UERJ 2020/1

THE FLAT EARTH CRUISE: SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE?

Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that our planet is not
round are planning a cruise to the supposed edge of the Earth. They’re looking for the ice wall that
holds back the oceans.
The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently
[5] announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers’ assertion that the Earth is a
flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.
Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls
the cruise “the biggest, boldest adventure yet”. However, it’s worth noting that nautical maps and
navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the
[10] Earth is … a globe.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a
round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies
to hide Earth’s flatness. “This likely began during the cold war”, the Flat Earth Society (FES) says.
“The U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were obsessed with beating each other into space to the point that each
[15] faked their accomplishments in an attempt to keep pace with the other’s supposed achievements.”
These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the FES, allegedly the world’s oldest
official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.
However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2.000 years ago,
and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a
[20] spherical world.
But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the
North Pole smacked in the center and an edge “surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds
the oceans back”. This ice wall – thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica – is the destination
of the promised FEIC cruise.
[25] There’s just one catch: navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels
around the Earth’s oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, says Henk Keijer, a
former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience.
GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals
from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are
[30] required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth’s curvature, Keijer explained. “Had the
Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to
everyone on Earth”. He adds: “But it is not enough, because the Earth is round”.
Whether or not, the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based
navigation system for finding the end of the world remains to be seen.

Adaptado de livescience.com, 30/05/2017.