Is Earth Actually Flat?

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. In 2003, researchers did the measurements

and found that Kansas is in fact literally flatter than a pancake.

Of course, the Earth is not flat, the Earth is round.

Otherwise travellers would be falling off the edge all the time.

Right?

Wrong.

If the Earth was not a ball shaped, but was instead a flat disk, like this plate, well

with the weight, density and thickness, living in the middle could feel pretty normal.

But as you move toward the edge, gravity on a disk Earth would slightly skew, pushing

at a greater and greater angle back toward the centre.

My friend Nick from 'yeti dynamics' put together this great simulation.

The person and buildings obviously aren't to scale but check out how such increasingly

diagonal gravity would work. Although this is a flat disk, it would feel

to a runner headed toward the edge, like they were fighting to climb up a steeper and steeper

hill.

The building foundations behind the runner

reflect how you would have to build structures, closer and closer to the edge, so that people

living in them always felt like down was at right angles to the floor - the way we feel

it on our big, round Earth. As you approach the edge, things would get

scary.

Remember, this is a flat Earth, but it would

feel like a sheer drop off.

What's really cool is that contrary to the

"don't fall off the edge" fear, on a flat world because of gravity, the scary risk would

actually be falling away from the edge and rolling all the way back to the centre.

Once you stepped over the edge, instead of falling off into space, you'd be able to relax.

It would be a nice level place.

This model, of course, neglects the fact that such