
For anyone who’s made the journey, there is only one consensus: The Earth is round. A couple of guys have even done it in hot air balloons. Since Magellan’s journey, ships and planes have circled the world thousands of times.

In 1522, the explorer returned to his starting point, completing the first successful circumnavigation of the globe. It took the crew three years, but sailing ever eastward eventually paid off. Since it’s impossible to reach the same fixed point from two different directions unless you are traveling across a sphere, Magellan argued that if he could reach the islands, the world would have undeniable proof that the Earth was round. Intellectuals from the Islamic World to India to China came up with similar theories and hypotheses that didn’t just confirm the curvature of the Earth but accurately calculated its circumference. Even without the help of calculators and computers, early observations and mathematical calculations in Athens, Mesopotamia, and Rome demonstrated the curvature of the Earth over and over again. It’s been well over 2,000 years since Greek scholars began to interrogate the shape of the Earth. 2,000 Years of Proof That the World Is, in Fact, Round

The belief that the Earth is flat, though, a belief so antiquated that no one has taken it seriously for centuries, lives on. In 2020, Hughes died in a second rocket launch (the first one failed to reach the height needed to see the whole planet by more than 61 miles). government to make us believe the Earth is round.

If Hughes’ rocket launch succeeded, groups like The Flat Earth Society-who believe that the Earth is a disc centered around the North Pole and bound at its edges by a 150-ft wall of ice called Antarctica-would finally have proof that not only the Earth is flat but that we are all victims of a conspiracy cooked up by NASA and the U.S. W hen self-declared Flat Earther “Mad” Mike Hughes launched himself toward space on a homemade rocket in 2018, he hoped to capture photographic evidence that the Earth was shaped like a pancake, not a sphere. NASA exists, lunar eclipses are real, and scientific proof is irrefutable.
