It feels like the flat Earth conspiracy is something which everybody likes to talk about, but nobody actually believes.
It’s that thing which the random guy in the pub won’t stop talking about when you’re just trying to sit down and have a couple of drinks with your mates.
But for some reason, people seem to be buying into the theory, and the group who subscribe to it seems to be growing. There is even a Flat Earth Society whose membership continues to grow.
And it’s millennials who are to blame, according to a YouGov poll of 8215 US adults. They found that only 66 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds reckon the Earth is round.
That leaves one actual third of people who reckon the Earth is flat, and I’ve never been more ashamed to be on this (round) planet.
Obviously, it could just be that the respondents in the survey were trolling the people asking the question in a sea of edginess, but who knows.
But still, two thirds of people actually think we live on a flat Earth which is surrounded by a wall of ice. People have been watching too much Game of Thrones.
The results of the research actually show that the belief is held less widely as people in the survey get older, with 94 per cent of people aged 55 and over believing that the planet is round.
Interestingly, Republicans were more likely to believe that the world has a spherical shape, with 89 per cent. Democrats were slightly more skeptical at 83 per cent.
Equally as interesting is the role which religion played in people’s perceptions of the flat Earth, with more than 50 per cent of Flat Earthers regarding themselves as ‘very religious’ – a figure which dropped to 17 per cent for those who were ‘not religious at all’.
If you were wondering just what flat Earthers say when you ask them what happens when you fall off the edge, then worry not.
Connor, son of famous flat-earther Dave Murphy, spoke exclusively to UNILAD about NASA, the Sun, Photoshop and pretty much everything you’ve ever wanted to ask someone who thinks the reason you see the curvature of Earth from a plane is because the windows are round.
Speaking about why NASA and the government would lie about space travel, he said:
There are two good reasons in my opinion. One obvious reason would be money. The money raised by NASA alone since their inception is something like fifteen trillion dollars, and with that money they’ve really shown little for their work.
They’re releasing composite images and articles and telling you this is what’s happening, this is what we’re doing, and we spent seven hundred million dollars to get this photo of Pluto that we had to put together in Photoshop.
A second thing is to make people feel insignificant. It makes you feel like you’re an insignificant speck of dust and therefore you’re easy to control. Basically if you can imagine the globe squashed down with Antarctica instead of being its own continent, being the perimeter around the side. So a lot of people say that’s an ice wall. It’s more like a shelf or cliff.
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And as for why we don’t fall of the edge of the world, he added:
Fall off into what, do you know what I’m saying? The way we see it is it’s an enclosed system.
There’s water above, there’s the firmament – or the dome – and there’s water above it and water below it and there’s no leaving it, there’s no finding other Suns and stuff. You can’t fall off the edge, essentially.
So there you have it, consider yourself learned real good.
