The Flat Earther's Guide to the Cosmos (Preface and Chapter One)

Preface

The universe occupied by our not-so-distant ancestors was an unthinkably huge, expansive space, beautiful and terrifying, populated with uncountable objects flying about in predictable patterns, all obeying the same mathematical laws, made of the same stuff as ourselves and our own world. Humans struggled to understand their place in such a cosmos, and worked to explore and increase their understanding with every means they could find or create.

Today, thanks to a handful of heroic YouTubers and Facebook meme creators, and communications technology that in no way depends on scientific principles, we know our universe much better. We know our earth to be a small, flat plane, lit by two glowing circular thingies powered by unknown sources, flying in circles over the world because reasons. The sky is a solid firmament over that world, made of an unknowable material with amazing properties we can only hope to someday understand, or simply ignore, dotted with mysterious little points of light that twinkle playfully and exist for some purpose that's probably pretty important. What's beyond that is anyone's guess.

This series is an attempt to compile all that knowledge, so hard-won by the brave few with access to the internet and the courage to speak out for money. It begins, as it must, with the Earth--that place we call home, because we live there and it's where we keep all our stuff.

1. The Earth

It is all too easy, given what we know now, and given our instant access to the most reliable suppository of information in human history (the internet), to regard our not-so-distant ancestors as a primitive and superstitious people. But we must always bear in mind--these ancestors were handicapped by the limited tools they had at the time to interrogate the cosmos and determine its true nature. They had only their own senses, advanced optics, precise measuring equipment, sophisticated mathematics, a body of scientific knowledge based on centuries of experimental results, rockets, and their own reasoning to rely on. It is really no wonder their model is so simple and seems to explain so much.

Of course, one of the first things they wanted to understand and explain was the day and night skies--the sun, the moon, the stars and all of their motions across the sky. What were these mysterious lights, and what was behind their seemingly regular and predictable movement?

Our ancestors, limited as they were, conceived of a fanciful explanation: the earth was a spinning ball, circled by a reflective, spherical moon, with both circling a huge shining star much like those tiny lights in the night sky, but much closer. 

Yes, some complicated people still believe this myth. 

You, the modern thinking person, may find these ideas ridiculous. But remember--traditional thought dies hard, and our ancestors had to actually figure everything out through trial and error, and critical thought, lacking the ability to just look stuff up on the internet. We are truly an advanced species.

Still, though, it is hard to comprehend certain aspects of the old model--particularly the part where the earth is spinning and moving around the sun. Granted, it does look very much like that, a remarkable coincidence. If it were actually the case, this one simple model would explain everything. Today, however, we know that each feature of our cosmos requires its own, individualized explanation, unconnected from and often contradictory to the explanations for other features. The philosophical principle behind this mode of thinking is known as Occam's Razor, which, as you may know, we gave him for Christmas and was the first to use seven blades for extra closeness and comfort.

Seriously, can the earth be moving? Obviously not. And we don't need any fancy gyroscopes to know that. In a sense, we have them built into our senses.

You know how when you move, you can feel it? Whether accelerating or decelerating, you can feel the motion? You know how when you make a turn to the left, you feel a pull to the right? You know how you occasionally walk into walls? It hurts, right? This is because we feel motion! 

If the earth were moving, we would feel it. And even more problematic for the old belief system--if the earth were spinning, all the water in the oceans would go flying off into what they call space. Modern scientists have proven this with sophisticated, meticulous, repeated experiments involving a pitcher of water and a basketball. The ancients, of course, dreamed up, quantified, and demonstrated the effects of their own creative and more emotionally satisfying explanation--they invented a force called "gravity," and insisted that it pulled everything toward the center of the spherical earth. They posited that all matter was attracted to all other matter, the more matter involved the stronger the force, and that the earth was so massive it exerted a strong pull on everything on it--ourselves, our stuff, and all the water in the oceans. This seemed satisfying to them, but they could not explain something as simple as a butterfly without hypothesizing, however improbable, the existence of air, wings, motion, and even other forces at play that counteracted this "gravity."

Today, though, we have a much more rational and concise theory with a much wider explanatory power--the water sticks to the earth because that's which way down is.

The reason why things fall in the universal down direction will be left as an exercise for the student.

And we know butterflies fly because they can--we certainly would--and that's the kind of simple, self-evident, demonstrable fact that our ancestors thought needed a more rigorous explanation. They were not unintelligent people. They simply thought too much.

Features of the Earth's Surface

This is not intended to be a geography textbook; that is a work for another day. Or two, however long it takes. But a quick glance at a modern map of the world shows how well we have come to know the surface of the earth. All the continents are on there, as well as many islands. In some parts of the world, distances are even known accurately. It is a very complete and well-established map; there are no blank spots left.

Perhaps the most striking feature is Antarctica, the wall of ice that surrounds the flat earth. It is not known what is beyond this wall. 

Next chapter: The Sun & The Moon