I reached out to Yudi, an IT professional from Jakarta who runs the Flat Earth Indonesia Facebook page to see if he can convince me the Earth is flat. A typical conversation with one of these guys usually mentions Aristotle, Copernicus, and Galileo Galilei before moving on to quantum theory and Newtonian gravity. The Indonesian Flat Earthers are obsessed with using science to prove their point. Flat Earth Indonesia dismisses the Flat Earth Society as a bunch of nut cases too obsessed with old NASA conspiracy theories. The whole conspiracy theory, a mess of pseudoscience, claims that shadowy global cabals are tricking us with Photoshop and "fake science," and lots and lots of (misused and misunderstood) science jargon, ticks off so many boxes on the Indonesian conspiracy theory fringe's list of loves, that it almost seems tailor-made for this country.īut Indonesian Flat Earthers aren't the same as their foreign brethren. So who the hell actually believes this stuff? A lot of people in Indonesia, it seems. Worldwide, the entire notion smacks of a willful ignorance and a boneheaded refusal to accept a mountain of scientific evidence. The president of the Flat Earth Society has been called the world's "most irrational person." Former US President Barack Obama referred to climate change deniers as the Flat Earth Society. Now, this idea has been universally mocked. Who is to say that Antarctica is not a wall of ice arranged in a ring around all the edge of the flat disk? Although, I have to say that this map of Shackleton's Antarctic explorations looks straight enough. In their view, no one has ever traversed the entire width of the continent in a straight line, so therefore there is no proof that it's even a continent at all. “Is there anyone so foolish, as to believe people who walk with their heels upward, and their head hanging down?” one of the Catholic geographers supposedly exclaimed when Columbus told him the Earth was a circle and not a flat line.This conspiracy theory alleges that the Earth is actually a flat disk surrounded by an impenetrable ring of ice that we call Antarctica. Crucially, he claimed that when the explorer told Spanish geographers the earth was not actually flat, they refused to believe him, even questioning his faith and endangering his life. The archive may have been extensive, but Irving couldn’t help from adding fictional flourishes to Columbus’ already fascinating life. While visiting the city, Irving was tempted by a giganticarchive of documents about Columbus and decided to write the explorer’s biography. His inspiration came after his friend, Alexander Hill Everett, the United States’ minister to Spain, invited Irving to stay with him in Madrid. Irving, a master storyteller, was already famous for tales like “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” when he tackled the life of Columbus. Rather, it was invented in 1828, when Washington Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The legend doesn’t even date from Columbus’ own lifetime. The myth of Columbus’ supposed flat earth theory is tempting: It casts the explorer’s intrepid journey in an even more daring light. A map of the four voyages of the Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus. After years of negotiation and argument over the actual length of the proposed journey, he finally convinced Ferdinand II of Spain and his wife Isabella to finance the expedition. He mistakenly believed that the circumference of Earth was very small and that by traveling west toward what he thought was China, he’d open up new trade routes. However, Columbus ran into resistance when he tried to get funding for his landmark journey for a different reason. Thus, it’s nearly impossible-and completely implausible-that rich Spaniards of the late 15th century thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the map. Using calculations based on the sun’s rise and fall, shadows and other physical properties of the planet, Greek scholars like Pythagoras and Aristotle determined that the planet is actually a sphere.ĭuring Columbus’ time, educated people carefully studied knowledge passed down by the ancient Greeks. That was thanks to scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who, as early as around 600 B.C., made observations that Earth was round. onward believed that the Earth was flat.” According to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, “no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. There’s just one problem: It’s almost certain that in the 1490s, nobody thought the earth was flat. (Credit: julio donoso/Sygma/Getty Images) Detail of Portrait of Christopher Columbus.
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