Terry Sarten: The Earth is flat - it's written in the stars

It looks like a curve, but maybe the Earth is a flattened out disc.

The Earth is not a ball floating in space ... if it was, we would all fall off.

I'm with that bloke Mike Hughes, a Californian who has built his own rocket so he can go up and see for himself that the Earth is flat.

He is planning to launch his home-built steam-powered rocket from the back of a modified mobile home. This sounds incredibly dangerous so I have taken a more conservative down-to-earth approach with my own research.

'I went down the sea, Down to the sea and sky, To prove that mumbo jumbo, Is just a great big lie?'

I stood on the shore, looked out across the ocean and there it was, a straight-line marking water from sky. There was a slight curve, true but there is no beauty in a straight line, besides my glasses make everything look a bit out of focus when it is more than a few feet from my face.

Why don't scientists do that? Instead of all those expensive space flights they could have just looked at a map. A map of Earth shows it as a flat surface with the various continents, islands and oceans spread across it.

There was a time when maps used to have a warning in big writing at the edge of the map saying "There Be Dragons". This is nonsense. The edge of the map is the edge of the world and if there were dragons they would tumble off and become lost in space.

There are some of us who think that the notion the Earth as a ball is simply a plot hatched by airlines to con us into paying for flights to countries on the so-called other side of a spherical planet when, in fact, they are not.

We all know about flights spending ages circling the airport waiting to land, right? The pilots are told to do this to create the allusion you have been travelling a really long way when it is actually not very far in a straight line.

Photos taken from space by astronauts appear to show the Earth as a glittering ball but, of course, you can only see the one dimension. The Earth is flat.

It is a disc with the water kept in by a giant ring if ice - the polar region. There are people who claim to have sailed right round the planet but they would say that, having been prevented from falling off the edge by the impenetrable ice.

Yes, I hear you say - but what about the gravity thing. This mythical pull is simply holding us back from discovering the truth.

The Earth is a disc and so there is no need for this so-called force of gravity. I mean if you jump inside a lift that's going down you don't hit your head on the roof do you. See what I did there?

Where are the longitudinal blinded case control studies on people jumping in lifts? There are none because that would let the whole gravity thing out of the bag requiring a long and embarrassing excuse.

The Earth must be flat. Wind and weather don't go around corners, they blow across countries.

And the whole day-night sequence is just a trick of the light. The sun goes over the edge while the moon comes up from the other side of Earth's disc. We see this happen every day but still the round-earthers stubbornly claim that they are right.

Some may think Mike Hughes is wrong to challenge the round-earthers but there is no doubt that his attempt to go into space with a steam-powered rocket ship is very brave and worthy of applause.

■Terry Sarten is a writer, musician, satirist and round-earth denier - feedback welcome: tgs@inspire.net.nz