When assuming the Earth is flat, there are a lot of questions about how daily life would work, if it would
exist at all, and whether there would be any advantages to living on a strange flat disk with the sun and
moon rotating in the sky.
Say goodbye to gravity (at least as we know it)
On a spherical Earth, gravity pulls on objects equally no matter where in the world they are. For the
Earth to take the shape of a flat disk in the first place, gravity as we know it must have no effect. If that
happens, it will pull the planet back into a spherical shape.
Perhaps a flat Earth would not have gravity at all. A solid disk-like Earth would not be possible under
actual conditions of gravity, as calculated by the mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell in
the 1850s.
Or perhaps on a flat Earth, gravity would pull everything toward the center of the disk. The North Pole,
in this scenario; the farther you are from the North Pole the greater the horizontal gravity toward the
central point of the disk. According to James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University's LamontDoherty Earth Observatory “This will cause chaos all over the world”.
The earth will certainly be devoid of an atmosphere
Without gravity, the flat Earth would not be able to hold onto the layer of gases called the atmosphere.
The force of gravity is what holds this veil around our planet. Without this protective coating, Earth's sky
would turn black because light from the sun would no longer scatter when it enters Earth's atmosphere
painting the sky the familiar blue we see today.
A loss of atmospheric pressure would expose plants and animals to the vacuum of space, suffocating in
seconds. Zoologist and breeder Luis Villazon wrote in BBC Science Focus.
Without the planet's atmosphere water would initially boil away in the vacuum of space. This is because
water boils when its vapor pressure equals the pressure of the atmosphere. Lower atmospheric pressure
means a lower boiling point.
Without the atmosphere to help warm the planet The surface temperature would also drop, causing any
remaining water to quickly freeze. But it's not all bad news. Organisms in the deep ocean, such as
chemically engineered bacteria that don't need oxygen may survive. And these bacteria may survive
long trips to space and live to tell the tale.
Cloudy weather with a chance of rain
If gravity gravitates towards the center of the planetary disk, which in this case is the North Pole,
precipitation will also gravitate toward that spot. This is because precipitation falls to the ground due to
gravity and will therefore fall towards the point of the strongest gravitational force. And only at the
center of the disk will weather behave as we know it on Earth now.
The farther you travel, the more horizontal the precipitation. Water in rivers and seas will also flow
towards the North Pole, which means that vast bulging oceans will gather at the center of the planet
leaving virtually no water at the edges. According to Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory.
We will all be lost
Satellites would have trouble orbiting the Earth if it was flat. "It's hard to imagine a world without GPS,"
James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said in a
statement. “Horizontal rain points us in the right direction, north."
Some trips may last forever
Longer travel times can be expected, because of the distances we may need to travel. According to the
flat Earth belief, the North Pole is in the center of the planet and Antarctica forms a giant ice wall around
the edge, and this wall conveniently prevents people from falling off the face of the earth. But if you are
unable to fly around the world and are instead forced to fly across it, your travel times will increase
exponentially. For example, to travel from Australia (which is one side of the Flat Earth map) to
McMurdo Station in Antarctica (on the other side of the Flat Earth map), you'll need to fly across the
entire North Pole as well as North and South America.
No more aurora borealis and we'll all burn out
On a spherical Earth, molten metal swirling around our iron core generates electric currents that create
our protective magnetic field that curves around the planet from one pole to the other. According to
NASA. But on a flat Earth, without a solid core generating a magnetic field, the protective layer, the
magnetosphere, would cease to exist. As well as the aurora, or as it is known as the northern lights,
which appear when charged particles from the sun collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the
magnetosphere, as they release energy in the form of amazing light displays of the aurora borealis.