In 2018 a Reddit user floated a tongue-in-cheek idea: make a reality show in which a team of flat-Earth believers sets out to find the edge of the world, cameras rolling. The suggestion went viral because it pointed at something real. The flat-Earth claim makes a physical prediction, and the planet is open for anyone to go and check.
Six years later, something very close to that show actually happened. In December 2024 four flat-Earth proponents and four globe supporters flew to Antarctica to watch the Sun, and what they saw settled one of the movement's central claims. This article explains the original joke, where modern flat-Earth belief comes from, why historians call the "medieval flat Earth" a myth, and what happened on the ice.
The reality-show idea
The pitch was simple. Many modern flat-Earth versions picture the world as a disc with the North Pole at the centre and Antarctica stretched around the rim as a towering ice wall, sometimes said to be guarded by the world's militaries to keep the public from looking over the edge. So, the Reddit user proposed, send believers on an expedition to reach that rim and film the result.
Other commenters added variations: take the group to both poles, or, for a larger budget, put them in orbit so they could see the curve for themselves. The thread was a joke, but it made a fair point. A claim about the shape of the planet can be tested by travel, and a test is only useful if everyone agrees in advance what result would count against them.
The map above, titled "New Correct Map of the Flat Surface, Stationary Earth" and published by John G. Abizaid of Boston, shows how older flat-Earth writers arranged the continents: a disc centred on the North Pole, with a ring of ice at the outer edge where Antarctica should be.
Did people in the Middle Ages think the Earth was flat?
No, and this is one of the most persistent historical myths. Educated Greeks knew the Earth was a sphere by the fourth century BC, and around 240 BC Eratosthenes estimated its circumference. That knowledge never vanished. Medieval scholars across Europe accepted a round Earth as basic cosmology.
The story that everyone before Columbus feared sailing off the edge was largely a 19th-century invention. Washington Irving's romanticised 1828 biography of Columbus included a mostly fictional scene of churchmen objecting to a spherical Earth, and later books by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, written to portray religion and science as eternal enemies, exaggerated the number of medieval flat-Earthers. Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell took the myth apart in Inventing the Flat Earth (1991), and Stephen Jay Gould wrote that scholars never went through a period of "flat Earth darkness". Christine Garwood's Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea (2007) tells the fuller story.
Where modern flat-Earth belief began
The modern movement traces back to Victorian England. Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884), a lecturer described at various times as a chemist, physician and soap boiler, published a pamphlet in 1849 under the pen name "Parallax" and later expanded it into the book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe (1865). "Zetetic" comes from the Greek for "seeking" or "inquiring", and Rowbotham presented his method as trusting only what the senses could check.
His key "proof" came from the Bedford Level, a straight six-mile stretch of drainage canal in the Fens. In 1838 he watched a boat row away through a telescope held just above the water and claimed it never dropped below the horizon. He taught that the Earth was a stationary disc and that the Sun and Moon circled only a few thousand miles overhead.
The video above is presented as footage from a flat-Earth conference, part of the movement's revival in the YouTube era. Below it is the azimuthal equidistant projection that many modern believers use as their map. It is a real and useful projection, centred on the North Pole, but it badly stretches the southern continents, which is exactly why it cannot describe a real flat surface.
The 1870 wager over the Bedford Level
One of Rowbotham's followers, the polemicist John Hampden, offered a bet in 1870 that nobody could show curvature on the same canal. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, accepted. Wallace set up markers at equal height along the water, allowed for atmospheric refraction, and showed that the middle marker stood visibly higher than the ends, as a curved surface requires. The referee, John Henry Walsh, editor of The Field, awarded him the bet.
Hampden refused to accept the result. He accused Wallace of fraud, a court eventually voided the wager and ordered the stake returned, and Hampden was later jailed for libelling and threatening Wallace. The episode is a useful lesson: Rowbotham's original observation was real, but it was explained by refraction. Cooler air near still water bends light downward and can hide curvature over short distances.
How we know the Earth is round
The evidence is everyday and overlapping. Ships disappear hull first over the horizon. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth's shadow on the Moon is always curved, from every angle, which only a sphere produces. Travellers heading south see new constellations rise. Time zones exist because the Sun lights only half the planet at once. Aircraft routes, GPS satellites and countless photographs from space all depend on a globe.
Strictly speaking, the Earth is not a perfect sphere either. NOAA describes it as an irregularly shaped ellipsoid: rotation makes it bulge at the equator, and mountains, trenches and uneven gravity add further bumps. That refinement describes a globe in detail; it gives no support to a disc.
The 2024 Antarctic expedition: the show that happened
Colorado pastor Will Duffy spent about three years organising what he called The Final Experiment. In December 2024 he flew a group to Union Glacier Camp in West Antarctica, around 79 degrees south. Four of the travellers were flat-Earth proponents, including the YouTuber Jeran Campanella, and four accepted a globe. The trip cost roughly $35,000 per person.
The test was the midnight sun. On a globe, the Antarctic summer brings 24 hours of daylight; on the usual flat map with Antarctica as an outer rim, the Sun should set. Both sides reportedly agreed beforehand that a Sun circling the sky without setting would count against the flat model. For about three days the group livestreamed the Sun doing exactly that.
All the flat-Earthers on the trip accepted what they had seen. Campanella said his model no longer held and later stepped back from the community. Another participant, Austin Whitsitt, admitted he had been wrong about the 24-hour Sun but said he remained open to a flat Earth. Much of the wider flat-Earth world rejected the result outright, claiming the footage was faked. The same pattern appears in many belief communities: evidence can persuade the people who see it first-hand, while those at a distance find reasons to dismiss it.
Why the idea still matters
The reality-show joke worked because it captured a good scientific habit. Before going to look, write down what you expect to see and what would change your mind. Duffy's expedition did exactly that, and it is why the result carried weight with those who went. For anyone talking with a friend who doubts the globe, the most productive question is not "how can you believe that?" but "what observation would convince you?", followed, where possible, by going together to check.
Sources: Wikipedia: The Final Experiment (expedition); Wikipedia: Myth of the flat Earth; Wikipedia: Samuel Rowbotham; Wikipedia: Bedford Level experiment; NOAA: Is the Earth round?.
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