And Yet The Earth Is Flat Poem by Paul Hartal

One day the mailman brought me a letter
from California. It said that the Earth was flat.
What? Was I misled by my teachers? Was the idea
of a round earth nothing but goverment propaganda?

The Flat Earth Society's website proudly proclaims:
"This site is not a joke." Members of the Society
embrace the notion that the earth is shaped as a disk.

But is not our planet a sphere? No, they reply.
Just look around you: "The world looks flat."

The existence of the Flat Earth Society displays
the intrinsic tension between common observable
experience and counter-intuitive evidence-based
science.

The ancient Greeks were already aware that the Earth
was a round sphere, rather than a flat plain.
Aristotle in the 4th century BCE correctly argued
that the Earth had a globular shape, revealed through
the eclipses of the Moon's convex shape that shows
the spherical shadow of the Earth.

A century later Eratosthenes, Chief Librarian of
the Alexandria Library, even calculated the length
of the equator. Assuming that he used the Olympic
Stadia as units for distance measurement,
Eratosthenes found the length of the Earth's
circumference at a little over 25,000 miles,
which is nearly correct.

As a matter of fact, it is not very difficult
to demonstrate the spherical shape of the Earth.
From a sea shore, for instance, you can see
approaching ships appearing out of nowhere
as they emerge and rise in the horizon
of the ocean, due to the roundness of the planet.

Also, when you fly, at a cruising height of
35,000 feet in clear weather you can detect
the curvature of the Earth on a cloud free
horizon.

However, people who believe
in the flatness of the earth
continue to cling to their belief
in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
When the President of the British Flat Earth Society
was shown a satellite picture of the spherical earth,
he examined the image and said unruffled:
"It is easy to see how such a picture could fool
the untrained eye."

But perhaps we should be more forgiving.
One could also view Flat Earthers as individuals who struggle
To preserve their common sense, incorrigible romantics
Who are trying to find sanity in a familiar world against
the maddenning tide of postmodern angst and
oversweeping technological pandemonium.

If we ridicule the Flat Earth Society, why should not we
Ridicule the Sunset Society, too? After all, the sun does not
Go anywhere but stays at the center of the solar system, day
Or night. What makes the sun apparently disappear from
The sky is the rotation or turning motion of the earth.
Although the sun continuosly shines on our planet, due to
The rotation of the earth, it provides sunlight only to parts
Of the world that face it. Thus after sunset night descends
On part of the earth.

Moreover, theoretically it is also possible to argue
that if you believe that your ruler, or pencil,
for example, is straight, you are wrong, because
Due to the curvature of space absolutely
straight lines do not exist.

The world displays a great deal of intrinsic fuzziness.
Nothing is completely black or white, but rather gray.
And therefore one could plead that the belief
in the Theory of Flat Earth is a fuzzy conjecture,
just relatively wrong. Nothing is absolutely flat
and nothing is absolutely spherical.