In this episode, we talk about the growing number of people who believe that the Earth is actually flat, and how we can stop this from happening in the future. We also talk about how we need to stop people from believing something that simply isn't true, because it can have dangerous consequences.
00:00:00.000I remember a few years ago, before the pandemic, before much of this, I got fascinated with the idea of flat earthers.
00:00:13.020Now this is an entirely new phenomenon. There wasn't really any moment back in recorded history.
00:00:22.760The ancient Greeks or the ancient Babylonians or the Incas or whoever else,
00:00:27.320who actually wondered whether the Earth was actually flat or not.
00:00:31.600And Christopher Columbus, they knew the Earth was round. There was no danger he was going to fall off the edge of the world.
00:00:37.600That wasn't what people worried about when he was setting off to discover the Americas or discover a shortcut to India.
00:00:43.040But recently, over the past few years, a whole bunch of people have decided that the world is flat.
00:00:51.080Now, everything we know about science, from the people we've sent to the moon, to the photos we've taken from space,
00:01:01.360to how we explain day versus night and seasons, we know that the Earth is round.
00:01:09.360But there are a whole bunch of people out there who have decided that the Earth is flat.
00:01:19.640And they hang out with each other, and they find different ways of proving to themselves that the Earth is flat.
00:01:25.640Now that may not seem like a very serious thing, because someone who believes the Earth is flat is not going to necessarily cause tremendous harm to everyone else.
00:01:36.360But the ability to start to believe something that simply isn't true, because enough people are telling you and reinforcing that around you,
00:01:50.360actually starts creating real problems and can bring us as a society to very scary places.
00:01:58.360And that's why we're still very much trying to figure it out, how to make sure we're protecting people's freedom of speech and freedom of expression,
00:02:06.360and we're making sure that marginalized communities and people who are traditionally oppressed by majorities continue to be protected in all the ways they need to be in societies,
00:02:18.360because there are lots of tools for majorities to oppress minorities everywhere in the world.
00:02:25.360But our capacity to make sure we're keeping people safe and not having people actually believe that vaccines include a microchip that's going to track you or poison you when it's actually about saving your life,
00:02:41.360these are things we have to figure out together.
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