David Blaine’s Ascension stunt has reignited the flat Earth conspiracy and honestly, this is why we can’t have nice things.
In a real life Up moment, Blaine flew 24,000 feet above the desert in Arizona on Wednesday by hanging on to a bunch of helium balloons. A truly insane stunt by any stretch of my child-like imagination.
The stunt allegedly has been in the works for 10 years, which means he basically got to work on it as soon as Up hit theatres back in 2009. But unfortunately, they had to do a last-minute change of plans and relocate from NY to Arizona as a result of bad weather.
It took about 50 helium balloons to get Blaine off the ground, but for the love of God, do not try this at home.
Like pretty much every other event in 2020, the stunt was live-streamed for the world to see. But while many of us gazed in awe trying to work out how this man turned our favourite Pixar movie into real life, some conspiracy theorists used it to support the flat Earth theory.
Many flat Earthers flocked to the live-stream comments on YouTube to announce that the footage somehow *proves* that the Earth is, indeed, flat.
“EARTH IS FLAT,” one user simply put it.
Obviously, the Earth in not flat. That is a fact. We know this.
But unfortunately, no amount of science can reason with the popular conspiracy theory, even when other users presented factual evidence.
“Studies place the threshold altitude for seeing Earth’s curvature at about 35,000 feet,” one user argued.
For reference, Mount Everest is just shy of 30,000 feet tall, so you need to be *really* high to see the Earth’s curvature, and perhaps even higher to believe it is flat.
You can’t see the Earth’s curvature, but you *can* see the closest thing we’ll likely ever get to Up being real life in the video below.
