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Flat Earthers spend $20,000 to prove the Earth is flat, end up proving it’s round

A documentary that is available on Netflix is showing the ridiculousness of Flat Eathers from all around the globe.

Behind the Curve shows us that Flat Earthers are nothing if not creative with their ‘logic’. After all, Flat Earthers have also said that the Earth is shaped like a donut, and used some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to get to that point.

Here’s the trailer for the film:

If that’s not enough enticement, as Andrew Whalen points out in his piece for Newsweek, the Flat Earthers in the film prove themselves wrong not just once, but twice.

Yes, Flat Earthers are this ridiculous.

“Science is having a problem combatting what we are doing,” Mark Sargent says early in Behind the Curve, citing the fact that he can see Seattle skyscrapers from his mother’s home on Whidbey Island, when he presumes they should be hidden behind the Earth’s curvature. “Neil Degrasse Tyson—I hate saying his name, we call him He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named—says that, ‘It’s a growing anti-intellectual movement that borders on the end of civilization and democracy as we know it.’”

I imagine they don’t like Neil because they’re tired of getting dunked on by him.

In the film, Sargent  says that “The reason why we’re winning against science is that science just throws math at us.” 

Yeah. Because science is just a bunch of jerks trying to prove stuff, ya know?

Apparently these people think that the Earth is covered in a giant dome with the sun and moon rotating around… somewhere. If this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s okay, because it doesn’t.

One of the more jaw-dropping segments of the documentary comes when Bob Knodel, one of the hosts on a popular Flat Earth YouTube channel, walks viewers through an experiment involving a laser gyroscope. As the Earth rotates, the gyroscope appears to lean off-axis, staying in its original position as the Earth’s curvature changes in relation. “What we found is, is when we turned on that gyroscope we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15 degree per hour drift,” Knodel says, acknowledging that the gyroscope’s behavior confirmed to exactly what you’d expect from a gyroscope on a rotating globe.

“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that. ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem,’” Knodel says. “We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”

I love his honesty. “Wow, that’s kind of a problem.” Yeah, it is, if you believe that the Earth is flat.

Knodel pressed onward refining his experiment in a desperate attempt to stop proving himself wrong, but because the Earth isn’t fucking flat, he continuously fails to do so.

Then there’s the other experiment, done by Knodel’s YouTube co-host/conspirator Jeran Campanella. 

They set up a laser with the plan of having it hit measuring posts over 3.88 miles. Basically, if the laser hits the middle post at 5.6 feet, then the third post at 8 feet, it demonstrates that the Earth isn’t round. But to the surprise of no one, the experiment fails because their laser isn’t focused enough.

But then at the end of the film, he does a similar experiment using light and holes cut into styrofoam at the same height. If the Earth is flat, the light should shine through both holes, as shown below in their graphic:

But, because the Earth isn’t flat, the experiment is a failure. But Flat Earthers aren’t about to let things like “facts” or “reality” stop them.

… Except they did? I guess? I say that because this is literally how the film ends, with them proving themselves wrong. It’s amazing.

Campanella watches when the light is activated at the same height as the holes, but the light can’t be seen on the camera screen. “Lift up your light, way above your head,” Campanella says. With the compensation made for the curvature of the Earth, the light immediately appears on the camera. “Interesting,” Campanella says. “That’s interesting.” The documentary ends.

Out-fucking-standing.

The Flat Earth movement, much like the anti-vaccine movement, is a religion. That’s very clear. Just like Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc, they ignore evidence that contradicts their belief and work tirelessly to find workarounds to prove themselves right when they actually are proving themselves wrong. They exhaust themselves attempting to explain away contradictions when Occam’s Razor (not to be confused with Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword) would lead them to the correct result.

Written by Dan Broadbent

Science Enthusiast. Atheist. Lover of cats.

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