April 1, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:05
4043 Why I Was Wrong About Flat Earth
An April Fools Day Special. One of the most viewed videos on this channel is a debate about the Flat Earth Conspiracy - and the surprising popularity of the video has prompted a reexamination of the proposed theory. The Flat Earth Conspiracy Debate! Yes, Really.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsOz_J6tJVUYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
It's a crazy journey. And let me sort of preface the arguments I'm about to make just by...
Telling you how I ended up going this direction.
Strange direction. Strange direction for me, but nonetheless.
So, a couple of days ago, I was just kind of curious and looked at my sort of top videos and, as usual, upfloated the debate that I had with the Flat Earth proponent some years ago.
And I've seen that from time to time.
Boy, that's a lot of views for some crazy stuff.
And I was like... I wonder if anything's changed.
So I began to sort of look up some of the flat earth stuff.
And I'd really, it's like a Zen thing.
Like you clear your mind and say, this is what I sort of did with my theory of ethics.
You clear your mind and you say, okay, what if?
Nothing I believe is true.
How would I go about establishing it?
So I just sort of did it as an intellectual exercise.
Let me tell you something.
I mean, it's not quite as easy as you think.
So I'm going to put forward these arguments, and you can figure out for yourself where I stand.
And, you know, I look forward to the rebuttals below.
But let me just sort of run through what I have discovered.
And I'm aware, I'm aware there are internet rabbit holes, there are wormholes that lead you to an entirely different dimension of not correct.
But let me just run through some of my sort of thinking about it.
So the first thing is I said, well, flat earth, that's crazy!
And then I thought, well, you know, people do believe a lot of crazy stuff in this world.
And I began to sort of think along those lines.
You know, people believe, oh, communism is kindness.
Human evolution has somehow magically excluded the human brain.
Socialism is an excellent economic system.
And people believe that paying billions and billions of dollars to government workers to predict the weather 100 years from now using made-up computer models is totally science.
People believe that debt is money.
Liabilities are assets.
Government schools have something to do with education.
So lots of crazy beliefs out there.
All of those, by the way, do far more harm than something like the flat earth.
And then I thought that that was okay.
Lots of crazy beliefs out there.
And then I thought, well, how do I look to someone who's not well-versed in philosophy?
I look crazy.
To some people, I look crazy slash evil.
Now, And I thought, okay, well, what are some crazy things that I've asked people to believe over the years?
You don't have to be in relationships with abusive people.
The initiation of force is universally wrong.
Taxation is theft. Evolution produces differences in human populations.
Voluntarism is better than violence.
You can only have ethics without the state.
And charity is better than welfare.
Like crazy, crazy stuff.
And I thought, well, when people first hear this stuff, it sounds crazier than the flat earth.
So let me just, mental exercise time, I'm going to go over the flat earth, or the anti-flat earth arguments, mental exercise, going to just rebut them.
And I'm like, let me clear my mind of all preconceptions, of all prejudices, to start with the blank slate, the blank page, and see where we go.
So, of course, you know, number one, you're standing at a harbor, you watch ships sail, and the ships go hull first and then mast first down, right, which would be the case, where they curved Earth.
And I thought, okay, well, you can have a curve without having a sphere.
Okay, again, this is mental exercise time.
Just stay with me for this part of the argument.
You can have a curve without having a sphere.
Lots of things are curved without them necessarily being spheres.
Like, I can curve my arm, just my fingers a little bit.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a sphere.
So, what if it's slightly, like not totally flat, but just a little bit, you know, like banana shaped?
What if it, again, I haven't used fruit, in particular banana, to illustrate anything for years and years, but, you know, visuals can help, right?
So, what if it's just like not the drop end of the banana, but just, you know, slightly curved?
Okay, well, that would explain that.
Okay, well, there are stars.
Stars from the southern hemisphere, stars from the northern hemisphere.
Okay, well, theoretically, there could be mirrors.
There could be black mirrors. And that could happen as well.
There's the lunar eclipse, but what if it's the curved edge of the banana, right?
You can't argue with that.
And they say, but your eyes can see the Andromeda galaxy, which is like 2.6 million light years away.
And so if your eyes can see the Andromeda galaxy from 2.6 million light years away, surely you can see Miami from New York City because it's flat.
It's just a thousand miles, right?
But there is, of course, pollution.
And the lights have often in people's houses and so on.
There are drapes. There are lampshades.
There's lots of ways to obscure light.
And, you know, there's stuff in the way.
It's not perfectly fair.
Mountains and valleys and so on, right?
And then, okay, sort of earth curvature, right?
The earth's curve, some people say around 35,000 feet, as long as you have a 60 degree field of view, somewhat difficult from a passenger plane window, but you go higher, and then you see a slight curve.
So again, we go back to the banana, kind of slight curve.
Again, mental exercise time, I know it's crazy, mental exercise time, slight curve, right?
And January 2017, University of Leicester students strapped cameras to a weather balloon and sent it to the sky.
The balloon rose over 77,000 feet, about 23.5 kilometers and change, above the surface.
And they sent back a curve.
Again, a curve does not necessarily mean a sphere.
And according to what I've read, you can actually send a weather balloon up as long as it has a payload of less than four pounds, otherwise known as one atom of my ego.
Now, let's look at...
Some of the arguments which, again, I appreciate your mental exercise time.
Let's look at some of the arguments around the banana-shaped world and say it's completely flat, it's like a disc, dinner plate, whatever you want to say.
So, you could say that the leading flat Earth theory says, okay, what the Earth is is a disc.
There's the Arctic Circle in the center, like the bullseye, and then around it, like Saturn's rings, I guess, is Antarctica.
Now, that is around the edge.
It's a 150-foot-tall wall of ice that goes all the way around the rim.
And NASA employees, according to this theory, guard the ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disk.
Now, frankly, this is one of the theories that was put forward by the guy I debated with a couple of years ago.
I mean, this is nuts. I mean, this is plain crazy, right?
So, the reason we know that this can't possibly be real is that NASA employees are U.S. government employees, and that would require that there's a wall that has anything to do with the U.S. government.
So, can't be.
The U.S. government, as we can see, absolutely allergic to walls of any kind, and therefore, politically, I mean, even if we say somehow it's physically possible, politically, it's impossible for the U.S. government to have anything to do with the wall to guard any borders whatsoever.
There are no Western governments that have anything to do...
Well, no, I shouldn't say that.
I guess maybe Poland, Hungary, a couple of other places.
But no Western, Western governments, Western European, North American governments would have anything to do with any kind of wall, just on the off chance that Central Americans might go to the wrong wall, climb over, escape off into space, and be unable to illegally vote for Democrats.
So that can't possibly be the case.
And of course, if anyone proposed building such an ice wall, the Democrats would simply say, or the leftists would say, well, people would just tunnel under it or bring a 155-foot ladder.
So, politically speaking, it is constitutionally impossible, it seems, for Western governments to build walls of any kind, to maintain walls of any kind, so that can't possibly be possible.
Occurring. Oh! Man!
It's really tough. Okay, it's kind of tough when I have these thoughts on the fly, but I'm gonna be honest with the flow of my thoughts as we go through this.
So the thought just struck me.
Maybe I should just retract that.
Maybe I should edit that out.
Okay, let me just make the case, and I'll see if it's worth staying in.
So I'm saying that the US government wouldn't have anything to do with building any kind of perimeter wall or border wall.
That's actually not true, because recently Trump signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that had lots and lots of money for border walls in the Middle East.
So maybe the US government and NASA would sort of fund and man it.
If it was told to them that the war had nothing to do with the southern border of the United States between the US and Mexico.
So, okay, you know, maybe that's a little bit more plausible.
Okay, so a couple of other issues regarding the flat Earth.
So again, major theory, you've got this day and night cycle, and the way that this is explained is you have the Sun and the Moon, and they've done the math, and you can check it out yourself.
So the Sun and the Moon are spheres that measure 32 miles per And they move in circles 3,000 miles above the plane of the Earth.
And according to this, stars move in a plane 3,100 miles up.
Now, I did some sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations and tried to figure this stuff out.
It's pretty nutty.
You've got two equal-sized spheres measuring 3,200.
Miles across. That's crazy.
There are only two spheres in human existence that measure 32 miles in diameter.
That's Kim Kardashian's left butt cheek and my own particular forehead.
And that's like a QED fan moment, so...
Okay, so the way that it's supposed to work is that these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet in a 24-hour cycle.
So there are these big giant spotlights that light up the planet from time to time.
And again, I hate to draw things back to politics, but I can't see how this could work.
Because the only automatic spotlights that I've ever seen in the world...
are the spotlights that are constantly trained on any intergalactic skanks who accuse Republican men of sexual indiscretion.
So they're unavailable for any other purpose such as night and day.
Now, flat earthers also believe that there has to be this invisible, they call it an anti-moon, and that obscures the moon during a lunar eclipse.
So there's the moon and then there's the anti-moon which obscures The light on the moon.
And again, back to politics.
There's only one anti-moon that we've ever seen, and that is the anti-moon that obscures vision.
So these are the media blackouts on any legitimate victims of sexual assault by Democrat, let's say men.
So again, politically we're having trouble now.
The problem also is Gravity, right?
If gravity is mass, then as you climb from the center, where there would be no gravity, to the outside, then you would be like climbing a hill, because there'd be more mass behind you, but less ahead of you, so it would not really, really work.
Now, they have an interesting, and again, I know it's crazy stuff, but you know, just go with the thought experiment, right?
So they say, it's not that objects...
are accelerating downwards it's that the disk of the earth is accelerating upward at 32 feet per second squared or 9.8 meters per second per second and it's it's it's propelled upwards by a mysterious force that they call dark energy and I hate to say how I spent my evening but let's just say that there's I guess a rift or a split or significant disagreement between factions of the flat earthers about whether or not Einstein's theory of relativity permits the earth to continue accelerating up past the speed of light.
Of course according to Einstein's theory of relativity as you get closer to the speed of light all the energy that you apply to get faster gets converted to mass and you can't ever get past the speed of light.
So Again, I'm with Einstein for the most part, but some, again, admittedly English history major, back of the napkin calculations.
The only thing that has been clocked as faster than light are the theoretical tachyons and, of course, the absolutely empirical wild internet accusations.
They've been clocked at faster than light.
Interestingly enough, the only thing that's opposite to that, the only thing that has the greatest amount of inertia or slowness or lethargy are leftist appreciations of the genius of the free market and also corrections and retweets of those corrections of wild internet accusations.
Now, of course, the question is, if it's flat, what lies beneath?
What lies beneath? Now, this, of course, is unknown.
But most flat earthers, well, let me say, there's a lot of flat earthers who just believe it rocks, you know, because you drill down and you can see.
But there is another contingent that believes that if you keep drilling down, under the flat earth, you will find a layer, millions and millions of bodies produced by murderous communism.
And if you go even further below that, you might find...
The conscience of a communist, of course, that remains a theoretical entity like Tachyon's.
Now, of course, when you have a basic truth and there has to be a big cover-up, and why is there a big cover-up?
So why would governments conceal the true shape of the earth?
Now, again, it's trying to guess what's in the mind of some sort of shadowy cabal on the other side of the planet.
But it probably has something to do with finances.
And of course, there's base human motive.
It costs a lot less to fake a space program than to actually have a space program.
So of course, everyone who's involved in NASA, they seem to have particular virulence against, well, it's to do with...
Wanting funding. You know, okay, so let me give you an example that's probably closer to...
It's far cheaper to fake a currency than to actually have a currency, right?
To fake a currency, you can just type whatever you want into your own bank account.
You can print money, which, you know, is worth about what you printed on.
Actually having money means that it's limited in some context, right?
It's gold or some basket of commodities or it's a cryptocurrency that's limited in its capacity to multiply.
So it's way cheaper to pretend to have a space program than to actually have a space program, and it's way cheaper and more profitable to pretend you have a currency than to actually have a currency.
And when you think about it, and here, I don't know, goosebumps for me, maybe for you, maybe not.
Fiat is only one letter away from flat, right?
Take the I out, replace it with an L. You go from fiat to flat.
And if you think that the flat earth makes no sense, but you believe somehow that fiat currency have value, boy, you're totally barking up the wrong conspiracy theory tree.
So, you can call it a conspiracy theory.
The question then becomes, how prevalent does a conspiracy theory have to be before it's no longer a conspiracy theory?
You know, wild, crazy theories are always on the outside, always on the periphery.
People thought that Einstein... It was crazy when he put forward, and hundreds of scientists signed a document saying, it is our consensus that Einstein is wrong.
And Einstein basically said, science is not consensus.
If I'm wrong, just one scientist disproving me would be enough.
You don't need this democracy.
You don't need a vote. So there was a study published online, March 5th, 2014, in the American Journal of Political Science.
And they said, well, about half of Americans endorse at least one conspiracy theory.
So that's a lot.
That's a lot. And they gave, well, let's just give some examples of conspiracy theories.
The media supplies news, not propaganda.
Government schools supply education, not propaganda.
Movies supply entertainment, not propaganda.
Cell phones are useful information appliances, not intergalactic spying devices.
Oh, there is such a thing as the Department of Defense, military bases around the world, 700 of them.
Why? Because America is everywhere!
Search engines are in the business of delivering information to you rather than delivering your private life and sometimes your kidney in a bag to advertisers, totalitarian governments, and foreign hackers.
Diversity is a strength.
It's not April 1st today.
Lots of theories out there that are kind of crazy that people still believe.
So, the upshot, it's been quite a journey.
I am discombobulated.
I feel like I've disassembled and reassembled in a mere proxy or doppelganger of a rational human being.
So, That's where I'm at.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
The flat earth. Yeah, it seems kind of crazy.
It still seems nuts.
But it's still a better love story than Twilight.
It's still a better social theory than multiculturalism.
It's still a better economic theory than socialism.
