Take me to the Edge of Earth, a dream resort for flat-earthers

It's a Saturday morning. You open your mail to discover a lavishly illustrated holiday brochure titled 'Take me to the Edge of Earth'! As you sip your leisurely coffee, fond memories flood your mind. When was your last visit to this famous resort? It wasn't that expensive after all, especially with the flat-earther discount. The food was good, offering signature pizza and pancake dishes with a variety of sauces—perhaps a bit flat, but still delicious! The service was excellent, with a welcoming atmosphere and signs like 'Be kind to globe-earthers, they can't help what they are'. So sweet!

Fig.1. The Edge of Earth resort. A Tortoise spotter feeds the six-thousand-year-old animal with breadcrumbs. Source: The Flat Earth Society chronicles

The hotels provided comfort and were tastefully decorated with Flat World maps (Fig. 2), essential for globe-trotters of all denominations. The central street was bustling with a crowd wearing oxygen masks due to the thin air. Yellow signs warning 'Danger, low gravity, don't jump!' added a splash of color to the icy white landscape, pleasing the eye. The bars were booming, offering a round-the-clock happy hour for the Flat Earth Society, which established an office there to search for intelligent life on other flat planets. No signals have been detected so far, and the reasons for this are unclear. To reinforce intelligence on this side, the society recruited a squad of new members equipped with radios and flashlights to improve communication with extraterrestrials.

Fig. 3. New Standard Maps of the Flat World. Source: Amazon. The founder of the Flat Earth Society, Samuel, has famously declared: "Zetetic Earth not a globe." Just look around! He debunked science as fake news and labeled heretics as oddballs.

The alleyway led to the main attraction, known as the Eighth Wonder of the World: the Edge itself. Here, you could always find curious onlookers, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Tortoise that carries the planet on its back. Each sighting was greeted with cheers and applause. It was widely accepted that the legendary creature appeared in good health and not a day over 5,000 years old, despite its reported age of 6,000 years. Well-wishers expressed their gratitude to the hero for its enduring service to humanity by gently scratching behind its ears and throwing breadcrumbs.

I could have talked about this place endlessly. But surely, you've visited and seen it all firsthand! You never heard of it? That's strange! Particularly given the buzz it would have generated in the travel world if it were real. For some inexplicable reason, the flat-earthers have never tried to reach the place themselves. Instead, they challenge NASA to spend a fortune and take them into space, ignoring countless satellite images of the round Earth. Do they seriously believe that such an extraordinary place could have remained undisclosed until now?

Fig. 3. The alternative Flat Earth model proposed by flat-earthers.

In our new category, Flat Earth, we will explore a hypothetical scenario in which our planet is flattened into a pancake. This alternative model will act as a conceptual tool to enhance our understanding of the laws that naturally form planets and stars into spherical shapes. Proof by contradiction is a widely used and effective method in scientific inquiry aimed at identifying and correcting false misconceptions. On our planet, gravity remains fairly consistent everywhere, regardless of our location. If the Earth were flat (Fig. 3), as suggested by proponents of this alternative model, gravity would vary significantly between the center and the edges, leading to an apocalyptic scenario that we will explore here, along with other intriguing scenarios involving the laws of optics and more. And hopefully, we'll have a lot of fun!