View from the North 40: The Earth as we know it ... or not

Contrary to my grade school learnin’, Europeans of the Middle Ages did not think that Earth was flat only to be proven wrong by one Christopher Columbus, no, the Flat Earthers didn’t really get going until the 1900s.

In 400-something BC, just prior to my birth, some Greek scientists, tired of looking at statues of perfect people, sat down and figured out the whole Earth-is-round thing. The problem was mapping that world accurately.

Sure, a map works great if you’re looking at it on a globe because, spoiler alert, a globe is shaped like Earth. But how do you account for constant curvature on a flat map? You figure it out, because who wants to pack a whole globe in their pocket?

Unbeknownst to me, there exists in the world just shy of a bajillion different maps that try to depict the entire planet on a flat piece of paper. Bajillion is an actual unverifiable number.

One of the most popular solutions was the Mercator Projection map — the one most of us, and Google too, grew up using in U.S. schools.

The Mercator Projection map is created as if you made a paper cylinder, slipped it over the globe so that it was snug at the equator, then all the features on the globe were projected out horizontally onto the paper. Just unfurl the cylinder and, voila, a map. The beauty of this map is that you can draw a straight line to anywhere you want to go and that’s how you get there, also straight streets are straight and right-angle turns are depicted as 90-degree turns.

The bad thing is that the map creates the optical illusion that land masses at the poles are bigger than they actually are, like how Greenland looks as big as all of South America, but it’s really less than 1/8th the size. And somehow land masses and countries aren’t where they look like they are.

No, I don’t get how you can draw accurate lines of travel from point A to point B if the landmasses are wrong.

I do know there are all these different maps out there, all both right and wrong in their own ways. In fact, theoretical fist fights and yo’-mama joke battles broke out during World War II about how to most accurately draw maps to show the physical relationship between countries and the threat posed by the real-life proximity between Axis and Allied countries.

This is serious business, people; the fate of the free world actually depended up an agreement about the shape of the world.

So how did we get from spherical earth to flat earth in a monumental bass-ackward shift in scientific understanding?

In the late mid- to late-1800s a few people started saying and writing things about how folks believed, or believe, in this theory of a flat earth. Some of the stories were just meant to be stories, such as Washington Irving embellishing the story of Columbus convincing people to support his trip to “India.” Some of the stories were a fabrication to create division between religion and science.

Even though virtually everyone believed in a round earth, some folks started thinking twice about this flat earth concept, trying to justify it and by 1956 The Flat Earth Society had officially formed.

If the earth isn’t flat, why bring it up, you ask? Good question to which the only answer is: It’s 2020.

2020, the year of the pandemic, has already seen some crazy: A massive fruit bat swarm so big it repeatedly shut down flights in Queensland, Australia. Poland accidentally invaded Czech Republic. Locusts swarmed East Africa. The Pentagon released UFO videos. A dust storm in the Sahara Desert affected air quality in Florida. Double hurricanes trashed the Gulf. A land hurricane leveled Iowa. A whole star that was being actively watched by scientists disappeared out of the cosmos and comet NEOWISE could be seen easily with the naked eye hanging in the night sky for weeks.

Except for the pandemic, people barely paid attention to these things. For real? The last time a bright, shiny celestial body hung in the sky, a child was born, a religion launched and Gutenberg had to invent an entire mass-production printing press to keep up with the publication demands on the child’s book deal. Just sayin’.

And the Flat Earthers have had a tough year. Their poster boy, “Mad” Mike Hughes, 64, died in an attempt to take his Flat-Earth financed, steam-powered rocket to the outer atmosphere to take a photo or the earth. As parachutists say, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Rest in peace, man.

Their discovery cruise to Antarctica — the edge of the world — was canceled, and an Italian couple trying to make it to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where — they believe — the world ends got lost, got stuck in quarantine and then abandoned their boat and their dream of discovery.

In honor of the frustration and sacrifice of the Flat Earth people, I’m calling on all my readers to consider, if only for this weekend, that Earth is a flat disc, covered by a clear dome, floating in an eternal ether. It can’t be any more outlandish than what is going on in real life this year.

It is an election year.

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Maybe clap your hands if you believe at [email protected].