Flat Earthers

This holiday season I've been fascinated by all the effort that goes into proving that the Earth is flat.

According to a Gallup poll, more than one in six (18%) of Americans believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth and a substantial number of those believe the Earth is a giant snow globe with a flat base.

These guys are dedicated. Someone went through the effort of filming a six hour YouTube video on his flat earth theories. The theories vary depending on the level of ignorance of the theorist but they all have some things in common.

• Antarctica is not a continent but a wall of ice surrounding the Earth disk.
• An impenetrable dome called The Firmament covers everything.
• NASA scientists, astronauts, astronomers, polar explorers, pilots, and every government are engaged in a grand conspiracy to conceal the flatness because they are all Freemasons.
• Passengers who fly non-stop from Sydney, Australia to Santiago, Chile are all lying when they say it only takes twelve hours.
• The moon landings were fake, satellites are fake, pictures of planets and stars and distant galaxies are all CGI fakery.
• They refer to Google Earth a lot even though Google Earth uses satellite images they say are impossible.
• There is no such thing as gravity. 
• And, of course, the Bible says it so stop confusing me with facts.

They jump through some incredible hoops to reach these conclusions. They reject all astronomic observations after Ptolemy (100 ACE) as wrong and cling to maps that are only accurate when measuring distances through the North Pole.

Here is a video where a guy spends twenty minutes proving conclusively that, if short lines are the same length as long lines, then a flat earth makes sense.

No amount of scientific logic will enlighten their dim bulbs. Indeed, they consider enlightenment to be evil. Still, the simplest proofs are the best.

On a flat earth, Polaris would be visible from Australia. On a globe it would not. It is not.