this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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It isn't. A lot of popular conspiracy stuff is pretty new and the internet helped their spread.
It does remind me of Galileo's quote "Eppur si muove" (still it moves). Or less directly Feynman's "for a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled".
Reality doesn't care about anyone's opinion.
Flat Earth belief is pretty much as old as writing. Long history here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
There are two types of flat Earth belief, and the writing above is definitely the latter, more recent, and willfully ignorance crowd.
More recent, but still 19th century.