Can’t you see it? | Images: (left) Tim Pearce, CC BY 2.0, (right) fogcat5, CC BY-SA 2.0
Every now and then, I come across something so rare, so beautiful, so crystalline in its idiocy, that I can’t help but sit and wonder: is it the most dedicated satire I’ve ever seen? Or are they as astoundingly divorced from reality as they seem?
“There are no forests on Flat Earth Wake Up” is one of these moments. I first heard about it from an article over at the Atlantic called “The Flat-Earthers Have a Wild New Theory About Forests: What it means to believe that ‘real’ trees no longer exist.” If you’re not prepared to watch a full eighty minutes of quietly incoherent lunacy backed by nothing more than pareidolia and smug-sounding “really?”s, then you could definitely read the article. But I actually encourage you to go listen to the voice of Mr. “Людин Рɣси” as he tries to explain that all the forests on our very not-flat planet are actually just “thirty metre bushes,” and that the “real” trees on the “flat” Earth are all gone.
See, “real” trees used to be km high, and all that’s left are their stumps.
Now, I’ll grant you that we don’t know the precise geological means by which Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower formed, but I can guarantee that it was by geological (and not biological) means. But then, I can also guarantee that the world is actually round, by virtue of the fact of “things in orbit,” and these things called “days” and “nights” and “the Solar System.”
But then, there’s really no service to be done in arguing against flat Earth theories, because when you’re capable of that level of denial of evidence, there’s no actual way to argue against it.
So just to make sure you don’t get too depressed, here’s a gif of a puppy rolling down some stairs.
Happy Monday, Everyone.
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.