• kevincox@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    The Flat Earth Society.

    I don’t remember the exact URLs or wikis but about 10 years ago I stumbled across one of the funniest websites I have ever seen. It was a wiki with an alternative science that justified a flat earth. It had some incredibly clever premises such as gravity is due to the Earth accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s^2 and an explanation for now this didn’t fail to continue as they approached the speed of light. There were layers and layers of explanation explaining many corners of the premise and providing explanations for things that at first felt like flaws in the simpler layers. It wasn’t anti-science, it was cleverly twisting science with the holes hidden away. It was an incredible amount of work by a lot of clearly very clever people. While I enjoyed all of the slightly flawed science my favourite page had to be the one answering the question “But what about the photos of the earth that show it to be round” with a short dismissal like “All of the images are clearly doctored.” The non-scientific dismissal was startling contrast to the rest of the site and gave me a good chuckle.

    Of course the trolling was so good that people started believing it, the hard work of god-tier troll was converted into a religion for the mindless. What was once beautiful art is forever tainted by the inadvertent damage that it has caused.