The Voyage

by Douglas Falk

“Explain it to me, then. Help me understand. Why would they lie?”

  “You’re asking the wrong question, John. The real question to ask yourself is this: Why would they speak the truth?”

  William grinned and cleared his throat.

  “Try picturing, if you can, the historical timeline of the scientific progress of this place we call home…Earth. Thousands of years ago, pretty much all ancient civilisations knew that the Earth was flat—the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Navajo, the Inca, the Maya…and of course, our own Norse ancestors. This status quo reigned supreme until Pythagoras hypothesised the idea of the Earth being a sphere in around 500 BC. He was the first major player in history who brought up that the Earth was not flat or stationary…a man before his time, for sure. The idea did not become widespread outside of Greece, and even in his homeland it only had a minor following. It would take a long, long time until the ball Earth we know and cherish took hold for real. Let’s fast-forward a couple of years! A millennium, to be precise. You still with me, buddy?”

  John nodded. “I’m listening.”

  “Good. Like I said, one millennium came and went…and this is when Aristotle and Plato emerged from their previous states of mediocrity and started to make wild predictions about the cosmology of our world. While those two believed that the Earth was spherical, they did not believe that Tellus orbited the Sun. Aristotle’s theory was geocentric—meaning, the Sun, the Moon, and the other celestial bodies circled around the spherical Earth in space. But it was only about a century later, around 250 BC, when the spherical Earth was cemented as absolute truth and not just conceived of as a mere thought experiment. The person who should be credited for this happening is the mathematician and philosopher Eratosthenes, who stepped into the limelight with his famed experiment of shadows and sun rays, which is used to this very day as absolute proof of the ball Earth.”

  John shrugged.

  “I bet you wonder how the experiment worked out. I’ll tell you how! They measured the shadow angles in two different cities during the solstice at noon: in the cities of Alexandria and Syene. Eratosthenes was in Syene while his assistant was dispatched to Alexandria. In Syene at noon, Eratosthenes noted that the Sun cast no shadow on the well he stood next to—the Sun’s rays pierced through the bottom of the well. At the same time in Alexandria, his assistant mounted a vertically aligned iron pole in the ground…and the assistant saw that clearly a large shadow was cast on the pole. The assistant hurried back to Syene and reported his findings to an overjoyed Eratosthenes, over the moon by the fact that his experiment turned out to be successful. During the days to come after the experiment, he sat down in his study and crunched the numbers. He calculated the circumference of the Earth by taking into consideration the length of the shadow cast in Syene, and a presumed distance to the Sun of several million miles away…and settled on a number that is still today near identical to the official figure for the circumference of our planet: 24,900 miles. The facts are, though—and even our good friend Neil deGrasse Tyson will agree with this—that if the Sun were not in fact 93 million miles away as the official distance currently stands at…this experiment would work just as well on a flat and immovable Earth. And don’t even get me started on how Eratosthenes completely ignored the element of refraction in his calculations. In any case, his false premise lead to a faulty conclusion. If the Sun were in fact not 93 million miles away, but much closer…and much smaller, casting a localised ray of light…the experiment works on both a plane and a sphere. The math checks out. You following, mate?”

  “I’m still listening, yes,” said John calmly.

  Tonight, I will imbibe this pseudoscientific lecture like a junkie inhaling his favourite drug and forget it all by tomorrow morning.

  “Good, my friend! Very good. Do tell me if I get sidetracked; that happens too easily with me. We were talking about the timeline, yes. The timeline. Let us now leap forward many years, to the seventeenth century to be precise…the century that saw the rise of a certain Sir Isaac Newton of the Royal Society. I trust you’ve heard of this chap, John.”

  John nodded.

  “By this time and age, the sphericity of the Earth was no longer theory, but cold-hard fact. The debate was done—Columbus and Magellan had successfully circumnavigated the world, and Copernicus had all but finalised the heliocentric model that we know and follow to this very day. There were questions left to be answered, yes—such as gravity. But as for the shape of the world? It was a closed and shut case. There was no longer a need for scholars like Aristotle to evangelise his globe-Earth ideas on a town square to a horde of clueless, uneducated crowds. The only people who would even think twice of putting their stock in the belief of a flat Earth by this century were most likely regarded as the troglodytes or Neanderthals of their time. In other words, only technicalities were left to be argued for. Newton advanced his theories of gravitation, and Einstein finalised them about three hundred years later with his theory of relativity. But here’s the pickle, John. What if all of these learned, extremely talented men of their age…were simply wrong? What if they had overthought the whole process?”

  John cringed in his seat. “Why would they have been wrong? Or are they in on the conspiracy too? These people, my friend, dedicated their entire lives studying science, and they all followed the scientific method. How could so many brilliant men during the span of thousands of years get something so monumentally wrong as failing to correctly guess the real shape of the Earth?”

  William just continued smiling, and it got on John’s nerves.

  Why is he so smug? He’s a bloody flat-Earther. He should be squirming in his seat.

  “Let me tell you of a common practise in the medicinal community called bloodletting that happened to be in fashion back in the day. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The entire scientific community truly, and honestly, madly, deeply…believed that bloodletting would cure whatever malady their patient was suffering from. This alone should tell you everything you ought to know about how terribly wrong the scientific community has been over the centuries. Now of course we know for an absolute fact that bloodletting did far more harm than good as a sort of cure. Jesus goddamn Christ, John. The doctors of yore actually thought that draining blood, as if they were vampires, would actually heal them!”

  “We’re cursing now? Never heard you curse before. You must be mighty passionate about this.”

  “Oh, you know I am.”

  The smug grin of an all-knowing zealot just wouldn’t wash away. He’s just like a scientologist, or a fresh recruit of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  “Here’s another example I thought of just now, John. During the Great Plague of London towards the end of the 1600s, what do you think the trusted scientific community of Great Britain did? Who were to be blamed?”

  “I don’t know…some minority population? Gypsies? Jews?”

  William cackled. “No such thing. This happened about 280 years before the rise of Adolf Hitler. No, they blamed…and culled…cats. Yes. The cats. When the real culprits were, you guessed it…rats! Rats were the carriers of the bacteria, and the brilliant limeys decided for some God-forsaken reason to cull the poor cats of London instead…and in turn, making the problem even worse! I mean, everyone knows that the cat is a rat’s worst enemy. How incompetent they were. How clueless.”

  William’s keen eyes spied that John had started to drift away somewhat during the conversation of mice and men, so he decided to yank him back to the topic at hand with a vengeance.

  “But I am not here to drone on about rats, cats, zebras, or lions or go off on a zoological tangent Attenborough-style. I was making a point here, John. The point is this: To blindly trust the consensus of the scientific community two millennia ago is simply…madness. Folly. And yet, that is what we believe in this case. We believe that we live on a spinning ball because the ancient Greeks already figured that out…ain’t that so? Scientists are people, just like you and I. Even with good intentions,
they are not strangers to faulty conclusions. And that includes Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, Cavendish, Galileo, Newton…and Albert Einstein, in particular.”

  “I have a hard time seeing it,” said John bluntly.

  “John, there were people even in the late 1800s, and towards the early 1900s, who adamantly opposed the consensus of a spherical Earth. But I bet you’ve never heard of those people, because they don’t teach us about them in school. Like Doctor Samuel Birley Rowbotham, an Englishman who attempted to disprove the globular Earth hypothesis with his famed Bedford Levels experiment in the late 1800s. His experiments showed quite clearly that the elusive Earth curvature simply did not exist and therefore we live on a plane…but nobody listened. There were no ways of trading information swiftly and easily like there is today. Thank heavens that we live in an age when the internet has been ushered in!”

  “Never heard of this fellow.”

  “Well of course you haven’t, and you haven’t heard of him because of something I have hammered home in this conversation several times already; the game is rigged, so to speak. We are programmed at an early age to believe something, and the curriculum of the education system will follow the same line to a tee during your entire childhood. Once you have reached adulthood, it’s nigh impossible to think outside the box when it comes to these matters.”

  William sighed loudly, but if he was exhausted by turning a regular Friday night at Molly Malones into a disjointed sermon of his obscure belief, he showed no signs of it. He was merely gathering more strength to deliver his next blow that would knock John over for good.

  “I’m going to drop a quote on you now, and I want you to guess who said it. All right?”

  John exhaled and muttered slowly with a tone that implied indifference. “All right. Fine.”

  “Einstein’s theory of relativity is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles, and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king…its exponents are brilliant men, but they are meta-physicists rather than scientists.”

  John, being mildly intoxicated, felt like shooting from the hip on this one. “Stefan Löfven?”

  William laughed loudly over the mere thought of the current prime minister being a critic of Albert Einstein. Or even daring to speak out on scientific matters at all beyond bragging about how he was such an excellent welder in his glory days.

  “Good one. No, I’m afraid not. It was Nikola Tesla. You know, Tesla Motors? The company run by Elon Musk…”

  “Of course I know who Elon Musk is, and I also know of Nikola Tesla. No need to talk to me as…what was it you called the poor sods who believed the Earth was flat during the dawn of enlightenment? Ah, yes. Troglodytes. Anyway—just because Tesla thought Einstein’s theories were poor does not mean that they are not true. That’s a logical fallacy, if you start thinking like that. They were bitter rivals at the time and Tesla had more than a touch of narcissism, don’t you think? That alone might explain why he had such a low opinion of Einstein.”

  “Of course. It might. But that does not change the extraordinary fact that Nikola Tesla, one of the brightest minds who ever walked the Earth, held the unwavering stance that the theory of relativity that we all know and love today…was garbage. Hot garbage! Remember, as of today, relativity is no longer a theory in the eyes of the scientific community. It is cold, hard fact. Like evolution.”

  “Yeah, because Einstein figured it all out. Relativity is fact.”

  “It is indeed…for the vast majority of Earth’s population. Ninety-nine percent. Heck, maybe even 99.9 percent. But it is not fact for me, at least not until it is unequivocally proven. To quote Tywin Lannister: A lion does not concern himself with the opinions of sheep.”

  “Who the hell is Tywin Lannister?” John had never heard of this historical figure. “You and your bloody quotes…they never end, don’t they?”

  “Jesus, John. Have you never watched Game of Thrones?” William sighed.

  “No. Never.”

  “Wow. You’ve been living under a rock these past eight years for sure. Tywin is the patriarch of House Lannister. The point is that it does not matter what the masses think if the thought process of those individuals is flawed. A lie is still a lie even if everyone believes it, and something that is true is true even though nobody happens to believe it.”

  John just looked at him with a blank stare, so William continued.

  “In any case. Thanks to Einstein, who arrived like the second coming piecing together the last missing link of how the universe works, there was no debate from then onwards of where we are right now. We stand on a spinning ball, everything is relative, there is no up or down in space, and we are hurling, tilting, wobbling, and spinning through the universe in speeds you can’t even imagine if you tried your hardest. Until…”

  “Until what?”

  “Until we developed technology advanced enough that we one day were able to launch a craft high enough in the sky to observe if all the centuries of mathematical equations and all the serpentine, convoluted ideas and theoretical constructs were actually true. So, then the question becomes…what if they turned out to not match reality?”

  “If the Earth turned out to be flat and they reached some kind of dome in the sky or…whatever it is you nutty folks believe is going on up there…they would have told the public about it. What they wouldn’t have done is sit down and plan out elaborate hoaxes to deceive the world for all the years to come, like the Moon landings and the International Space Station,” said John.

  “Would they not? I’m not smitten by your ill-founded faith in the ruling elite, John. The same ruling class who brought down three towers via controlled demolitions when we were just kids almost twenty years ago. The same elite who are currently spraying barium and strontium in the skies, the very same ruling class who control and modify the weather from the HAARP facility in Alaska…and God knows what they have cooking in CERN over at Switzerland. Christ, John.”

  “Stick to one theory at the time, please. My brain was overheating just fine already before you brought chemtrail-talk and the like into the mix.”

  “All right, John. I will,” said William and cleared his throat.

  “You have to admit that even though the 1950s were a long time ago and their technology is, with our standards of today, ridiculously outdated, it still would have toppled the power structure of the entire world if the Earth turned out to be flat. Society would collapse, and anarchy, chaos, and disorder would reign as the eyes of the world would shift from petty squabbles between nations to a joint effort of exploring the new discovered lands beyond Antarctica, and if there is indeed some kind of barrier surrounding us—an edge, if you will—the only thing people would care about is to penetrate that barrier and discover what is outside of this realm. Like Truman did in The Truman Show. Because once Truman discovered that his whole life was a lie, a staged television show, everything changed for him. All that mattered from the moment his ship hit that solid brick wall was to get to the other side and find out the truth of where he was. And before you roll your eyes over my movie references…”

  John did indeed roll his eyes.

  Truman Show? Truman Show is a damned movie. This is real life! Planet Earth is not a Hollywood set or a stage show. We’re supposed to be living in 2020…dammit, William!

  “Even though it was indeed just a movie, the same rules would apply if something like that would happen in real life. It’s within our nature as humans. If we are fenced in, we want to know why the fence was built, who built it, and what lies beyond the fence. The quest for ultimate knowledge is what separates us from all other species on Earth—animals of lesser intelligence, like sheep or cows, would not question why they are caged. They would accept it quickly and get on with their day…but we are not like cows, are we? There would be panic. There would be violence. There would be confusion. Where are we, John? What lies beyond the shorelines of A
ntarctica? As you now hopefully understand, John, the most logical decision here, the lesser of two evils, if you will, is to tell the public the exact opposite of the truth to keep them in line. It was the only way to make sure the old paradigm continued.”

  John was not laughing any more. He looked deeply into his empty glass of whiskey and pondered.

  I have to admit…this makes sense. It does makes sense, somehow. I can’t even put my finger on why it makes sense, but it does. William talking about flat-Earth theory, and making sense while doing so…I must be living in the Twilight Zone. The Earth sure as hell isn’t flat, though. But if it was, his line of reasoning isn’t half as bad as I thought it would be.

  “I don’t know if it’s because I’m tipsy, tired, or simply more absent-minded than usual on this day, but in that very hypothetical scenario that you are painting, I could actually see how your argument could strike a chord in the hearts of gullible folks. Order and stability based on a lie is, in some extreme cases, better than the alternative. Sometimes the cold hard truth can do more damage than good. I can see it—the rest I cannot, you lunatic. Good luck convincing me on the rest!”

  “Oh, I’m not expecting you to flip over this one conversation, John. I thought I hammered that point home repeatedly, did I not? This takes weeks. Months. Could even take years. Let me give you one last example before we wrap up this night out, if you will allow me to.”

  “Sure.”

  “Thank you. I am going to just throw something out there for you to chew on as you go to sleep tonight, and I implore you to really think this through, okay? An example of why I don’t trust the science we are given today. You know how we were taught in school of the inner layers of planet Earth? You know, the inner mantle, outer mantle, the crust, the core…so on, so forth. All that jazz.”

  “I remember, yes. I remember my teacher telling us that if you were to drill a hole right through the Earth, you would eventually emerge in Australia or something on the other side. I know of course that’s just a metaphysical idea, but still.”