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Like on the Rainbow Road course in Mario Kart. In other words, you can fall off, into the adjacent outer space. But more popular is the belief that our planet is finite, and crossing over Antarctica’s limits would mean leaving it entirely. Some believe the Earth to be an infinite plane, and within this tenet lies a subdivision further-either it has edges that cannot be reached, or it doesn’t have them at all. There is some division among Flat Earth believers as to what lies beyond the ice wall. Flat Earth believers contend that this ice wall (they vary on the height the average seems to be something like 150 feet tall) “keeps the water in.” As in, keeps our ocean water from pouring off the edges of our flat planet. What we think of (“think of”) as the southernmost continent, they believe to be an ice wall wrapped around the Earth’s perimeter like a frame. The Flat Earth also finds the North Pole at the center, and, at the outer limits, Antarctica. The size of the sun is commonly understood to be closer to 865,000 miles across, and the moon, 2,000.) The Earth does not orbit around them, as it does not orbit instead, the sun and moon move in rotating spheres some 2,500 miles above us. (For reference: 32 miles is the length of Manhattan’s coastline. He died in 2001, leaving the Flat Earth Society (then up to about 3,500 members worldwide) to die out with him.ĪCCORDING TO THE FLAT Earth model of the universe, the sun and the moon are the same size: 32 miles across. He denied the mission, stating that the Earth, a flat disk embedded in a planar universe, could not be “orbited.” Shenton died arguing his cause, and the organization’s subsequent president, Charles K. Shenton only enjoyed about a year of plausible deniability before the Sputnik satellite was launched, but he was undaunted. He founded the Flat Earth Society, the modern movement, in 1956. When Shenton found Zetetic Astronomy, he drew from it ideas that would inform his contemporary version of a theory debunked, as far as very nearly everyone else was concerned, by the early Middle Ages. Believers in the Earth’s flatness are nothing if not resilient, though.