Plots, if young people believe it, the question gets really troubling

by Paolo Di Falco and Marta De Vivo

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscious stupidity.” Saying these words was the Reverend king And, on second thought, they fit the bill to summarize the curious story of two Italian adventurers: husband and wife, intrepid adventurers, who in 2020 decide to embark on an adventure towards the limits of knowledge.

The objective? Test it the earth is flat, and thus, he also sold his car, out of the thirst for knowledge, in full emergency shutdown from Venice they go to Sicily, in search of the end of the world. Too bad that once we arrived in Sicily, in addition to having discovered that the world was not ending and that – who would have imagined it – after years of plots Google maps were true, they even risked a nearby shipwreck Ustica, where they were later rescued by the Coast Guard. Ironically: to get to Sicily, the adventurer couple did not even use maps or anything else from their mobile phones (a whole plot), but instead oriented themselves with a compass, an instrument that works on the basis of terrestrial magnetism, a principle that they terrapiattisti, they should have refused.

Facts like this, in 2020, in addition to making us laugh out loud, they also make us think a lot. In Italy alone, there are up to 30,000 flat Earthers, 30,000 misunderstood geniuses who believe that the Earth is flat, 30,000 people who believe that there is a conspiracy, 30 thousand people who believe that Australia does not exist. But do we realize it? In 1969 we also reached the moon, today theartificial intelligence It is capable of miracles and then … the Earth is flat.

Not just irony of fate: according to a survey by YouGov, a third of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 are unsure of the shape of our planet. How can we young people, those of us who are practically born with smartphones in hand, believe the thousands of lies with which landowners try to support their absurd thesis? As we can millennials Do you believe some Youtube videos recorded by a middle-aged man with a tin foil hat on his head to protect himself from aliens?

I don’t know if we realize it, but the problem is not believing that the Earth is flat or similar, but realizing that these beliefs, since we are literally bombarded with information, are capable of take root even in the minds of the youngest. It is precisely through the Internet, so populated by us young people, that these absurd theories are shared: from 2015, according to data from Google Trends, there has been an exponential increase in searches with the subject “Flat earth“And so rise to incredibly high levels baffling For the evolved age we live in

Social media has certainly not helped and still does not help to beat this ugly beast, also called disinformation. Videos, images and long publications circulate in the various forums dedicated to flat-earthers and on other social channels such as YouTube, Instagram and Facebook that may seem completely satirical, but which hide a reality. worrying. In these terrapiattisti social profiles you can find conspiracy statements directed at scientists and researchers defined as “satanists of Pot“Which” have the sole purpose of deceiving and spreading lies. “

These statements, for us convinced supporters of the sphericity from Earth, they may even provoke a laugh at first, but unfortunately they are detrimental to young minds that are still forming and learning about the world. In fact, however much the landowners represent a group minority society, their positions and theses that are cunningly proposed to the public can confuse and make even the youngest believe these nonsense.

Social networks should get more involved in the fight of these buffalo and thus counteract a massive cultural regression. An involution that, if we do not intervene in time, could occur earlier than expected: day by day the groups of people who unite in support of the countercyclical theses regarding the times we live in increase and who are fiercely against science: just think about the deniers of the coronavirus, the no vax, the 5G conspiracy theorists …

If we continue in this direction we will run the serious risk of reaching the heights of the most extreme ignorance; To prevent this from happening it is good to intervene first, investing in the education of children and preventing the spread of fake news. Einstein himself, who has been defined by our flat-earth friends more than once as “stupid,” said that “Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”