But, in fact, she has had access to other information. You’d need to either have an instinctive genius for astronomy, or be as obsessively drawn to spheres as Mark Sargent is repelled by them, to stand on a bit of the world and decide it seems flat only because it’s actually a tiny, imperceptibly curved part of an unimaginably massive ball. Marilyn Teed, who’d travelled to the conference from Pennsylvania (presumably without the help of GPS), explained how she knew: “I went down to the seashore, down New Jersey, and I did my own testing… you take a straight edge and you go from one end and you follow the horizon of the ocean and… it’s flat.”Īssuming no access to information other than the evidence of her own eyes, that’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion. The answer seemed to be that they just used their gut instinct and common sense: it looks flat – or flattish, flat with a few bumps – so it must be. “Why do people still think the Earth is flat?” was the title. “Let’s take a wry look at this tiny subculture of harmless eccentrics,” was the tone. Sargent was being interviewed at the first annual Flat Earth International Conference, held just over a week ago in North Carolina, as part of a light-hearted little BBC website package on the subject. Boundless doubting could take us back to the stone age – and not in a time machine we’ve invented And he obviously reckons the notion that there’s something slightly off-putting about the planet being a ball is a key selling point. He’s an extremely successful advocate of a conclusively disproved theory. And it isn’t.īut what do I know (other than that the world is round)? Mark Sargent has 43,415 subscribers to his “Flat Earth” YouTube channel. And, let’s be honest, people are going to be pretty ready to believe that anyway because you’ve been trying to convince them that the world is flat. It may lead people to believe you’ve attached more weight to evidence supporting your theory than to evidence refuting it. I’d say, if you’re trying to convince people of something that flies in the face of scientific orthodoxy, it’s advisable not to let slip that, before you started your researches, you had a huge emotional preference for what you ended up concluding. The remark gives an interesting insight into his approach. Unlike Mark Sargent, I don’t have a preference. I’m content for the world to be whatever shape the world is. Then again, I wouldn’t say I positively liked it either. In fact, I’m not sure you can really feel it at all. I mean, don’t they? Personally, I don’t mind it. I thought that was a revealing statement. “Nobody likes this uncomfortable feeling of being this tiny ball flying through space,” Mark Sargent, who believes that the world is flat, told the BBC the other day.
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