Why a Flat Earth?

Ever since the official signing of the Flat Earth Society's charter, one of our most difficult goals was to understand the mindset of those we were trying to save. The complexities of Efimovich's theory, that theory's convoluted nature and dependence on flawed logic and the omission of obstructions make it nearly impossible to understand at all, let alone understand why anyone would believe such dribble.

Although we have, through the years, made significant progress towards understanding the viewpoint of Efimovich's followers, we still recognize the holes in the intricate web Efimovich wove. Ours is the truth, the truth of the world's flatness, and ours is also the burden of proof. We are the minority, the followers of lies being the majority, and we gladly accept our burden, if in the end that acceptance means ridding the world of the foul half-truths spread by Grigori Efimovich and his brood of vipers. We present the following five arguments, each completely logical and to some degree building off of the arguments before it. We hope that, after carefully considering what we say here, you will look a with a little less ridicule on the Flat Earth Society and its members.

1) The ether factor

In classical physics, ether was assumed to be a ephemeral substance which permeated all matter. This omnipresent medium was that through which visible light and other electromagnetic waves were supposed to have traveled. It was assumed to have qualities which now seem rather bizarre - too bizarre, in fact, to be allowed to exist, by Efimovich's teachings. So in 1887, two American scientists, operating under the Efimovich-based assumption that the Earth was moving through outer space and not the fixed center of the Universe, conducted an experiment to "prove" whether or not ether actually existed.

In this experiment, the general idea was to try to calculate the absolute speed of the earth relative to the fixed ether. In a sense, they would emit a light pulse, and calculate how far it "trailed" behind the earth, much like tossing a napkin out the window of a moving car to calculate the car's speed. It was assumed that, if ether existed, the light pulse would fall back in one direction, giving the physicists a tangible "absolute" speed of the earth. Their calculated speed: Zero.

Yes, scientists Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley were baffled by this, wondering how the Earth could be sitting in one spot, while every aspect of the teachings of Grigori Efimovich indicated that the planet must be orbiting its own sun, and therefore must be moving at least with a critical orbital velocity. Moving quickly to avoid having to admit that they were wrong, they were able to instead "infer" from their results that the ether must not exist, and that light must propagate through no medium at all (impossible for a wave by the very definition of a wave). Their inference was generally accepted by the scientific community (save a few notable exceptions, including Hendrik A. Lorentz) and the "ridiculous" notion of ether was thrown out.

But light waves would still require a medium for transmission, and the actual purpose of the experiment was to determine the existence of that medium. The results speak for themselves: the Earth does not move. And even if the Earth did, the problems inherent in keeping it moving through this light medium called ether are overwhelmingly supportive of "Flat-Earth" theory.

1) Maintaining speed

In the Efimovich model, the planet Earth is supposed to be a large, spherical shaped ball of rock flying through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. But how could the Earth continue to move at the same speed for as long a time as the "round Earthers" say that it has existed for; namely, several billion years. If outer space were a vacuum, then there would be no problem. But space is not a vacuum, it is instead filled with ether. The earth would have to have been pushing its way through the ether for all those billions of years. Shouldn't it have slowed somewhere along the line? What would keep the Earth from grinding down to a stop at some point on the Efimovichian timeline?

2) An accelerating world

A second critical piece to the Efimovich model is that the Earth is not the center of the solar system either. It is, according to "round Earth" theory, orbiting the sun at a radius of around five-hundred million kilometers. Were this the case, the Earth would be an accelerated object in circular motion around its sun. And thereby are the problems introduced. The Earth accelerating in circular motion would behave no differently than would a car taking a corner: loose objects (humans and animals would act like loose change or a cup of coffee on the dashboard) would slide around, or be thrown off completely. There would be an apparent centrifugal force on everything. During the day, when things would be facing the sun and therefore on the inside of the "orbit", buildings would be crushed and humans beings squashed like grasshoppers in a centrifuge. And at night, when everything would be at the outside, trees and buildings would be ripped from the ground and flung into outer space, and humans wouldn't stand a chance. Obviously, there is a flaw in Efimovich's "orbit" theory.

1) Staying on top

Once again, picture in your mind a round world. Now imagine that there are two people on this world, one at each pole. For the person at the top of the world, (the North Pole), gravity is pulling him down, towards the South Pole. But for the person at the South Pole, shouldn't gravity pull him down as well? What keeps our person at the South Pole from falling completely off the face of the "globe"?

2) Falling off

As we begin to make this argument, we acknowledge beforehand that we are aware of the property of matter known as friction. Yes, we realize that whenever two surfaces are held together by any force there will be a static frictional force that will resist any motion by either surface in any direction other than parallel to the force. The example we are using is an extreme situation, and would involve the object in question to travel a considerable distance (tens of degrees of latitude) from the "top" of the planet.

Using the "round Earth" theory, setting an object on the earth would be like setting grains of sand on a beach ball. Certainly a few grains would stay - right around the top, the surface is nearly horizontal - but when you stray too far from the absolute top of the ball, the grains of sand start sliding off and falling onto the ground. The Earth, if round, should behave in exactly the same fashion. Because the top is a very localized region on a sphere, if the Earth were in fact round, there would be only a very small area of land that would be at all inhabitable. Stray to the outside fringes of the "safe zone", and you start walking at a tilt. The further out you go, the more you slant, until your very survival is determined by the tread on your boots. Reach a certain point, and you slide off the face of the planet entirely. Obviously, something is wrong.

In order to avoid the aforementioned scenario, (which obviously is inaccurate, as you very rarely hear of people falling off the face of the planet) we are forced to assume that, in the "round Earth" theory, there would be a gravitational field radiating from the center of the planet. All objects, be they rocks, insects, humans, or other planets would have, under Efimovich's theory, have a gravitational "charge" that would, under a certain alignment, cause them to be attracted to the center of the Earth. Unfortunately, like a magnet in a stronger magnetic field, it would undoubtedly require a long time to re-align an object's gravitational charge, were this the case. And so we go to argument four, which deals with difficulties in having different "downs" for different people.

1) Negotiating long-distance travel

Now imagine, if only for the sake of argument, that the person on top and the person on bottom can both manage to remain attracted to the ground "below" them. What would happen if the person on one side decided to visit the other? Since the man at the North Pole has a different idea of what is down and up (and in fact experiences an opposite pull from the Earth's gravity) than the person at the South Pole does, when the denizen of the frozen Arctic visits his Antarctic counterpart, they will experience gravitational pulls exactly opposite of each other! The human from the North Pole will "fall up", never returning to the ground, and will continue falling forever into the deep void of outer space!

Looking at the feasibility of Efimovich's teachings cannot remain limited to examining small, solid objects such as human beings. A true analysis of his work must incorporate natural phenomena and how their existence is either explained or made difficult by each of the theories. In the next argument against the "round-Earth" theory, we will be analyzing the existence of two extremely commonplace (yet altogether unfeasible under the ramifications of having a round planet) non-solids: the atmosphere and the oceans.

1) The fluid problem

Water. Regardless of which train of thought you follow, it covers over seventy-five percent of our planet's surface. And the atmosphere, also a fluid, covers the entire surface. The difference is why. While flat-Earthers know that the ocean is really just a large bowl, (with great sheets of ice around the edges to hold the ocean back), and the atmosphere is contained by a large dome, the backwards "round-Earth" way of thinking would have you believe that all those trillions of gallons of water and air just "stick" to the planet's surface.

Conventional thinking would suggest that the water would just run down the sides of the Earth (to use the analogy again, like droplets running down the sides of a beach ball) and fall into outer space, while the air would dissipate. Using the earlier mentioned idea of "gravitational charge" gives some credibility to the theory. If the fluids were static, then exposure to the gravitational field for a long enough period of time would allow their molecules to align themselves with and be pulled in by the field.

But fluids are not static, especially not in the atmosphere and oceans. Great ocean currents run both at the surface and deep below, carrying water across huge basins, keeping the solution far from stagnant. Jet streams of air travel at hundreds of miles per hour through the atmosphere. And windblown rainclouds carry vast quantities of evaporated seawater across miles of ground, releasing their load far from its starting point. Water or air that (according to "round-Earth" theory) starts on one side of the planet could end up completely on the other side in a matter of only a few days. With all this turbulence and motion, if the world were round, the oceans should all fall "down" into the sky, leaving the planet dry and barren, and the atmosphere would simply float away. Why, just look at the moon. It is round, like a ball, and yet it has no atmosphere at all.

2) Thermodynamic complications

Taking into account the "gravitational charge" analogy once more, and assuming that for some reason the atmosphere was able to align itself with the new direction of the theoretical "gravitational field", we are faced with a new problem involving another branch of physics known as thermodynamics.

Obviously, the world is static, the fixed center of the Universe. The sun, planets and stars all revolve around it (although not necessarily in circular paths), in a plane level with the flat Earth.