COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DAVID MITCHELL IN THE
GUARDIAN
The Earth may not be
flat, but it just might be doomed
Well, what can I say?
In the 21st century, a presumably educated man writing about
the notion some obscure people somewhere have that the earth is flat?
I have news for the writer, somewhere on earth you will find
some people embracing almost anything you can imagine.
Humans are not completely rational. And we have a range of
intelligences from brilliant to dullard. We are also the victims of all kinds
of mental and emotional glitches, nature's little random gifts and mistakes,
from anxiety or paranoia or depression to various manias or psychopathy.
We are the product of a hugely complex evolutionary process,
and many are also its innocent victims.
The Internet, like a gigantic supplementary memory serving
everyone, keeps all the weird stuff we believe and imagine handy so that any
eyes can read it or gaze on it.
But the stuff was always there. It is not new. It is not
even remarkable.
After all, we have people believing there's an old man with
a beard up in the sky somewhere who takes a personal interest in each of our
mostly uneventful little lives.
"because the
Earth being round is a classic example of an issue where, unless you’re an
astronaut, you sort of do have to take somebody’s word for it."
That's simply untrue. The spherical shape can be understood,
but it requires a far better than average intelligence. Eratosthenes calculated
a roughly accurate diameter of a spherical earth more than 22 centuries ago.
The information for many was simply not known or could not
be grasped, but that is hardly remarkable given the variations in human minds.
What concerns me most about this article is that it quietly
slips in something unpleasant which is becoming very popular in the corporate
press, and that is that there is danger out there on the Internet and perhaps
it needs some controlling.
