Start spreading the news: Flat Earthers to gather
Edmonton event gives free rein to our delusions
It’s an event guaranteed to rock your world. Canada’s first Flat Earth International Conference is scheduled to take place in Edmonton on Aug. 9-10.
It will take place, fittingly enough, at the Fantasyland Hotel.
Tickets for the event went on sale Thursday. You can get the ball rolling by snapping up an early bird twoday pass for a flat fee of $129. For a more well-rounded experience, you can snaffle a $299 VIP pass, which gives you front-row seating and a chance to attend a dinner with the conference speakers.
The Flat Earth International Conference is the brainchild of Edmontonian Robbie Davidson, who bills himself on his Twitter account as a “Christian, husband, father, filmmaker, enclosed creationist, drummer, painter and media consultant.”
He’s hoping to draw between 300 and 400 people to the convention. From across — but not around — the world.
“It’s definitely going to put Edmonton on the map,” Davidson said Friday, without a hint of irony.
This isn’t his first trip around the sun. Last year, he organized his first Flat Earth event outside Raleigh, N.C., which sold out and garnered national media attention.
“The whole topic of the flat Earth is bigger than just the shape of Earth,” Davidson said.
“Hypothetically, if this is true, there probably is no greater lie. There probably is no bigger conspiracy. We’re being lied to by the upper echelon.”
Davidson believes all the other planets are round. Just not ours.
But then again, he doesn’t believe the Earth is a planet at all. He believes it’s a static plane, fixed in space, with the sun and other planets orbiting around it.
“Everything revolves around the Earth. The Earth doesn’t move,” he said.
Davidson stressed that his organization has absolutely no affiliation with the Flat Earth Society. That organization’s ideas, he told me firmly, are laughable.
Since 2015, Flat Earthism has been enjoying an internet-fuelled renaissance, with people using YouTube and Facebook and Twitter to spread their conspiracy theories, to share their “clues” that we’ve all been tricked into believing the Earth is round. There are Flat Earth documentaries. Flat Earth podcasts. Their sphere of influence is growing.
You could call it a global movement. If you believed in globes.
Now, I’ll admit, I am deep in the pocket of Big Geography.
The problem is, you can’t actually have an argument, a rational debate, with people who have bought into a conspiracy theory. A well-constructed conspiracy theory is invulnerable, because every piece of evidence you attempt to produce to rebut the conspiracy only proves, to true believers, just how deep and sinister the conspiracy is.
Show Flat Earthers pictures of our round planet, taken from space, and they simply respond that NASA is part of a complicated fraud, involving all kinds of elaborate sets and actors. (Presumably, Soviet cosmonauts were also in on the con, suggesting a remarkable degree of American/Soviet co-operation and co-ordination at the height of the Cold War era.)
Point out that you can actually see the curvature of the Earth from a plane, and they retort that all planes are fitted with windows that create the illusion of a curve.
The arguments are, if you’ll forgive me, circular.
There never seems to be any explanation of how and why so many people over the centuries — from Pythagoras to Aristotle to Eratosthenes, through to Columbus, Galileo and Copernicus, to Neil Armstrong and Neil de-Grasse Tyson — bought into the hoax.
Flat Earthers are relatively benign, as conspiracy theorists go. They’re not driven by hate, like Holocaust deniers. They aren’t causing the re-emergence of deadly epidemics, like the anti-vaxxers. Their neo-medievalism poses no obvious threat.
But laughing them off is too glib. It has never been easier for people to learn about the natural world. We only need to poke a few buttons on our portable phones to find the most reliable, credible scientific data, in real time, the kind of information that would make Aristotle or Copernicus pant with envy.
Alongside all the “real” information? We have an equal mass of junk knowledge. Just as it’s never been easier to find the truth, it’s never been easier to spread a lie. Or a fairy tale.
At a time of complexity and social upheaval, when people feel like the Earth is shifting beneath them, many lack the critical thinking skills to cope with this information intoxication, it’s all too easy to fall prey to mass delusion.
“People are very skeptical about science,” said Davidson. “Things just aren’t adding up.”
Davidson’s right about that. And there’s a real danger when people become so paranoid, so hyper-skeptical, that we can no longer agree on what constitutes objective truth.