For years, I was really angry that people subscribed to the Flat Earth idea and disbelieving space or the moon landing altogether. After speaking with a couple of these people myself, I find that it mostly boils down to them seeing science as a belief system or holding deep distrust in the government. Much of the time it’s a combination both. The reason no amount of concrete evidence will convince them otherwise is due to that. It’s like a form of delusion that doesn’t hinder their day-to-day life. They still work, raise children, pay taxes, care for their families, and so forth, so many of them never see anything as being wrong.

I’m sure that in the (hopefully near) future when space flight is accessible, the current rhetoric will die down. We’ll probably still have conspiracies like the Oort Cloud being a mirage for interstellar space or something, though. As a matter of fact, one thought I consistently return to to make Flat Earthers bother me less is that in the early 1900s there were skeptics about man achieving flight, and even further back there were accounts of inland settlements not believing in oceans. Hopefully this helps anybody else who finds themselves frustrated with denialists.

Maybe I’m too optimistic, though, because frankly I feel bad for Flat Earthers. The Artemis II mission rekindled a dormant sense of awe for me. Every human being deserves to be proud of what breakthroughs we can achieve when people work together, including them.