Fashions are cyclical and fluctuate, it seems, for centuries. Little did Galileo suspect that the reason for the sentence that imprisoned him in his home a few years before he died would be on the lips of many people, apparently documented and illustrated, many centuries later.
Most of the arguments of the Flat Earthers are easily rebuttable , and come from a deeply anthropocentric and simplistic conception of the universe. Instead, the vision that science proposes requires a certain level of abstraction; that is to say, we cannot observe with the naked eye, or experience through our own experience the phenomena that govern the universe. In fact, this is precisely what makes us human: the physical limitations that we present, which prove precisely that we are not the center of the universe and, probably, not the only beings that inhabit it.
The impressions that flat-earthers have usually respond to a concurrent fallacy: they come from a false perception that things are perfectly designed, in detail, adapted to the human being. But what they do not realize is that the point of view from which they start is wrong: it is not nature that is adapted to the human being, but it is the human himself that has developed perfectly adapted to all natural phenomena. For example, circadian rhythms agree with day and night, but not because the Moon and Sun are ‘designed’ to govern them respectively; And like this one, other examples show the wrong anthropocentric vision in which the flat-earthers place themselves.
The delicate processes that govern life (we could not live without the Moon, without the ozone layer, without a magnetic field) are not the product of an intelligent design adapted to life; rather, life arises and adapts to the phenomena dictated by nature, and not the other way around. Easy right? Although it is natural that we originally have that impression, for centuries science has allowed us to get closer to the truth and to put aside magical thinking.
Another fundamental pillar on which Flat Earth is based is the need to find a point of origin, an explanation for ‘creation’. Intelligent design (a creator God) is the simplest explanation for the origin of the universe. For this reason, many Flat Earthers are often believers.
The conception of the flat Earth does not only affect the design of planet Earth; It also involves banishing any discovery related to astrophysics (for example, the recent photograph of a black hole, a milestone in science), it implies systematically denying and condemning all progress of civilization. And although the human being is not all-powerful, and there are many things that remain unexplained (an example is dark matter), technology allows us to learn little by little more details about the rules that govern the cosmos.
Finally, the third fundamental pillar is the conspiracy, apparently orchestrated by institutions, companies and even workers and citizens in a personal capacity to make us believe that we are not a hypothetical universal center. How and for what? Nor do they themselves give an explanation for this. Theoretically, to underestimate the importance of women and men in the cosmos.
The most pessimistic opinions based on science believe that humans will die out without fully understanding the universe. Other visions are instead of the opinion that we will be able to transcend on a planetary level, and that we will be able to survive long after our planet is no longer habitable (an example of such an opinion was Stephen Hawking), to continue exploring our cosmic neighborhood. But, in any case, the only basis we have to explain our world is what the progress of science has been collecting for years in data, human effort, technology and international cooperation . The rest, very sorry, are more or less elaborate speculations.
Flat Earthers sound very convincing, but it is enough to invoke science to dismantle them. Many scientific disseminators (Quantum Fracture, Date Un Vlog, Plato’s Robot …) try to fight against the misinformation raised by some spokesmen for the flat Earth by providing objective data that, well understood, are indisputable, and that turn the flat-Earth debate into an unscientific absurdity; but it is, at the very least, interesting to analyze.
In this gallery we collect the most important and definitive arguments against the flat Earth, which will allow you to leave your interlocutor out of the game.
