About

If Earth Isn't Flat is a photoshop series juxtaposing two images, one normal and one curved, to pose a mocking argument about the debunked flat earth conspiracy theory.

Origin

The earliest known iteration of this style of photoshopped images was posted by Ultimate Guitar^[1] message board user Joshua Garcia on October 17th, 2017. That day, in the thread "Flat Earth Theory Proved RIGHT – 100% True Fact – in One Video," they posted an image of two shoes, one unaltered and one with the soul erased to appear as though it is curved. The image is captioned, "If the Earth is not flat why do we have shoes like this and not like this." This image (shown below) implies that a round Earth would require a round shoe.

Spread

About a month later, on November 20th, the Facebook ^[2] account badsciencejokes posted a variation of the meme, replacing the Nike shoe for a DC shoe. The post (shown below, left) received more than 3,400 reactions, 400 comments and 530 shares in four months. Two days later, the image was shared on the Facebook^[3] account I Fucking Love Science, where it received more than 178,000 reactions, 29,000 shares and 24,000 comments.

Several months later, on February 4th, 2018, Facebook^[4] account succmymeme shared a variation replacing the shoe with a computer mouse. The post (shown below, center) received more than 4,500 reactions, 1,100 shares and 840 comments in three weeks.

On February 19th, 2018, Redditor ^[5] MLTPRPZ posted a version in the /r/theydidthemath subreddit that uses a car as the example of proof. The post (shown below, right) received more than 6,800 points (91% upvoted) and 130 comments.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not Available.

External References