Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
In 2003, researchers did the measurements and found that Kansas is in fact literally
flatter than a pancake. Of course, the Earth is not flat, the Earth
is round. Otherwise travellers would be falling off
the edge all the time. Right? Wrong. If the Earth was not a ball shaped, but was
instead a flat disk, like this plate, well with the weight, density and thickness, living
in the middle could feel pretty normal. But as you move toward the edge, gravity on a disk Earth would slightly skew, pushing at a greater and greater angle back toward the centre. My friend Nick from 'yeti dynamics' put together
this great simulation. The person and buildings obviously aren't
to scale but check out how such increasingly diagonal gravity would work.
Although this is a flat disk, it would feel to a runner headed toward the edge, like they were fighting to climb up a steeper and steeper hill. The building foundations behind the runner reflect how you would have to build structures, closer and closer to the edge, so that people living in them always felt like down was at
right angles to the floor - the way we feel it on our big, round Earth.
As you approach the edge, things would get scary. Remember, this is a flat Earth, but it would feel like a sheer drop off. What's really cool is that contrary to the "don't fall off the edge" fear, on a flat
world because of gravity, the scary risk would actually be falling away from the edge and
rolling all the way back to the centre. Once you stepped over the edge, instead of
falling off into space, you'd be able to relax. It would be a nice level place. This model, of course, neglects the fact that such a planet shape would be impossible. Anything as massive as the Earth, shaped like a flat disc, would, under its own gravity,
naturally collapse back into a ball. This is why in outer space everything more
than few hundred miles in diameter is round. Or so we've been told.
What if gravity isn't real? What if the Earth is, in fact, flat and science
has been wrong all along? It's a misconception that Christopher Columbus
discovered that the Earth is round. Virtually every scholar and major religion
in the West accepted Earth's rotundity, since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, who,
for instance, had noticed that boats disappear bottom first when sailing away.
And, as you walk north and south, stars pop in and out of the view. The misconception that only a few hundred years ago lots and lots of people believed
the Earth was flat likely began in the modern era, as a sort of insult.
Well, your people recently thought the Earth was flat, so why should we believe you now?
The smear was repeated and published so often it became accepted as historical fact.
"Flat-Earther" became synonymous with "Anti-science". It might seem flat over short distances, but
over longer ones, well the Earth is pretty darn curvy. The Verrazano–Narrows Bridge,...
