What If Earth Would Be Flat?

One of the most popular conspiracy theories in the world claims that the Earth is flat, not round. Proponents of this line of thinking believe that NASA and governments of all countries have colluded against humans by hiding other continents beyond Antarctica. Even though we know this isn’t true, what would life be like on a flat Earth?

The Flat Earth Society was established in 2009. rapidly expanding and attracting new members. Their main goal is to refute all available evidence for the round shape of the Earth.

According to them, the Earth is disc-shaped, with the Arctic Circle in the middle, and the giant Arctic ice wall surrounding the edges. In such a world, the Sun and the Moon are 51 km spheres moving in circles above the Earth. The stars also move similarly – as if swinging large searchlights above our heads.

However, there are many aspects that Flat Earthers have not considered, or their positions differ on these issues.

Gravity

On a spherical Earth, gravity affects objects equally no matter where they are in the world. For the Earth to take the shape of a flat disk, gravity as we know it must have no effect. If it worked, the planet would soon become a spheroid again.

Perhaps a flat Earth would have no gravity at all because according to calculations made by mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1850s, a solid disk Earth would be impossible under true gravity.

A more likely assumption is that on a flat Earth, gravity would pull everything to the center of the disk, the North Pole. According to James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the farther you are from the North Pole, the more horizontal the gravitational pull toward the disk’s center point. It would cause chaos around the world, but it would make the Olympic long jump easier.

Long trips and no GPS

According to a scientifically based model of the solar system, the Earth revolves around the Sun because the latter is much more massive and has a greater gravity. But the Earth does not fly to the Sun, because it travels in orbit. In other words, the Sun’s gravity does not work alone. If it were possible to turn off gravity, the Earth would fly in a straight line and fly out of the solar system.

According to the flat Earth model, our planet is at the center of the universe, and the Sun rotates like a merry-go-round above the upper half of the world, spreading light and heat downwards like a table lamp. In the absence of the linear, perpendicular momentum that helps create an orbit, it’s unclear what force would keep the Sun and Moon hanging above the Earth instead of crashing into it.

Similarly, in a flat world, satellites would likely not be possible. How could they orbit in a plane? Without satellites, GPS would not be possible.

If the Sun and Moon simply revolved around one side of the flat Earth, this would likely explain the transition from day to night. However, this would not explain the seasons, eclipses and many other phenomena. The Sun would also have to be smaller than the Earth to prevent it from burning up and hitting our planet or the Moon. But we know that the Sun is more than 100 times larger.

Longer travel times can be expected not only due to navigation without GPS but also due to the distances to be covered. If you couldn’t fly around the globe, you were forced to fly across it. For example, flying from Australia (which is on one side of the flat Earth map) to McMurdo Station in Antarctica (on the other side of the flat Earth map) would require flying across the entire Arctic as well as North and South America. You can also forget about trips through Antarctica (although they have been done more than once on a spherical Earth).

Farewell to the aurora borealis

According to NASA, molten metal swirling around an iron core on a spherical Earth generates electric currents, which in turn create a protective magnetic field that curves around the planet from pole to pole. But on a flat Earth, without the solid core that creates the magnetic field, this protective layer, the magnetosphere, would no longer exist. So are the northern and southern lights, which are formed when charged particles from the sun collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the magnetosphere, releasing energy and creating incredible light shows in the sky.

However, this would not be the least of our worries, as the Earth would no longer be protected from the solar winds. According to NASA, the Earth and everything on its surface would be bombarded with harmful radiation from the Sun, making the world similar to our neighbor Mars – hot and dry.

What are hurricanes?

Every year, hurricanes cause unprecedented damage and claim hundreds of lives around the world. According to NOAA data, in 2017 Hurricane Harvey alone caused $125 billion worth of damage in the United States. dollars.

The devastating rotating nature of these tropical storms is due to the Earth’s Coriolis effect, which causes storms in the Northern Hemisphere to rotate clockwise and those in the Southern Hemisphere to rotate counterclockwise. However, on a stationary, flat Earth, the Coriolis effect would not occur.

There is no Coriolis effect, which means no hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. This is also why we don’t see these storms between five degrees north and south of the equator because, according to NASA, the magnitude of the Coriolis effect at the equator is zero.