It might seem hard to believe, but there seems to be a growing number of people around the world claiming and arguing that the earth is actually flat.
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So here we are, walking around with access to all the world's information and learning, through a device being carried in pretty much everyone's pockets, and what good is it doing us?
It seems that outsourcing our brains to so-called smart devices is making some people incredibly stupid.
Or perhaps they were just dumb to begin with, or incredibly conceited.
Now there was a time when the populace generally accepted the earth was flat, and was the centre of the universe, with the sun, moon and stars orbiting it.
So maybe the flat earthers, who refer to everyone else as "globetards", are still in that mindset of needing to believe that the entire universe revolves around them.
Of course, the whole idea of a flat earth was dispensed with hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago.
Pythagoras (he of the system for calculating the length of the hypotenuse in the right-angled triangle) is believed to have suggested the earth was a globe around 500BC after observing the moon's changing phases.
A few years later a fellow named Anaxagoras (who was not in the slightest bit concerned about triangles) determined the true cause of solar and lunar eclipses, while the shape of the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was also used as evidence that the earth was round.
Then around 350BC Aristotle declared the earth was a sphere based on observations he made about which constellations could be seen in the sky as you travelled further and further away from the equator.
And still today the flat earthers seem to have no explanation about why we in Australia can see different stars at night to those seen from the USA or Great Britain.
Yet while the earth's size was measured more than 2000 years ago, and we have long understood the rate at which the planet is spinning and orbiting the sun, there are those who insist the whole thing is a conspiracy, and who refuse to believe what is widely accepted as fact.
I have to wonder if this is because of falling education standards in parts of the world, a lack of scientific literacy, or just general distrust of governments and science in general.
After all, the flat earthers are often the same people who claimed COVID vaccines were filled with microchips designed to turn the population into robots - a claim which does not compute, does not compute. does not compute.
Or maybe the whole flat earth movement is just a huge practical joke that I don't quite understand.
