This flat Earth map drawn by Orlando Ferguson in 1893 is also considered the Bible Map of the World. (Image credit: CalimaX/ Alamy) If the Earth were flat," Adhikari says, "the trajectory would be completely different." How different depends on which way the globe is sliced into a flattened map, but if it looked like it does on a Mercator-projection map, it might head east and pass over Africa.

The ancient Greeks also knew Earth's size, which they determined using the Earth's shape. In the 2nd century BCE, a thinker named Eratosthenes read that on a certain day, the people of Syene, in southern Egypt, reported seeing the Sun directly overhead at noon. But in Alexandria, in northern Egypt, on that same day at the same time, Eratosthenes had observed the Sun being several degrees away from overhead. If the Earth were flat, that would be impossible: The Sun would have to be the same height in the sky for observers everywhere, at each moment in time. By measuring the size of this angle, and knowing the distance between the two cities, Eratosthenes was able to calculate the Earth's diameter, coming up with a value within about 15 percent of the modern figure. Of course, the Earth isn't flat. It's a sphere. There is zero doubt about this fact in the real, round world. To say the evidence is overwhelming is an understatement. HOT SPINNING BODIES

The moon is not Earth's only companion

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. If you use gravity to, say, trust your GPS to give you accurate positions and calculate trajectories, then that same force will form material the size of Earth into a ball.

Don’t worry, these hallucinogenic compounds aren’t provided by evil “Big Pharma”; they’re actually secreted by the shape-shifting lizards that rule society. Why do you think lizards are in charge in the first place? They provide the secretions that keep the population in line, believing in things like the Earth is round and buildings exist. The few times people have actually tried to make a tall building like the World Trade Centre, it is destroyed by the government. Some refer to “ false flags” at times like this. In truth, all flags are false; they’re non-existent tall structures, so are just figments of our collective imagination. Not every celestial body is a sphere, but round objects are common in the universe: In addition to Earth and all other known large planets, stars and bigger moons are also ball-shaped. These objects, and billions of others, have the same shape because of gravity, which pulls everything toward everything else. All of that pulling makes an object as compact as it can be, and nothing is more compact than a sphere. Say, for example, you have a sphere of modeling clay that is exactly 10 inches in diameter. No part of the mass is more than 5 inches from the center. That's not the case with any other shape—some part of the material will be more than 5 inches from the center of the mass. A sphere is the smallest option. She said all conspiracy theories share a basic thrust: They present an alternative theory about an important issue or event, and construct an (often) vague explanation for why someone is covering up that "true" version of events. "One of the major points of appeal is that they explain a big event but often without going into details," she said. "A lot of the power lies in the fact that they are vague."

Get the Newsletter

Our curved Earth also aligns perfectly with all of physics. Additionally, all of the other planets ever discovered also appear round, because that's how gravity likes things. People who believe that Earth is flat aren't coming to that conclusion from the same types of observations. Instead, they believe that we are being misled and lied to, that scientists (including me) want you to believe that Earth is round, despite its flatness.

On July 30, 2021, Shenzhou 12 astronaut Tang Hongbo photographed the spectacular scenery of thousands of lights in North Africa, clearly showing the curvature of Earth. (Image credit: Tang Hongbo/China Manned Space Engineering Office) Dean Burnett covers the neurological mechanisms leading to conspiracy theories and more in his debut book The Idiot Brain, Wilmore counts himself among the true believers. "My own convictions are a result of philosophical introspection and a considerable body of data that I have personally observed, and which I am still compiling," he said.

Don't trust NASA? The Russians also snap pictures of the round Earth, Space.com reported. So does Japan's space agency. And China's. The ancient Greeks figured out that Earth was a sphere 2300 years ago by observing the planet's curved shadow during a lunar eclipse, when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon. Some flat-Earth believers claim the world is shaped like a disk, perhaps with a wall of ice along the outer rim. (Why no one has ever seen this supposed wall, let alone crashed into it, remains unexplained.) Wouldn't a disk-shaped Earth also cast a round shadow? Well, it would depend on the orientation of the disk. If sunlight just happened to hit the disk face-on, it would have a round shadow. But if light hit the disk edge-on, the shadow would be a thin, straight line. And if the light fell at an oblique angle, the shadow would be a football–shaped ellipse. We know the Earth is spinning, so it can't present one side toward the Sun time after time. What we observe during lunar eclipses is that the planet's shadow is always round, so its shape has to be spherical. On YouTube, there are videos pointing to shadows in pictures of the moon and arguing that the moon is transparent, and thus just a light. One speaker at the 2018 conference attended by a Guardian reporter made a case for the moon as a projection. What is the Zetetic Method?