What Would Happen if the World Were Actually Flat?

flat earth map

If Earth were flat, you lot'd know it, because a lot of things would work differently. Photo: Pexels

By Doug Master

Welcome to the new year's day, 2018. The Earth has yet again fabricated a revolution most the sun. But not so fast. If yous subscribe to the idea of a flat Earth, and then you'd believe that no such thing happened, because the sunday rotates in a circle around the heaven.

Humans accept known for thousands of years that the planet is round, still the belief in a flat Earth refuses to die. Members of the Flat Earth Society and several celebrities, including Atlanta rapper B.o.B and NBA player Kyrie Irving, claim to concur such beliefs. Let'due south examine, then, how the well-known principles of physics and science would work (or not) on a flat Earth.

Gravity Fails

First of all, a pancaked planet might not have any gravity. It'southward unclear how gravity would piece of work, or exist created, in such a world, says James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia Academy's Lamont-Doherty Globe Observatory. That's a pretty big bargain, since gravity explains a wide range of Earthly and catholic observations. The same measurable forcefulness that causes an apple tree to fall from a tree also causes the moon to orbit the Earth and all the planets to orbit the sun.

People who believe in a flat Earth assume that gravity would pull straight down, just there'southward no evidence to suggest information technology would piece of work that way. What we know about gravity suggests it would pull toward the center of the disk. That means information technology would only pull direct down at one bespeak on the center of the disk. As y'all got increasingly far from the center, gravity would tug more than and more than horizontally. This would take some strange impacts, like sucking all the water toward the center of the world, and making trees and plants grow diagonally, since they develop in the contrary management of gravity'south pull.

Solar Problems

Then there'south the sunday. In the scientifically supported model of the solar organisation, the Globe revolves around the dominicus because the latter is much more massive and has more gravity. However, the Earth doesn't fall into the sun because it is traveling in an orbit. In other words, the sun's gravity isn't interim solitary. The planet is as well traveling in a management perpendicular to the star's gravitational tug; if information technology were possible to switch off that gravity, the Earth would shoot away in a directly line and hightail it out of the solar system. Instead, the linear momentum and the sun'due south gravity combine, resulting in a circular orbit around the sun.

The apartment Earth model places our planet at the center of the universe, but doesn't suggest that the sun orbits the Earth. Rather, the dominicus circles over the top side of the world similar a carousel, broadcasting light and warmth downward like a desk lamp. Without the linear, perpendicular momentum that helps generate an orbit, it'southward unclear what forcefulness would keep the sunday and moon hovering above the Earth, Davis says, instead of crashing into it.

Also, in a apartment world, satellites likely wouldn't be possible. How would they orbit a plane? "There are a number of satellite missions that society depends on that just wouldn't piece of work," Davis says. For this reason, he says, "I cannot retrieve of how GPS would work on a flat Earth."

If the sun and moon but loop effectually one side of a flat Earth, there could presumably be a procession of days and nights. But it wouldn't explain seasons, eclipses and many other phenomena. The lord's day would besides presumably have to be smaller than World and then as to not burn upwardly or bump into our planet or the moon. Notwithstanding, we know the dominicus to be more 100 times the diameter of the World.

Removing Sky and Earth

Deep below ground, the solid core of the Earth generates the planet's magnetic field. Merely in a flat planet, that would have to exist replaced by something else. Perhaps a flat canvas of liquid metal. That, however, wouldn't rotate in a style that creates a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, charged particles from the sun would fry the planet. They could strip away the atmosphere, as they did after Mars lost its magnetic field, and the air and oceans would escape into space.

Tectonic plate move and seismicity depend on a round Globe, because just on a sphere practice all the plates fit together in a sensible mode, Davis says. Movements of plates on one side of the Earth effect movements on the other. The areas of the Globe that create crust, similar the mid-Atlantic ridge, are counterbalanced by places that eat chaff, like subduction zones. On a flat World, none of this could be adequately explained. There'd as well accept to be an explanation for what happens to plates at the edge of the earth. 1 could imagine they might autumn off, but that would presumably jeopardize the proposed wall that prevents people from falling off the disk-shaped earth.

map of flat earth

How some Flat Earthers map out the planet. The Chill is at the center, and an "ice wall" effectually the edges supposedly prevents people from falling off. Image: Wiki Commons

Possibly 1 of the nigh glaring oddities is that the proposed map of the flat Earth is totally dissimilar. It places the Chill at the middle while Antarctica forms an "ice wall" around the edges. In such a world, travel would look very different. Flying from Australia to certain parts of Antarctica would, for example, take forever—you'd take to travel over the Arctic and both Americas to go there. In addition, certain real-world feats, such equally traveling across Antarctica (which has been done many times), would be impossible.

Falling Flat

Reverse to popular belief, it's a misconception that many societies of serious, educated people always actually believed in the flat Earth theory. "With boggling few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the tertiary century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was apartment," historian Jeffrey Burton Russell noted in 1997. "A round Earth appears at least as early on every bit the sixth century B.C. with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the globe was a sphere."

As the scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould one time wrote, the idea that many people—including the Spaniards and Christopher Columbus—believed the World to be flat was largely concocted past 19th century writers such as Washington Irving, Jean Letronne and others. Letronne was "an academic of strong anti-religious prejudices… who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth," Russell noted.

In any example, while it'south fun to imagine counterfactual scenarios, science proceeds past coming up with theories to explain observations. When information technology comes to these theories, the simpler, the better, Davis says. The flat Earth idea, however, clearly begins with the thought that the planet is planar, and and then attempts to twist other observations to its benefit. You can discover odd explanations for individual phenomena under this framework, says Davis, just "it falls apart pretty rapidly."