's too complicated. It's
a leaf. A leaf. He went back to the flat disk
idea. He said the Earth is flat and broad, and
because it is broad, it rides on the air like
a leaf or a kite. The air pressure underneath
holds it up. He also thought the sun and moon
were flat, fiery bodies that also floated on
the air. Okay, so we have a log, a hockey puck,
and a kite. And then there was Archelaus with
the saucer. Archelaus is interesting because
he was trying to solve a specific observational
problem. This shows they weren't just making
things up. They were wrestling with data. Okay,
what was the problem? Travelers had noticed that
the sun rises and sets at different times depending
on where you are east or west. If the Earth were
perfectly flat, everyone would see the sunrise
at the exact same instant. Right. Pop. The sun
clears the horizon. Everyone sees it. But they
knew that wasn't true. So Archelaus suggested
the Earth was depressed in the middle, like a
bowl or a saucer. The raised rim meant that the
sun would be blocked for some people while visible
to others. So he's twisting the flat Earth model
into a pretzel to try and make it fit the data.
He's patching the bugs in the code. That is the
hallmark of this era. Yeah. They are gathering
data. astronomical data, travel logs, and they
were trying to cram it into the flat framework
because that's what their intuition tells them
must be true. Before we leave the ancient flat
Earth, we have to talk about the Norse because
their version of the cosmic ocean isn't just
water, it's a monster. The Norse cosmology is
extremely visceral. You have Midgard, the Earth,
which is a flat, circular realm, and surrounding
it is the great ocean. But the ocean isn't just
empty, it is the home of Jormungandr. A Midgard
serpent. A snake so large that it encircles the
entire world and bites its own tail. I've always
loved that image, the Ouroboros on a global scale,
but looking at it through this lens, it's a containment
field. It is. In the Gylfaginning, one of the
key Norse texts, the ocean is described as impassable.
The snake represents the boundary. It's the do
-not -enter sign for humanity. The reason the
oceans don't drain off the edge is because this
living force is binding it all together. It really
highlights the difference between the modern
view of the ocean and the ancient one. To us,
the ocean is a highway. We ship cargo across
it. To them, the ocean was the barrier. It was
the end of reality. And that psychological barrier,
the idea that there is a limit to the world,
is something that takes a long time to break.
It requires a shift from trusting your gut to
trusting your math. Which segues perfectly into
part two, the great shift. The Greeks start seeing
curves. This is one of the most important moments
in intellectual history. It happens in Greece,
starting with Pythagoras in the 6th century BC,
who seems to have suggested it for aesthetic
reasons. He just thought spheres were the most
perfect shape. Of course he did. But it really
solidifies with Aristotle around 330 BC. No,
why did they change their minds? Did someone
sail around the world? No, and that's the beauty
of it. They figured it out without leaving the
Mediterranean. It wasn't about travel. It was
about deduction and observation. So Aristotle
lays out three main arguments in his book on
the heavens. And these are arguments that, spoiler
alert, modern flat earthers still struggle to
answer. They're simple, elegant, and devastating
to the flat model. The first one is the stars.
Aristotle points out that travelers going to
Egypt see stars that are invisible in northern
Greece, and stars that are visible in both places
appear higher in the sky in the south and lower
in the north. So the dome of stars is shifting
relative to your position. The further south
you go, the more of the southern sky you see.
Right. If the Earth were flat, moving a few hundred
miles north or south shouldn't change the angle
of the stars that much, unless the stars were,
like... Really close. But the shift happens uniformly.
It implies you are walking along a curve, and
as you do, your personal horizon is tilting.
Okay, that's clever. Argument number two, the
moon. The lunar eclipse. This is my favorite
one. When the Earth passes between the sun and
the moon, it casts a shadow on the moon. Aristotle
simply pointed out. Look at the shadow. It is
always a curve. The edge of the shadow is always
part of a circle. And a flat disk could cast
a circular shadow, right? Like a dinner plate.
Only if the dinner plate is facing the sun directly,
perfectly face on. But eclipses happen at all
different times of night with the Earth in all
different orientations relative to the sun. If
the Earth were a flat disk, eventually you would
get a shadow that looked like a thin line at
the edge of the plate or an oval. But it's not.
It is always a circle. The only shape that casts
a circular shadow from every single angle is
a sphere. That is the mic drop moment for me.
You can see it with your own eyes. You don't
need a telescope. You just need an eclipse. And
the third one is the ships. We've all heard this
one, but it's powerful. A ship sailing away from
you doesn't just get smaller until it's a dot.
It sinks. The hull disappears first. Then the
sails. Then the little flag on the top of the
mast. It's going over the curve of the Earth.
So by 330 BC, the intellectual heavyweights know
it's a sphere. But knowing it's a sphere and
knowing how big it is are two different things.
Enter Eratosthenes. Eratosthenes, the librarian
of Alexandria, around 240 BC. This story is often
told as he put a stick in the ground. But we
need to unpack the genius of the experiment because
it's a master class in geometry and observation.
He used the sun as a protractor. Basically. He
heard a report, or read it in a scroll in a library,
that in the city of Syene, which is modern Aswan,
on the summer solstice at noon, the sun was directly
overhead. And how did they know that? Because
there was a deep well. And at that specific moment,
the sun shone all the way to the bottom. It illuminated
the water. There was no shadow cast by the rim
of the well. So the sun is 90 degrees straight
up, perpendicular to the ground. Right. But in
Alexandria, which was almost directly north of
Syene, on the same day at the same time, a stick
in the ground did cast a shadow. Eratosthenes
measured the angle of that shadow. It was about
7 .2 degrees. Okay, so we have 0 degrees in Syene
and 7 .2 degrees in Alexandria. What does that
tell us? Here is the geometry. Eratosthenes made
two assumptions. One, that the sun was so far
away that its light rays are hitting the earth,
essentially parallel to each other. Which is
a good assumption. And two, that the earth is
a sphere. If the earth was flat, the parallel
rays would hit both cities at the same angle.
Both sticks would have no shadow. The only reason
for the difference in shadow length is if the
surface of the Earth is curving between the two
cities. So the 7 .2 degrees represents the amount
of curvature of the Earth between those two points.
Exactly. He realized that 7 .2 degrees is 150th
of a full circle, which is 360 degrees. So, if
that's the case, the distance between Alexandria
and Syene must be 150th of the Earth's total
circumference. Now he just needs to know the
distance between the cities. He didn't have Google
Maps. How do you measure a distance of, what
was it, 500 miles? in 240 BC. You hire a professional?
They were called bimetists. Bimetists. Professional
pacers. Walkers. Their entire job was to walk
long distances with a perfectly consistent stride
length and count every single step. They were
human odometers. Can you imagine the pressure
on that guy? 1 ,001, 1 ,002. Hey, don't talk
to me. I'll lose camera. Might have to start
over in Alexandria. It sounds absurd, but they
were surprisingly accurate. They determined the
distance was about 5 ,000 stadia. And a stadia
is? It's an ancient unit, and we're not 100 %
sure of its exact length, which is why there's
some debate over his final number. But based
on the most likely conversion, he did the math.
5 ,000 times 50 is 250 ,000 stadia. That comes
out to roughly 40 ,000 kilometers. Which is...
Almost exactly the real number. He was within
1 or 2 % of the actual polar circumference of
the Earth. With a stick, a well, and a guy walking,
it's one of the greatest scientific experiments
in history. That is mind -blowing, but... And
there's always a but in this story. Not everyone
was convinced. We have to talk about the holdouts.
Because even in the ancient world, there were
skeptics. Lucretius is the most famous one. He
was a Roman poet and philosopher in the first
century BC. He followed the atomist school of
thought, like Democritus. Why did he hate the
sphere? What was his beef with it? It was philosophical,
not observational. He believed the universe was
infinite. If the universe is infinite, it can't
have a center. The Aristotelian model relied
on the Earth being the center of the universe
where all heavy things naturally fall. Right.
Down meant toward the center of the Earth. Lucretius
said if there is no center, why would things
fall to a ball? Why wouldn't they just fall down?
He believed in a universal down. Ah, the universal
down idea. A single direction for the whole infinite
cosmos. Right. And this led him to mock the idea
of. The antipodes. You antipodes. We need to
define this word because it keeps coming up in
the sources. Anti -opposite -podes. Feet? Yeah.
People whose feet are opposite yours. The people
on the other side of the globe. Lucretius thought
this was a comedy routine. He wrote that the
idea of men walking upside down or rain falling
upwards into the sky on the other side of the
world was absurd. He basically said, look, have
you ever seen anything fall up? No. So why would
people stick to the bottom of a ball? It's intuitive
again. Without a theory of gravity, the idea
that mass attracts mass, the sphere does seem
ridiculous. Why doesn't the water drain off the
bottom? Why don't people in Australia just fall
off? Exactly. But despite Lucretius, the consensus
held. By the time of the Roman Empire, Pliny
the Elder writes in his encyclopedia that everyone
agrees on the spherical shape. It was settled
science in the West. They still argued about
the antipodes, but the shape was a given. In
the West. But if we pan the camera across the
Silk Road to China, we enter a completely different
reality, a parallel intellectual universe. The
Chinese exception. This is a part of the history
that often gets skipped, but it's crucial. China
had a civilization just as advanced, if not more
so, than Rome. They had brilliant engineers,
astronomers who cataloged comets, mathematicians
who calculated pi. But they operated on a flat
earth model almost until the 17th century. How
is that possible? How do you map the stars effectively
if you have the wrong shape of the ground? Well,
their model was called Gaitian, the canopy heavens.
And the standard phrase was, the sky is round,
the earth is square. A square earth, not even
a circle. Yes, think of a chessboard. And over
the chessboard, you have a round canopy or an
umbrella that rotates. That was the heavens.
It was a deeply ingrained philosophical and cosmological
view. But I recall reading about an egg analogy.
Zhang Heng, a brilliant polymath in the Han Dynasty,
described the universe as a hen's egg. That sounds
pretty spherical. This is where translation and
interpretation get tricky. In the 20th century,
Western historians like Joseph Needham read Zhang
Heng's text. And Zhang wrote, the heavens are
like a hen's egg. The earth is like the yolk
of the egg and lies in the center. Okay, yolk
equals round. Case closed, right? That sounds
like he got it. That's what Needham thought.
He argued that the Chinese knew it was a sphere,
but later scholars looked closer at the context
and at Zhang Heng's other writings. In another
text, Zhang Heng himself wrote, Earth takes its
body from the yin, so it is flat and quiescent.
Flat and quiescent. So the egg analogy was about
what? Position. Position. Nesting. He meant the
earth is inside the heavens, fully enclosed,
like a yolk is inside an egg. But not that it
was a sphere. The yolk can be flat inside the
shell. Ah, so it was about being enclosed, not
about being spherical. Precisely. And this philosophical
commitment to the square Earth had real consequences
for their science. There's a story about how
they tried to do an Eratosthenes -style measurement,
but it went completely wrong. This is fascinating.
What happened? This is a perfect example of how
your starting axiom dictates your results. In
the Tang Dynasty, around 7 and 20 AD, a monk
and astronomer named Yi Jing led a massive imperial
survey. They measured the shadow of the sun at
different latitudes, just like Eratosthenes.
They had better instruments than the Greeks.
Their data was incredibly precise. But they started
with the assumption that the Earth was flat.
Right. So when they saw the shadow length change
as they moved north, they didn't think, the Earth
is curving away from the sun's rays. They thought,
the sun must be much closer than we thought.
Ooh. Because if the Earth is flat and the shadow
gets shorter, it means you're getting closer
to the light source. Like walking under a street
lamp, the shadow changes. Exactly. So they used
trigonometry, assuming a flat Earth, to calculate
the height of the sun. They calculated that the
sun was exactly 100 ,000 light, which is about
200 ,000 kilometers above the ground. So they
did the math perfectly. They gathered the data
perfectly. But because their foundational belief
was Earth is flat, they ended up with a tiny,
close sun. instead of around Earth. It wasn't
until the Jesuits arrived in the 1600s, specifically
Matteo Ricci, bringing European globes and maps
and astronomical knowledge, that the Chinese
court finally began to shift toward the spherical
view. It shows that intelligence isn't the same
as correctness. You can be a genius and still
be wrong if your starting premise is flawed.
That is a lesson for the ages. Okay, let's jump
back to Europe. We need to tackle the elephant
in the room. the myth of the dark ages the columbus
myth we were all told the story the brave handsome
christopher columbus stands before the ignorant
spanish court the priests are wagging their fingers
saying you can't sail west you'll fall off the
edge the monsters will eat you and columbus says
no science says it is round it is a dramatic
scene it's heroic It's got conflict and it is
100 % fiction. It never happened. Not one bit
of it. Never. The debate between Columbus and
the Spanish Royal Commission, which actually
happened, was not about the shape of the earth.
It was about the size. Everyone in the room knew
it was a sphere. They were arguing about the
circumference. Yes. The Royal Commission, which
was made up of educated men, used Eratosthenes'
old numbers. They said the Earth is about 40
,000 kilometers around. The ocean between Europe
and Asia is too big. You will run out of food
and water before you get to Japan. And Columbus
said. Columbus essentially cherry -picked bad
math. He used calculations from a Persian geographer,
but mixed up the units of measurement using Roman
miles instead of Arabic miles, which were longer.
He also underestimated the size of Asia. He basically
fudged the numbers to convince himself the Earth
was much smaller, about 25 ,000 kilometers around.
So Columbus was the bad mathematician. The ignorant
priests were actually right. The priests and
scholars were scientifically correct. The ocean
was too big. If the Americas hadn't been there,
which neither side knew about, Columbus and his
crew would have died of thirst in the middle
of the Atlantic. He got lucky. So if everyone
knew it was round, where did this story come
from? Why does every American school child know
the people thought it was flat story? We have
to blame the storyteller, Washington Irving.
The guy who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
The Headless Horseman guy. The very same. In
1828, he wrote a biography called A History of
the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
It was more historical fiction than history.
He wanted to write a bestseller. He wanted a
hero. And a hero needs a villain. And a bureaucratic
argument about the length of a sea mile isn't
a very sexy villain. Exactly. So Irving, being
a fiction writer at heart, invented the scene
of the ignorant flat earth priests. He framed
Columbus as the lone beacon of science against
the darkness of religious stupidity. He just
made it up for dramatic effect. And people just
thought it. They loved it. It was a great story.
But it wasn't just Irving. Later in the 19th
century, you had scholars like John William Draper
and Andrew Dixon White. They were pushing something
called the conflict thesis. What is that? The
idea that science and religion are fundamentally
and eternally at war. They wanted to show that
the church has always held back progress. So
they latched onto Irving's story and presented
it as historical fact. They effectively slandered
a thousand years of medieval scholarship to score
a political point in the 1870s. Because the reality
of the Middle Ages was very different. Completely
different. If you go to a university in 1250
AD, the standard astronomy textbook was Desiramundi
on the Sphere of the World by John of Sacrobosco.
It's in the title. It's right there in the title.
Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian of the
era, starts his Summa Theologica by using the
spherical Earth as an example of a fact that
is proven by physics. He treats it as obvious,
like, of course the Earth is round, just as it's
obvious that. And you mentioned the kings, the
symbols they held. The Globus Cruciger. You've
seen it in paintings of Queen Elizabeth or Charlemagne.
They hold a golden orb with a cross on top. The
Holy Hand Grenade. Right. That orb represents
the universe, the earth. The cross represents
Christ's dominion over it. If they thought the
world was flat, they would have held a plate
or a disc. The fact that the ultimate symbol
of power was a sphere tells you everything you
need to know about the medieval worldview. Okay,
so they knew it was round, but was there any
debate or was it total consensus? There was a
debate, but it goes back to the Antipodes. It
goes back to St. Augustine. Augustine of Hippo,
4th century, one of the most influential church
fathers. Augustine was a smart guy. He read the
science of his day. He accepted the spherical
shape. But he had a theological problem with
the other side of the world. He argued that there
could not be people there. Walk us through the
logic. Why not? It was a syllogism. Premise 1.
All humans are descended from Adam and Eve. Premise
2. The equatorial ocean is a scorching hot boiling
sea, the torrid zone. No ship can possibly cross
it. Conclusion. If no ship can cross it, Adam's
descendants could never have reached the other
side. Therefore, the other side is empty. It
might be land, but it is uninhabited by humans.
So the debate wasn't, is it flat? It was, is
the other side empty? Exactly. And this brings
us to the one guy the myth makers always point
to, Cosmas Inacoploustes. Cosmas, who sailed
to India. Quite a name. He was a 6th century
merchant turned monk. And he did write a book
arguing the earth was flat. He drew it as a rectangle,
shaped like the tabernacle of Moses from the
Old Testament. So there was one. The myth has
a grain of truth. There was one. But he was the
exception that proves the rule. His contemporaries
mocked him. Another Christian philosopher, John
Philipponus, wrote a scathing rebuttal telling
him he was an idiot and that he was making Christians
look bad by ignoring basic astronomy. Cosmas
was a fringe blogger in his own time. But modern
historians or pseudo historians picked him out
of the trash heap and said, look, this represents
the entire Middle Ages. It's classic cherry picking.
It's like looking at a flat earth tweet from
2024 and saying the people of the 21st century
believe the earth was flat. Which, ironically,
brings us to the 21st century because people
do believe it again. The modern resurgence. This
is the part of the deep dive that shifts from
history to sociology and. psychology. When did
it come back? Because for a long time, Flat Earth
Society was a punchline. It was a joke about
people who argue for the sake of arguing. The
modern movement starts, weirdly enough, in the
19th century. Just as the myth of the Flat Earth
Pass was being invented, a guy named Samuel Rowbotham
started actually preaching it. What was his deal?
He was an English inventor and writer. In 1849,
he published a pamphlet under the pseudonym Parallax
called Zetetic Astronomy. Earth. Not a globe.
Zetatic. That's a key word here. What does it
mean? It comes from the Greek zetio, meaning
to seek or to inquire. Robotham's philosophy
was, do not trust theories. Do not trust what
you are told by so -called experts. Trust only
what you can demonstrate with your own senses.
Back to the floating log. Back to the intuitive
view. It all comes full circle. Exactly. He argued
that if you look at a canal, specifically the
old Bedford -level canal, which is a long, straight
drainage canal, the water looks flat for six
miles. Therefore, the world is flat. He was a
master showman. He would hold public debates,
shout down astronomers, and he gained a small
but dedicated following. This evolved into the
Universal Zetetic Society, but it stayed pretty
small, right? A handful of people. It was a fringe
curiosity. The Flat Earth Society was founded
in 1956, but it never had more than a few thousand
members. It was a quirk. Until around 2015. The
algorithm era. We cannot overstate the role of
YouTube and social media algorithms in this.
Around 2015, the recommendation engines figured
out that Flat Earth videos were sticky. Sticky
meaning people watched them all the way through.
And commented. And shared. They generated massive
engagement. So the algorithm pushed them to millions
of people. People watch conspiracy video about
9 -11 and the up next would be 200 proofs Earth
is not a spinning ball. And it sends them down
the rabbit hole. A very deep one. We have to
get into the psychology of the modern believer
because unlike the Babylonians, these people
have access to Google Earth. They can book a
flight from Sydney to Santiago. How do they maintain
the belief? in the face of just overwhelming
evidence. It requires a massive psychological
firewall. We call it the conspiracy necessity.
Meaning? Meaning you cannot believe the earth
is flat in 2026 without also believing in a massive,
coordinated, global conspiracy to hide the truth.
It's a package deal. It has to be. You have to
believe NASA is fake. You have to believe all
space agencies, Russian, Chinese, Indian, are
working together to lie to us. You have to believe
every pilot is in on it, every GPS engineer,
every satellite TV technician. It creates a villain
again. They are lying to us. And that is the
appeal. It makes the believer feel special. I
am not a sheep. I know the truth. I have woken
up. It appeals to people who feel disenfranchised,
who don't trust the government, who feel like
the world is out of control. This is one thing
they feel they can understand and control. Let's
talk about their model, because they don't believe
in the edge where you fall off into space, right?
Generally, no. Most modern flat earthers believe
in the ice wall. Which is Antarctica. In their
map, which is usually just the UN flag logo,
and as a beautiful equidistant projection, the
North Pole is in the center. The continents spread
out from there. And Antarctica isn't a continent
at the bottom. It is a giant ring of ice that
surrounds the entire disk. Like a pizza crust
holding in the sauce. Exactly. And the theory
is that if you try to go there, the military
will stop you. The Antarctic Treaty is viewed
by them not as an environmental agreement, but
as a militarized border pact to keep people away
from the edge of the dome or the edge of the
world. It effectively makes the world a prison.
Or a terrarium with a giant ice wall. And that
leads to the do -it -yourself science. You see
these guys buying $10 ,000 gyroscopes or taking
high -powered cameras. The Nikon P900 is famous
in this community to the beach to try and zoom
in and bring ships back over the horizon. There
is a tragedy in that. They are curious. They
are buying equipment. They are experimenting.
They are acting like scientists. But they refuse
to accept any result that contradicts their belief.
There is a famous scene in the documentary Behind
the Curve, which I highly recommend, where a
group of flat earthers sets up an experiment
with lasers and posts over a canal. to prove
the water is flat the bedford level experiment
updated yep and the experiment proves the water
is curved their own experiment and instead of
saying oh wow i guess we were wrong one of them
says that's interesting and another says they
encountered heaven energies that must have bent
the laser that is the difference between science
and pseudoscience right there science changes
the theory to fit the data pseudoscience changes
the data to fit the theory or Just ignores it.
Precisely. And while the number of hardcore believers
is small, maybe one or two percent, the sentiment
is growing. A 2018 survey showed that only 82
percent of 18 to 24 year olds in the U .S. firmly
agreed. I have always believed the world is round.
Only 82 percent. That number should be 100 percent.
It's not that the other 18 % are committed flat
earthers. It's that they are skeptical. They've
been exposed to the counter -narrative online,
and now they're thinking, well, maybe. I'm just
asking questions. That phrase is the gateway
drug. It reflects a breakdown in trust. We don't
trust experts anymore. We don't trust institutions.
And if you don't trust anyone, you fall back
on your own eyes. And your eyes tell you the
world is flat. This has real consequences for
education. I can't imagine being a science teacher
today. It's a battleground. Child psychologists
tell us that kids naturally develop a flat earth
model. It's intuitive. A small child's universe
is flat with a sky above it. Education is the
process of unlearning that intuition and replacing
it with a complex, non -intuitive model based
on data. But now teachers aren't just fighting
a child's natural intuition. They're fighting
TikTok. The National Center for Science Education
actually provides resources now specifically
for this. Teachers have students coming in saying,
but I saw a video that says gravity is just buoyancy
and density. The teacher has to deconstruct the
algorithm's programming before they can teach
the physics. It's a heavy lift, a very heavy
lift. It is. So let's try to land this. or the
spaceship. We've gone from Thales and his log
to the brilliant geometry of Eratosthenes, to
the stubborn square of China, to the fake news
of Washington Irving, and finally to the YouTube
rabbit hole. It's a long, strange trip through
the human mind. What is the big takeaway here?
Why should you, the listener, who presumably
knows the Earth is round, care about this history?
I think it's a lesson in humility. The Earth
has always been round. The physical reality hasn't
changed. But our perception of it and our ability
to accept it depends entirely on the tools we
use and the stories we trust. It's a reminder
that common sense is often the enemy of truth.
Common sense says the Earth is flat and stationary.
Science says we are spinning on a rock at 1 ,000
miles an hour, orbiting a fusion explosion in
an expanding universe. The truth is not intuitive.
It requires work. It requires trust in the collective
intelligence of humanity built up over thousands
of years. And it requires us to check our own
myths. I want to leave you with a thought that
kind of haunts me after going through all this.
We look back at the 19th century people who mocked
the medievals. They invented a fake history,
the flat earth dark ages, to make themselves
feel superior and modern. They needed to feel
like they had conquered ignorance, that they
were the enlightened ones. Right. So the question
is, what are we doing right now? What scientific
truths or historical facts do we accept today
simply because they make us feel superior to
the past? What will the people doing these deep
dives in the year 2500 be laughing at us for
believing? That is a terrifying question, and
I don't have the answer. Something to think about
next time you look at the horizon. Thanks for
diving deep with us. Keep looking up. See you
next time.