You’re gonna laugh, but there are people who not only believe the Earth is flat; some will call you “stupid” for believing otherwise. You’re sheep, in fact, slaves to the established scientific dogma of “Big Sun.” Why, yes, born from the idea that some people will believe anything comes the documentary Behind the Curve, a look into some of our round globe’s Flat Earthers.
Coming into this documentary, I had two obvious questions for Flat Earthers, the folks who truly believe the planet is coin-shaped. 1) Ok, where’s the edge? 2) How do you explain travel with regards to distances and locations? Flat Earthers may think this documentary answered both questions thoroughly. It did not. Meet YouTube overachiever Mark Sargent, a king among conspiracy theorists who modestly sloughs off his unofficial title as the man who brought Flat Earth to the masses. This northwestern resident explains the Earth is flat by pointing at Seattle. “There it is; could I see it [across Puget Sound] if the Earth were not flat?” Umm, yes. And there’s your proof. Never mind. His map of the Earth puts the Arctic Circle in the center and radiates the continents outward. Instead of re-approaching at the South Pole, the land masses grow further and further apart. I’m more than a little put off that the official mapper of the movement is a handyman, not a cartographer or at least a scientist; we meet him, too. Anyhoo, at the rim is Antarctica. We are covered by a huge dome and surrounded entirely by Antarctica. Beyond that, who knows?
Of course, there are different schools of Flat Earth thought. Some don’t believe in the dome; some don’t believe that Antarctica is the edge so much as a barrier to other worlds. Mark compares it to the sects in Life of Brian. Gee, Mark, you know that film was entirely about making fun of religious dogma and not-provable groupthink idiocy, right?
Ah, but we’re the dogmatic ones, not he. You see, Mark is a conspiracy hound. Having arrived on the Flat Earth theory years ago, he sought to disprove it and failed, which proves the Earth is flat. Of course, I think it only proves Mark is a shitty scientist. His airplane theorem bugged me. See, my thought is if a plane can go over the South Pole and not end up in space, then the theory is bunk. It’s hard to prove this to any skeptic, so I’ll show the next best thing: in the Flat Earth model, the continents radiate outward, and the discrepancies are made up in the oceans. i.e. the Atlantic and Pacific are worlds bigger than in a 3D globe. OK, so equidistant intercontinental plane travel between, say, two southern hemisphere cities should take much, much, much longer than the same between two equidistant –by round Earth standards- northern cities. Try looking up travel times between Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro (7,115 km apart) v. Berlin and Chicago (7,079 km apart). I think you’ll find they’re similar. On the Flat Earth globe, the southern trip should take at least three times as long. Mark, however, “proved” his point by showing the paucity of flights in the southern hemisphere in general. I’m really not sure how he proved this shows a Flat Earth, but the NASA rep calls him an idiot in the following scene.
Flat Earthers seem like a happy bunch, more-or-less; the documentary makes no effort to villain-ize or criticize these folks as people; it lets them have their say and enjoys their personalities. No matter how affable and gregarious the screen behavior demonstrated by Flat Earthers, however, group members are often undermined by a defensive hostility when the “S”-word happens. Is it not fitting that this group’s collective thought is so two-dimensional? Like so many conspiracy theorists and Trump voters alike, people who believe in a Flat Earth are convinced their skewed perspective is reality and, more importantly, it’s the only one that counts. They’re also convinced that unlike those snotty educated people, they’re the only ones who ever question anything; what they miss, sadly, is that the difference between astronomy and astrology is the difference between predicting an eclipse down to the last second and predicting one by dartboard.
The problem with Flat Earthers is the problem with a lot of folks who believe stupid things these days: no amount of evidence can ever prove them wrong (which is the exact difference between true science and mock science). Contrary to popular belief, however, these people might not be stupid. I don’t think Mark is stupid, just horribly, horribly misled and completely unable to believe otherwise (despite his “openness”). And when challenged, he will quickly attack education as brainwashing and then claim we are all fools. Gee, isn’t that convenient — this particular fallacy can only be appreciated by the uneducated.
For its fair approach, Behind the Curve is more-or-less entertaining. And I can even appreciate the POV from a certain perspective. Who’s to say the globe isn’t flat, really, other than, you know, seasons and tides and shadows and eclipses and science? Can I see the Earth isn’t flat when I look out my window? I sure can’t. Boy, you got me, Mark. You go to Houston (the “lair of the enemy.” Yes, that’s what he called it). You go to NASA and make your videos and tell the truth to the world. I love the science at work here, too. Behind the Curve showed two genuine experiments to prove a Flat Earth: one involved taking a gyroscope to a remote area and letting it be. If the Earth revolves at 1,000 MPH as the heliocentric model claims, the gyroscope will, unaided, rotate 15 degrees (360/24) an hour. The second involved erecting three aligned-but-distant planks in a row; the idea is you put a laser pointer eight feet up the first, and aim it through the second hitting the third eight feet up. If it hits the second pole at the eight foot mark, Earth is flat. These are actually sound, if simple, scientific experiments, I believe. I’ll let the film show you the results.
At any other period in my lifetime, I’d have dismissed Flat Earthers as misguided but harmless. That period has elapsed. In the current political climate so hostile to science, education, and professionalism, my temperament is a tad less forgiving; I find these crackpots alarming. Yes, I’m not a fan of “slippery slope” arguments, but the slope doesn’t need to be very moist or inclined to get from this idiocy to some truly terrible theses. How close is “The Earth is flat” to “Vaccines are bad,” really? Sure, even most MAGAs will tell you that both those positions are asinine. But how far are they, really, from “Global Warming is a myth” and “Trickle-Down Economics works?” The current administration has acted on both of those very mistaken beliefs. Quite frankly, you’ll find more evidence that vaccines cause harm than giving rich people a tax break has any legitimate communal economic benefit. I ask this in all sincerity: suppose Sean Hannity suddenly announced “the Earth is flat” … how long would it take that Orange Moron to act upon it? A week? A few days? I say it’s just a matter of hours before Der Furor starts calling for Space Force to create a wall along the outer rim to keep out those dangerous “overedgers.” And if he did that, would the 35%-40% of this country who worships at the altar of Donnie Nonsense blow him off or call for funding? Laugh now while you still can.
♪Welcome to this plight
In their tin foil hat
Even while I sleep
Idiots are acting on their greatest error
Sponsored cartographic terror
These nobodies want to school the world♫
Not Rated, 96 Minutes
Director: Daniel J. Clark
Writer: Doesn’t matter; they wouldn’t believe that, either
Genre: Not science!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Documentary-philes
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People resentful about which jagoffs get their 15 minutes these days
♪ Parody Inspired by “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
