Space

If The Earth Was Flat

What if the Earth was actually flat?

By: Brandon Tao, Journalist

April 19, 2024

Movement of the Moon and Sun around a flat Earth. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Earth is a sphere. We have known this fact for thousands of years. It was proven to us by the ancient Greeks using sticks & observing the night sky, science & gravity confirmed this fact hundreds of years later. And the hundreds of satellite we have & all the pictures of our round Earth prove this fact yet again.

But even with all this evidence, there is an organization of people who dispose all of it, and believe the Earth is flat. What if they are right?

Change the gravity.

Sideways Tree In Fort Worth Park Near The Fort Worth Zoo, If the Earth was flat. Most trees will look like this. (CC BY-SA 2.0) (Source: Robert W. Howington)

The most widely used map of a flat Earth is the one where the north pole is in the center & Antarctica lines the outer edge (image above)

For starters, gravity has to be changed. For one, if the Earth became flat, gravity would pull it back into a sphere. If we changed gravity so that does not happen, it will still have major side effects. Gravity would only function normally at the center of the disk, farther out, gravity pulls more & more sideways, like climbing a mountain that is ever increasing in steepness. This results in trees & plants growing diagonally as well as water & air flowing toward the center creating a massive ocean & a very thick atmosphere (enough to crush you) there whilst leaving the outer edges a dry, air devoided desert.

Magnetosphere.

Forget about the atmosphere & water part, because on a flat Earth, there would not be an outer core and more importantly, no magnetosphere. No magnetosphere means the atmosphere is gonna get blasted into space by solar winds plus a side effect of cancer & the oceans being boiled away, basically today’s Mars.

What is a solar eclipse?

Day and night would be weird. If the sun were circling the Earth (like in the image) it would 1. burn out completely because it is so small. & 2. light up the entire planet, the sun is not a spotlight. Good luck trying to experience night-time, and good luck trying to experience a solar or a lunar eclipse, because they simply would not exist. Do not forget we would see the same night sky. (if only that was true on our spherical Earth…)

Other changes.

Say your last prayers to hurricanes, because the one thing responsible for them (Coriolis effect) simply would not exist on a flat Earth. Also forget using a GPS system, because the satellites responsible for them would not exist simply because orbiting a flat plane is hard.

The Earth’s surface area would increase approx. 2.2x (Good luck traveling), tectonic plates would behave so vastly different & wonky describing it would be nearly impossible.

Conclusion.

Wrapping it up, it is good that science is on our side and that the Earth is a sphere. Because if Earth were flat, like how many want to believe so, simply existing here would be mostly impossible. And existing is also a good thing…