Ricardo, who refuses to give his full name, is a 60-year-old man whose restaurant in São Paulo has become a meeting place for people who, like him, reject the notion that the Earth is a sphere.
“The only thing I know for sure is that someday I will die and that the Earth is flat, ” he says.
Flat land plot
In Brazil there is a curious but surprisingly large club: more than 11 million people in the country - seven percent of the population - believe that the Earth is flat. This phenomenon is called the “plot of flat lands”.
The Flat Lands Conspiracy is a secretive, sometimes paranoid, community whose members communicate via encrypted messages on WhatsApp, invite-only Facebook groups, and especially on YouTube, where its channels have tens of thousands of subscribers.
There, members of society can freely express what they believe in without fear of ridicule: the Earth is a flat, motionless body. This is an argument that they put forward with various interpretations of physics, optics and the Bible, rejecting all evidence to the contrary as a conspiracy.
"The greatest lie of mankind"
Brazilians who believe the Earth is flat are mostly men, often Catholics or evangelical Christians, and with a relatively low level of education.
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But do not confuse education with knowledge, “flat” earthlings warn.
"The" flat "earthlings are the smartest!" says Anderson Neves, a 50-year-old entrepreneur who came to Ricardo’s restaurant, armed with a pamphlet condemning the “hoaxes” of Newton and Copernicus.
“Malignant pseudoscience has damaged the education system worldwide, ” says another text that he wears.
The "flat" earthlings pay tribute to photographs of the Earth made from space, and are convinced that NASA is committing a giant fraud. They call the idea of a round Earth "the greatest lie of mankind dictated by the world elite." The Flat Earth model depicts the Sun and Moon in the form of small balls of the same size, suspended over a planet in the form of a disk.
“Just look at the horizon. Climb the mountain and take pictures. You can see that the Earth is not curved, ”says Neves, squeezing the level to illustrate his point of view.
The “Plot of Flat Lands” is filled with counter-factual questions: if the Earth rotates at a speed of 1700 kilometers per hour at the equator, why doesn’t the movement make everything fly up? If this is a sphere, why can't we see a curve from an airplane?
They have little trust in space photographs or scientists' answers about gravity, Foucault's pendulum and two millennia of astronomical observations.
