Are flat-earthers being serious?

Of all the conspiracy theories that litter the Internet, the flat Earth conspiracy is quite possibly the most curious. After all, the ancient Greeks figured out the planet's shape (and even its circumference) in the third century B.C. 

But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, dedicated to insisting that the Earth is flat, has given rise to a modern ground of flat Earth adherents. These believers claim that the Earth is a flat disc, and that evidence that it is round — say, pictures taken from space — are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar system to make their theories work. 

No one knows how many flat Earth believers are out there. According to Smithsonian Magazine, membership in the Flat Earth Society, founded in 1956, once reached 3,500 people. Today, the society claims more than 500 members on its roster. But some believers want nothing to do with the Flat Earth Society, according to a 2019 CNN article, with some attendees of the Flat Earth International Conference in Dallas that year telling the news agency that the organization is a government-sponsored front designed to make Flat Earthers look bad. (The Flat Earth Society responded to this by telling CNN, "We are not a government-controlled body. We're an organization of Flat Earth theorists that long predates most of the FEIC newcomers to the scene.")

As the Flat Earth Society/Flat Earth International Conference schism reveals, flat-earthers are not a monolithic group. The current president of the Flat Earth Society, Daniel Shenton, is a Londoner who now lives in Hong Kong. Robbie Davidson, who organizes the annual Flat Earth International Conferences, is a Canadian who espouses a Biblical worldview and opposes what he calls "scientism."

A 2018 article in the Colorado Sun on a flat Earth convention in Denver found that many attendees believed a whole suite of conspiracy theories, such as that all politicians are actors and that powerful shadowy forces control the world. 

Flat-earthers occasionally get a boost from celebrity believers. For instance, on Jan. 25, 2016, rapper-singer Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. (known as B.o.B) released a track called "Flatline" in which he disses astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, after the two had a Twitter battle over the spherical-ness of the planet. B.o.B is convinced Earth is flat. A day earlier, the rapper tweeted: "No matter how high in elevation you are... the horizon is always eye level ... sorry cadets... I didn't wanna believe it either." In 2018, NBA player Kyrie Irving had to apologize after causing a media controversy by speculating that the Earth was flat on a 2017 podcast. 

The leading flat-earther theory holds that Earth is a disc with the Arctic Circle in the center and Antarctica, a 150-foot-tall (45 meters) wall of ice, around the rim. NASA employees, they say, guard this ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disc. (In keeping with their skepticism of NASA, known flat-earther conspiracy theorist Nathan Thompson approached a man he said was a NASA employee in a Starbucks in mid-May 2017. In a YouTube video of the exchange, Thompson, founder of the Official Flat Earth and Globe Discussion page, shouted that he had proof the Earth is flat — apparently saying an astronaut drowning was that proof — and that NASA is "lying.")

Furthermore, Earth's gravity is an illusion, they say. Objects do not accelerate downward; instead, the disc of Earth accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared (9.8 meters per second squared), driven up by a mysterious force called dark energy.

Livescience