The flat-Earth debate is a theory that still has the internet firmly in a chokehold.
You would think after years of actual scientific research, people would have finally given up the idea that planet Earth is a 2D piece of cardboard just floating about in space, right?
Well, it seems as though that day isn't about to come any time soon as there are many flat-Earthers still clinging to the idea.
In a 2018 study conducted by YouGov, it was reported that "just 66 percent of millennials [18 to 24-year-olds at the time] firmly believe that the Earth is round," while there were also several discrepancies about the idea within other age groups. A solid two percent of the American population believed that the Earth was actually flat - this is approximately 6 million people given that the population is above 300 million.
So what do flat-Earthers actually believe?
According to the deep, dark depths of Reddit, the members of this unique group believe that the world is in fact disk-shaped and that if you walk to the end of it, there's a great likelihood that you'll fall off of it.
In an interview with the Scientific American, Michael Marshall, the project director of the scientific scepticism group Good Thinking Society, explained the idea better, saying: "Some do believe it's a disk, but others believe that, yes, there's Arctic circle in the middle and there's the land masses around it."
He continued: "And then on Antarctica is the ice around the edge, but instead of it being a discreet disc, some people believe, in fact Antarctica just goes on forever in all directions. And so they believe that the earth is actually an infinite plane in all directions."
However, experts at NASA have completely shut down this idea after conducting their own studies on the matter and concluding that the Earth is in fact a sphere, though they added that it's "not a perfect one."
But no amount of research can deter the most passionate.
Take Bob Knodel, founder of the YouTube channel, Globebusters, for example.
He recently went viral (again!) for accidentally proving that the Earth is round after spending $20,000 on an experiment to show the opposite.
In an unsuccessful - yet highly expensive - attempt during the 2018 Netflix documentary Behind the Curve, the conspiracy theorist tried to disprove NASA's findings only to cement them further.
"What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15-degree per hour drift," he said, per Newsweek. "Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – 'Wow, that’s kind of a problem.'
"We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth," he continued, talking to a fellow flat-Earther. "We don’t want to blow this, you know? When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro.
"If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad. What I just told you was confidential," he added.
Big yikes.
Maybe it's time to save your money and leave the space stuff to the real experts.
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