We thought the world was flat before Columbus…right?

Well, some of us still think it today.

One such person is Dave Marsh, an NHS Supply Chain manager from Ripley. I met Dave last year, among other flat-earthers whose stories I’ve been editing into a little film. I visited Dave for a longer interview because I think his opinions are representative of British flat-earthers and, compared to the average, he’s outstandingly able to express them in sentences.

In the couple of hours we spent talking, he said plenty of things that you’d have to be a big-time science denier to believe: gravity doesn’t exist; space doesn’t exist; the earth should be considered flat as of 2017. But he also said something that might not give you pause: the earth was considered flat as of 1500.

It’s supposed to be a common misconception that renaissance-era thinkers and explorers were the first to see how the earth is round. Maybe the real misconception is that people really believe that, but you can be sure of one group who does.

The Columbus myth – that is, some imagined group promulgating The Globe circa 1400-1600 – is obviously useful to flat-earthers, because it means The Globe is an upstart idea – a product of the same Modern Era that gave us American slavery, the Nazi party, and frosted tips.

Dave had been telling me about his own belief about the shape of the world, which is that it’s not only flat but completely rectangular – essentially what we call the Mercator projection today.

‘Remember,’ he segued, ‘the square map, the Mercator 1592 map – which was obviously brought out in 1592 – was out before the globe. Yeah?’

I wasn’t sure that was true, but by benefit of doubt, perhaps he meant it came out before the first ever physical model of a globe?

Dave continued. ‘Kno’mean? I know that Copernicus brought out the globe in, I think it was, 1492 or 1493, but the flat maps were around a hell of a long time before any globe model. We’ve only believed we live on a globe since, uh, the 1400s.’

I was feeling more doubtful. Remembering my prep for Dave’s interview, I recalled Eratosthenes and his measurement of Earth’s radius. He was one of the ancient Greek blokes. When exactly did he live? I couldn’t remember, and Dave was talking fast.

‘Every cosmology, whether it’s Navajo, Norse, the, uh, Mayan, all say that it’s a flat plane. With, like, a sky, whether it’s some kind of barrier or whatever. Only the Greeks believed we lived on a ball. So–

‘But nobody after that?’ I interrupted.

‘Well yeah, the Greeks have always believed it, kno’mean? But it wasn’t till Copernicus that we actually believed we lived on a ball. Then Jesuits from– Went across the entire country, uh, different places– China. Introduced the globe to China, different things like that and, like I say, these guys always believed we lived on a flat stationary plane, and they’d been introduced to the globe like every other country. So that’s what I believe.’

Gosh. Where do I begin?

Overall, Dave is describing a version of world history that simply did not take place. First things first: ancient belief in a flat earth. It’s unclear what this should disprove. Nobody’s claiming that humankind always thought the earth was round, since somebody had to be the first to suggest it. Whoever that person was, they lived in, or before, the 5th century BC, because that’s when Greek writers began adopting the idea: Plato; Aristotle; Archimedes. So of course the Romans got the idea: Cicero and Pliny both wrote about a round earth.

Given the Roman Empire, it’s safe to say that any flat-earth believers would have found themselves ridiculed anywhere in Europe by about the 8th century. Dave is also forgetting about a small place called the entire Islamic world, which spent the Medieval period perfecting tools like the astrolabe, based around, you guessed it, spherical astronomy.

So where does Dave’s narrative come from? He mentions the Chinese, who didn’t acquire a spherical model until the 17th century. What he’s not mentioning is that, by that point, not only was the model adopted by every other scientific civilisation on record, but it had been for centuries.

Aside from how it’s drawing a conclusion from an outlier, Dave’s argument is quintessentially flat-earth for one reason: Appeal to the Ancients.

It’s a technique you’ll see used everywhere from the astrologer to the homeopath – and it’s ubiquitous among conspiracy believers because it empowers belief in just about anything, as long as it’s old, mysterious, and rejected by the mainstream.

Here’s how you do it. You pick an extinct, exotic-sounding civilisation, and with the confidence of Western condescension, you state: They knew less than us about science, so they’re required to know more than us about something else. Now you’re ready to make all sorts of claims: the Pyramids were built by aliens. Cancer is cured by herbs. The world is definitely going to end in 2012.

But of course, since they weren’t, it’s not, and it didn’t, we pay no more attention to these ideas than we do to whether or not the ancient Norse thought the world was flat. I mean so what? They also believed in a guy called Jormungandr. He was a giant snake that encircled the flat earth.

That’s the problem with pre-scientific thought (or if you’re a modern flat-earther, anti-scientific thought). You’re trapped in a scary version of the world, which you can either attempt to make less scary with supernatural stories, or you can shrug your shoulders and say “Things are as they appear. I live on a green surface under a blue thing. It turns black at night, and that’s all I can know.”

Anti-science belief is is a hostile rejection of the non-obvious, and of the scientific mandate to reconcile our place in the world by means other than a terrifying giant snake. It is a refusal to hear ideas that do not come unadulterated from the same eyes and ears that furnished our caveman ancestors with a blue sky above and green earth below. Learning more might be scary, but it’s an adventure. If you’re afraid of that adventure, I wish you the best of luck. The flat-earthers are always recruiting.