...the earth was flat?

Have you ever heard of the flat-earth theory? There are people who claim that the earth is flat, or rather shaped like a pancake, and that the sun revolves around the earth and not the other way around. These claims are of course not true, but let's imagine for a moment that the earth is actually not round, but pancake-shaped - what impact would that have on our daily life?

Hello and welcome back to a new episode of „What if...“

If the earth was actually a disk that is thicker in the middle than at the edge, the gravity would first of all be distributed differently than we are used to. Gravitation would pull all matter to the center of the disk and get stronger the further you get away from the center of the earth. So if you tried for example to walk to the edge of the earth, it would feel like you were climbing a mountain that is getting steeper and steeper. Trees would grow away from the center of the earth against gravity and all water would be drawn towards the center of the earth.

Furthermore, many of the technologies that we take for granted today would not be feasible on a flat earth anymore, as there would be no stable orbit around the earth in which satellites could fly. That would mean, that there would be no navigation systems, no synchronized time, no credit cards, no internet and no television.

But how would our hypothetical earth behave in space? - If the sun actually rotated around a flat earth, it could illuminate every part of the earth at the same time. Because of that, it would always be bright, there were no seasons and no time zones. This constant sunshine would completely dry out the earth. So the sun would have to be much smaller than it actually is. In addition, due to the missing earth's core, the earth could not build up an electromagnetic field, which protects us from the radioactive radiation of the sun and ensures that our atmosphere and the oceans are not sucked out into space.

As you can see, the difference between a flat earth and ours would be so significant that we humans would not even be able to survive on such a planet. This is also why it is obvious, that the earth isn’t actually flat, but of course round.

We hope you enjoyed the article and we'll see you again next week in a new episode of „What if...“

Yassas and thank you for listening.