Flat Earth

Hello, friends. Or whoever is reading this. Enemies. Spies. Super models looking for a date. Whatever.

My brother John and I were talking yesterday about the Flat Earth Society- people who believe that the Earth is not round, as most people seem to think, but a huge disc. I would really like to meet a flat-earther some time, just to ask some basic physics questions. Here is my big one.

In order for a flat earth to exist and not collapse in on itself, there must be no such thing as gravity. To give us the illusion of gravity, the earth disc must be accelerating through space at 9.8 meters per second squared (the acceleration of a falling object due to gravity). These are not my assumptions, but theirs. My question is how these assumptions are possible when put in context. Let's look at some numbers.

Because the idea of a flat earth comes from a strict interpretation of the bible, we will take a very conservative estimate for the age of the earth: 6000 years. That means the earth is:

6000 x 365 or 2,190,000 days old

2,190,000 x 24 or 52,560,000 hours old

52,560,000 x 60 x 60 or 189,216,000,000 seconds old

Because the earth is claimed to be accelerating "upwards" at 9.8 meters per second squared, that means that at this very moment, the earth is traveling at a speed of:

189,216,000,000 x 9.8 or 1,854,316,800,000 meters per second

1,854,316,800,000 x 2.23693629 or 4,147,988,543,077 miles per hour

Because the speed of light is fixed at 299,792,458 meters per second, the earth would currently be traveling at:

1,854,316,800,000 / 299,792,458 or just over six thousand times the speed of light.

Let me repeat that. Flat earth theory, plus some simple arithmetic, states that the earth is currently traveling at 6000 times the speed of light. The speed that nothing can surpass. Using some of the same math (I won't put it in) we find that it would take the earth disc just barely over a thousand years to hit light speed. Which means that somewhere between Adam (ca 4000 BC) and Noah (ca. 2300 BC) the earth hit the maximum possible velocity, and stopped accelerating.

[edit- John pointed out to me that I was remembering my math wrong- it would take a year to hit light speed. So, Adam was just figuring out that animals tasted way better cooked by the time the earth hit warp one. Hurray for science!]

Sorry flat earthers, you'll have to try a bit harder to convince me!