One day, Pastor Will Duffy of Denver, Colorado, thought it would be a good idea to take influencers flat earthers and scientific communicators to Antarctica to see with their own eyes whether the planet is spherical or flat. The initiative, called ‘the final experiment’, was one of the most anticipated events of the year (at least for a certain community) and finally came to fruition. The expedition to one of the Earth’s poles allowed the participants to observe some of the phenomena that show the true shape of the planet. “It’s okay, guys, sometimes you make mistakes in life,” confessed Jeran Campanella, a famous content creator who shared conspiracy theories about the flat Earth.
Antarctica in flat Earth conspiracies
Antarctica is an essential topic within flat earthism. According to them, this site is not a continent in the southern region of a globe, but rather a wall of ice surrounding the flat disk that, they claim, houses all the continents. Furthermore, it not only connects with the void, but it is a territory that cannot be accessed, because the guardians of the world order are interested in maintaining “the secret.” More importantly, for flat earthers, In this region midnight suns cannot exist, the exclusive phenomenon in which there is sunlight 24 hours a day.
Midnight sun on the Antarctic Peninsula, AntarcticaSteveAllenPhoto/Getty Images
However, midnight suns do exist. At the South Pole, right on the summer solstice, there is a day when the Sun illuminates the region for 24 hours. The phenomenon occurs due to the combination of the spherical shape of the Earth and its tilt axis of 23.5°. In the northern region, the opposite is true: during the winter solstice, there are 24 hours of continuous darkness.
WIRED talks with the most relevant scientific communicator in Spanish-speaking networks about the nature of his work, the most important questions in science and about debates with conspiracists.
The midnight sun did appear
The ‘final experiment’ took both flat earthers and science content creators to Antarctica during the summer solstice to observe the midnight sun. Originally it was planned to take 24 followers of the flat Earth theory and 24 of the spherical Earth theory, with all expenses paid. Only a small percentage of invited flat earthers agreed to take the challenge.
After demonstrating the predicted behavior of the Sun, the influencers conspiracists gave their opinion on the matter. None of them changed their beliefs about the shape of the Earthbut they accepted that their grand hypothesis about the behavior of the Sun on an azimulta-equidistant plane (the map of the Earth as a disk) had faced a serious blow.
“Sometimes you make mistakes in life. I believed there was no 24-hour Sun. I realize that I will be called a fraud for saying this and, you know what? If you are a fraud for being honest, so be it,” Campanella explained on his YouTube channel, which has 73,000 flat-earther followers.
“The Sun is doing what they said it would do, very clearly. I don’t think this falsifies the plane of the Earth. I don’t think it proves a globe. I think it’s a singular data point. I’ve seen a physical demonstration that could prove that this works on a flat Earth,” said Austin Whitsitt, another participant who doesn’t believe the planet is round.
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