debate about the earth is round or flat facts on how to win the earth is round

I am in one of a series of meeting rooms, joined together to make space for the weekend’s events. A damp, grey midlands afternoon dribbles outside, streaking dark rainwater down the decades-old concrete of the building. It’s April 2018 and I'm inside a dreary hotel in the centre of Birmingham. On arrival at that conference, I had found myself thrust into an upside-down world where wrong is right, down is up, NASA is a scam and - don’t you see? - everything you’ve ever been told is a lie.

Sadly, it was tackled firmly to the ground by one of the weirdest and most unsettling weekends I have ever experienced.

With conspiracies still swirling unchecked in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic, that optimism would be quite helpful right now. It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based.’ With virtually every after-school dinner of my youth eaten on board the Starship Enterprise, I became an adult imprinted with the progressive optimism and faith in science that Picard and his crew embodied. 'The first duty of every Starfleet officer,’ Captain Picard tells a junior officer in one stirring speech, ‘is to the truth - whether it is scientific truth, or historical truth or personal truth. Among other things, I regularly stay up late to watch SpaceX launches and my favourite childhood TV show was Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show in which scientific analysis and long, diplomatic conversations always beat the lasers and trite quips of lesser SciFi. My optimism was largely a product of my lifelong interest in space and science and my faith that they will always win out. Having said that, I also carried with me an optimism that it might not be so bad - there might be every possibility that the regular attendee would on average be more curious than conspiracist, and that maybe only a handful of people would turn up. I’m not ashamed to say I was also morbidly curious about the people who would be going - both to speak and listen. At the time, I was stunned by how there was even enough demand for it I thought the matter had been laid to rest quite confidently some millennia ago. I say it as an opening disclaimer because, a little under two and a half years ago, I attended ‘FECON’ (an event less scatological than it sounds), the UK’s first ever Flat Earth Conference, to take portraits of the people who would be there.

Debate about the earth is round or flat facts on how to win the earth is round