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If the Earth was flat it would be incredibly easy to prove. For instance, you could go to any seashore and look at a boat sailing far out in the distance and not dipping over the horizon, or ask any of the astronauts onboard the International Space Station to just take a quick photo of the flat circle below as a favor.
So far, not a single flat-Earther has been able to find any proof, which should tell you something about whether the theory has merit, even if you discount all the evidence that Earth is indeed round as a global conspiracy that only YouTuber "GlobeEarthCuck1848174" has seen through.
Despite Italy's lockdown, a couple from Venice recently set out to prove Earth's flatness once and for all by sailing to the edge of the world, which they believed to be somewhere near Sicily. It's amazing how people who live locally never visit famous tourist attractions, like the leaning tower of Piza or the edge of the Earth where the sea meets the infinite void.
"The two left the Veneto during the lockdown for Lampedusa, violating all restrictions," Salvatore Zichichi of the Maritime Health Office of the Ministry of Health told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "In Termini Imerese they sold their car and bought a boat."
"For them, Lampedusa [an island of the Italian Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean Sea] was the end of the Earth."
The trip, always destined to end in disappointment, hit some snags immediately. Firstly, if you're planning on taking a trip to the very edge of the world, this year, when most of the world has been ordered by law to stay at home, perhaps wasn't the best one to choose.
Using a compass (a navigation system that relies on the principle that the Earth is not a pancake), the couple set off in their boat and attempted to navigate their way through the Pelagie Islands to reach Lampedusa, La Republica reports. You probably won't be surprised to learn that a couple that sold their car in order to reach the end of the world perhaps hadn't thought things through, however, and they soon found themselves lost, tired, and washed up on the island of Ustica instead.
Since the global pandemic is still on, the couple was placed in quarantine by health officials, but in their determination to find the edge they escaped and sailed away once more, possibly figuring the police's authority ends where the rim meets the vacuum of space. They were caught three hours later.
"A few days later, they tried to escape again. They ended up in the home of a mythomaniac who claimed to be positive for Covid but luckily he was not," Zichichi said.
Dejected, they returned to their part of the globe by ferry.
