Summary Table: Contemporary Flat Earth Movement — Key Facts

Origins and Structure:

Historical societies (England and New York, 19th century) inspired today’s movement.

The modern movement is decentralized, relying on global online communities.

Notable Advocates: Mainly alternative media personalities (YouTubers, event speakers); rare involvement of mainstream celebrities like Egyptian artist Mohamed Sobhy, who has sparked regional debate.

Main Arguments: Focus on visual observation, conspiracy theories about scientific institutions, misinterpretations of physics, and religious literalism.

Demographics: Supporters found worldwide, most active among young to middle-aged adults consuming alternative media; no consistent pattern for gender or economics.

Risks: Broadly seen as harmless, but deep involvement may lead to social isolation, distrust, or further conspiratorial thinking.

Parental Action: Emphasize respectful communication and education on critical thinking and evidence-based understanding.

Detailed Report

The contemporary Flat Earth movement draws its roots from the 19th-century revival of the belief by British writer Samuel Rowbotham but has reached far more people through the Internet since the 2010s.

The movement today no longer relies on formal, centralized organizations.

Instead, it consists of a vast number of online communities formed around social media groups, YouTube channels, discussion forums, and event-based gatherings.

Online platforms have facilitated the movement’s spread not only in English-speaking countries but also across regions such as the Arab world.

Rather than being dominated by legacy societies from England or New York, the global network now acts through a patchwork of decentralized, often private groups .

Specific Organizations and Public Figures:
- Modern Flat Earth societies reference 19th-century groups but are now organized mainly through digital affinity groups, not traditional membership organizations.

- Online communities flourish in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, often with region-specific social media groups.
- Notable individual advocates are typically alternative media personalities—social media influencers, YouTubers, or event organizers—rather than widely recognized celebrity figures.
-

In the Arab world, Egyptian performer Mohamed Sobhy is among the few mainstream celebrities who have generated controversy and discussion publicly associating with Flat Earth claims .

Common Arguments Used by Flat Earth Believers:
1.

The horizon appears flat to the naked eye, supposedly disproving curvature.

Photographs or videos from space are dismissed as fabricated, usually under an alleged global conspiracy.

3. Physics and optics are misinterpreted (e.g., misunderstanding why ships disappear from the bottom up, or how gravity works).

Literal readings of religious texts are offered as definitive proof.

Broad distrust of mainstream education and scientific institutions is framed as evidence of a cover-up .

Reasons for Resurgence:
- The accessibility and echo-chamber nature of online communities support the reinforcement and spread of fringe beliefs.
- Broader distrust of authority (governmental, scientific, and academic) and anti-globalist sentiment.

- The popularity of alternative media promoting “truth-seeking” outside of mainstream channels .

Characteristics of Typical Believers:
- A tendency toward conspiracy thinking and skepticism of official narratives.
- Varied demographics, but most active members are young adults and middle-aged individuals engaging frequently with alternative information sources.

- No strong biases based on gender, ethnicity, or economic status.
- Social or psychological factors such as dissatisfaction with mainstream explanations or alienation from traditional institutions may play roles .

Potential Risks and Expert Consensus:
- Flat Earth belief is widely regarded by mainstream science as a pseudoscientific myth, thoroughly disproven by centuries of empirical evidence and experiment.

- Most supporters engage harmlessly and treat their belief as a personal or eccentric quirk.
- Risks arise if individuals become deeply embedded in broader conspiracy communities, potentially leading to increased social isolation, distrust of education and public authorities, and exposure to more dangerous forms of misinformation .

Key Considerations and Recommendations for Parents:
Communicate Openly:

Maintain calm, respectful dialogue with your teen about science, sources of information, and ways to evaluate claims in an evidence-based manner.

Monitor for Red Flags: Watch for signs of broader anti-social attitudes, secrecy, or manipulative behaviors from the friend’s family (such as pressuring your child to reject all science or shun dissenters).

These are uncommon, but when present are a cause for concern.

Educate on Critical Thinking:

Help your child understand why and how scientific consensus is reached, the importance of evidence, and the nature of online echo chambers.

Limit Contact Sparingly: Restrict contact only if you observe clear signs of manipulation, increased social isolation, or rejection of education/science stemming from involvement with the friend’s family.

In ordinary circumstances, exposure to alternative viewpoints—when accompanied by parental guidance—does not pose inherent danger.

Encourage Inquiry: Support your child in asking questions and seeking trustworthy answers, which can strengthen resilience against misinformation .

In summary, contemporary Flat Earth belief, while unusual and at odds with established science, is not in itself dangerous or “dark.”

Most practitioners are not actively harmful.

Risks arise mainly from deeper involvement with broader conspiracist worldviews or manipulative communities.

The most effective parental strategies are vigilance, communication, and proactive education on critical thinking and scientific understanding.

Summary Table: Contemporary Flat Earth Movement — Key Facts

Origins and Structure:

Title:

Content: How did Muslim scholars refute the flat Earth theory a thousand years ago?
The flat earth is currently one of the most famous scientific myths widespread in the Arab world, and has private groups on social media met by supporters from all over, and in recent days has been controversial because of statements by the Egyptian artist Mohamed Sobhy.
There are two histories to this theory, not one; the first is ancient and the second is modern.
A number of Greek philosophers believed that the earth was flat, and the ancient Scandinavian and German peoples also believed that the earth was flat and surrounded by oceans, and the common belief in ancient China was that the earth was square and flat while the sky was spherical.
But it ’ s really surprising to know that early astronomers assumed its sphericity, and they were from almost every culture: Pythagoras, who lived about 2,500 years ago, proposed the sphericity of the Earth based on his observations of the moon during the eclipse.
Pythagorean's observations are still evidence of a refutation of the flat Earth theory: Pythagorean observed that the shadow that the Earth casts on the Moon during the eclipse is always round.
Regardless of the moon-facing part of the planet, eclipses occur everywhere in the world.
The idea of a lunar eclipse is simple: put a big lamp in the middle of your room and turn off the rest of the lights, stand at a distance of one meter from it, now turn around while you reach your hands in front of you with a tennis ball, when you give your back to the lamp and pass the tennis ball in the shadow extended in front of you because of your body, this is the eclipse.
To Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes, born 276 BC, was the first to measure the circumference of the Earth using a simple method involving the angle of the Sun at different locations.
Eratosthenes was astonished to read that the columns in the ancient Egyptian temples of Aswan on the afternoon of June 21 of each year did not leave a shadow under them, and the mystery of the wonder was that the columns in Alexandria left a shadow under them on the afternoon of the same day.
Eratosthenes came to the conclusion that the earth must be convex and not flat, otherwise the columns in Alexandria would appear shadowless, and then after reflection Eratosthenes came to the clever idea that we could measure the length of the shadow in Aswan which is zero, and its length in Alexandria, and then measure the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, and infer the circumference of the earth.
The story goes that he sent a man to measure the distance, so that with some simple geometry he could measure the circumference of the Earth, which he concluded was about 39,348 kilometers.
Eratosthenes' account was transferred to the Arabs from among the sciences they translated.
According to Carlo Nelino in his book "Astronomy: A History of the Arabs in the Middle Ages", the Caliph al-Ma'mun al-Abbasi (who ruled from 813 to 833 AD) asked two teams of astronomers to test these calculations and come up with the most accurate measurement of the Earth's circumference....
The safe astronomer.
The method adopted by the Arabs is to go out into a perfectly flat desert, and then rely on the inclination of the polar star in the sky.
The ancients realized that the position of stars in the sky is affected by your place on Earth, the further you travel south, the lower the polar star in the sky until it disappears completely after the equator, and the more you travel north, the higher the polar star sky until it became above your head in the North Pole, which means that the Earth is round, otherwise the position of stars in the sky changes with your place on it.
The height of the polar star (and all other stars) is measured in degrees, and it is like to put a protractor in front of your eyes, the horizon is at zero, and then look at the protractor from the side to find at what degree the polar star stands, and this is something you can do exactly as the ancients did, and now astronomical software is easily available.
Al-Ma'mun astronomers measured the height of the polar star, then moved north once and south once, until the amount of inclination of the polar star changes by one degree, and then measured the distance north and south, and this measured distance is one degree from the circumference of the Earth's circle, and it can know the rest of the circumference of the Earth, because the Earth is a ball, and like any ball, rotation around it requires 360 degrees.
The first team of Al-Ma ’ mun astronomers went out to the Sinjar desert, a small city in northwestern Iraq today, and the second team to the Palmyra desert in eastern Syria, and carried out the same experiments in both places. In the Sinjar desert, for example, the height of the polar star was about 35 degrees. south of the wedge site until the measurement dropped by a degree.
According to al-Ma ’ mun ’ s astronomers, the scale of one degree was about 56 parsecs and two-thirds parsecs, which Nalino calculated — according to Edward Kennedy of the American University of Beirut in a paper published in the Encyclopedia of the History of Arab Sciences — to be 111.8 kilometers, a value used by later researchers such as al-Biruni and al-Toussi.
Calculating the circumference of the Earth in this experiment, it turned out to be about 410,248 km, which was close to modern measurements (40075 km) in the most accurate way at the time.
Note that the difference between the two measurements is about 1,100 years, and the reason for the difference is not related to the same method but to the ellipse of the Earth, as the distance between the two latitudes increases slightly as we head north.
Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni
The second attempt was by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born in September 973 AD, who used the best and easiest formula to calculate the circumference of the Earth in his time.
The Al-Biruni method is based on triangulation, where the sunset is observed from the top of a high mountain overlooking flat ground to the horizon, the astrolabe measures the angle the sun descends relative to the observer on the top of the mountain, where the line connecting the observer on the top of the mountain and the horizon makes the sunset clock touch the planet Earth.
It is known that the tangent of a circle perpendicular to its diameter, and then we have a right-angled triangle at the horizon, and we can measure the radius of the Earth by knowing the height of the mountain, which is mathematically easy.
Currently, the same calculations can be applied by high school students, for example, in all countries of the Arab world, who have a good amount of trigonometry study.
In a study published in the International Journal of Sciences, an Italian team repeated al-Biruni ’ s experiment and concluded that its results for the radius of the Earth are equal to 3,928.77 English miles, which compares favorably, being 2% different, with the average reference radius at the measurement latitude, which is 3,847.80 miles.
Pakistani physicist Mazhar Mahmood Qureshi, in his book An Introduction to Muslim Contributions to Science and Technology, points out that al-Biruni ’ s experience in what is now Nandana Fort in the mountains of northern Pakistan is a typical example of the use of experimental scientific methods.
The most important book of al-Biruni astronomical is "The Law of Masoudi", in which al-Biruni collected all the astronomical problems of his time, and the way of al-Biruni was to present the origins of the matter and the views of the Indian, Greek and Arab astronomers and then weighted between them.
Modern history of flat earth
But at that point, you might ask yourself: if the sphericity of the Earth was obvious to Muslim scholars and their comrades in other parts of the world in ancient times, why did it come back?
In 1849, the English writer Samuel Rowbotham published a pamphlet entitled "Oil Astronomy" (from the Greek letter zeta, not oil), in which he defended the theory of the flat earth, and followed this with another entitled "The Instability of Modern Astronomy and its opposition to the Bible".
In 1883, Rowbotham founded oil societies in England and New York, shipping thousands of copies of his books to talk about flat earth.
Meanwhile, William Carpenter, a printer and native of Greenwich, England, supported Rowbotham and advocated his theory, learning it from John Jasper and preaching to more people than any cleric of his generation in the southern United States. Once.
From here the myth began to branch again in the United States, and then to Europe, and then to the Arab world and the rest of the world, but in this context it was mixed with conspiracy theories concerning secret groups trying to control the world by deluding people that the earth is round.
The proof of the sphericity of the earth is not new, and has a long history in which Muslim scholars have made an influential contribution, but because the “flat earth ” has been transformed from ignorance of the nature of science into a conspiracy theory it has been imported along with other famous theories into our Arab world.
Source: Al Jazeera + Websites

Historical societies (England and New York, 19th century) inspired today’s movement.

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TECH WORLD

Stewart Brand Saw the Future

In his journey from hippie sage to global business consultant, the Whole Earth Catalog founder embodied the shifting spirit of Silicon Valley.

You may have heard the just-so story about environmentalism as we know it. On Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut aboard NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft took a photograph of the faraway surface of a green-and-blue, cloud-marbled planet known to its English-speaking inhabitants as Earth. Published less than a week later on the front page of The New York Times, the image set off a general ecological awakening. The lesson was: Behold the fragile jewel that is your one possession and cherish it accordingly. “Within two years of this picture being taken, the modern environmental movement was born,” Al Gore explained in the book version of An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Gore is one of many to tell the tale, which I most recently encountered in a book by the economist Diane Coyle on the statistical measure known as GDP: “Seeing the earth from space had given us a vivid new perspective,” prompting “concerns about the effect of economic growth on the environment and the planet as a whole.”

Such claims invite skepticism. Can a photo really induce instantaneous enlightenment? As it turns out, climate change and resource depletion have accelerated, not slowed, since publication of the “Earthrise” photograph. Nor has the basic ambiguity of the image been noted often enough: The photo may have encouraged new environmental commitments, but to take it at all entailed leaving the planet behind—much as tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with their fantasies of colonizing space, now imagine humanity doing on a more permanent basis. In this way, an ostensible portal to ecological salvation contains a different implication—in which Earth is, Eurydice-like, glimpsed only to be lost and abandoned. But to enter these objections may be to pitch criticism of the “Earthrise”-as-Eureka meme at too high a level. Prior to 1968, it was by no means unheard-of to encounter mounted globes of the planet, in classrooms and elsewhere. Spin one of these and you can see the whole terrain, as isn’t the case with a photo.

The notion that a revolution in consciousness ought to follow from whole-Earth imagery is most closely associated with Stewart Brand, the Bay Area networker, publisher, booster, and impresario who, toward the end of the 1960s, launched the countercultural handbook the Whole Earth Catalog and, almost two decades later, founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), an important precursor to the internet. As veteran tech journalist John Markoff recounts in his biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, a vision came to Brand after he took LSD on a San Francisco rooftop in 1966. Floating up over the city, in his acidulated imagination, and then beyond the atmosphere, Brand felt a light bulb the size of the globe switch on: “Seeing Earth from space would transform the way we view our planet and ourselves.” All was one and everything was connected. Brand would soon put together a plywood sandwich board emblazoned with the vaguely paranoid query WHY HAVEN’T WE SEEN A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WHOLE EARTH YET? in Day-Glo letters, and wear it, along with a white jumpsuit and feathered top hat, to college campuses.

It was Brand who, in the fall of 1968, scooping The New York Times by several months, put a NASA satellite photo of the planet on the cover of his first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. In tones of somehow giddy responsibility, an early editorial note suggested that human beings held the planet in their hands: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” More practically, Brand’s semiannual catalog would function as a sort of Sears-Roebuck resource for hippie homesteaders, enabling them to set up their lives after their own fashion, beyond the administered patterns of bureaucracy and suburbia.

Yet this vision of an interconnected planet ultimately led Brand, now in his eighties, beyond the 1960s idyll. As a hippie sage, he’d proposed a DIY counterculture as the logical expression of a properly planetary point of view. Later on, his enthusiasm for the burgeoning internet suggested to fans such as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos that, in fact, it was a global network of communication and commerce that best embodied the truth that the world is a single entity made up of interconnected inhabitants. The title of Fred Turner’s 2006 study, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism, neatly captures the arc of Brand’s singular career. It also poses the question of whether the cyberculture of the 1980s and beyond should be seen as a betrayal or, instead, a fulfillment of the counterculture of the 1960s. In both periods, Brand insisted on placing the relevant “tools”—whether psychedelic drugs or personal computers—in the hands of individuals. And in both cases, he hoped the result might be a world of newfound individual satisfaction and collective responsibility.

Born in 1938, Stewart Brand preceded by more than half a dozen years the earliest of the baby boomers. If the boomers were a generation whose outlook and trajectory he often seemed to anticipate—from early countercultural forays, to a later embrace of PCs and the internet, to a final accommodation with big business—it must have helped that in relationship to them he possessed the confidence and sophistication of an older brother, without ever projecting the authority of a parent.

Brand’s hometown, Rockford, Illinois, furnished the subject of a 1949 photo essay in Life, because the magazine’s editors judged it the most typical city in the country. And the Brand household does seem a distillate of postwar America. Brand’s father was a partner in a local advertising firm—much as Brand himself would later operate as a publicist for countercultural ideas and products. In the father’s ham-radio hobby, it’s also possible to spy the son’s future embrace of the personalized, as opposed to bureaucratic, employment of technology. As for Mrs. Brand, a Vassar-educated homemaker and “space fanatic,” her passion for exploration of the New Frontier recurs throughout her son Stewart’s life, from his boyhood attachment to a book called The Conquest of Space onward. In recent years, Brand traveled with Jeff Bezos through the Western United States to find a site for Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company.

The brightest thread running from Brand’s youth to his later years may be the individualism he articulated in a diary entry from 1957, when he was still a teenager. Should the United States and the USSR come to blows, he told himself, “I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty.” Such Cold War self-reliance was complicated, however, by Brand’s classes at Stanford, where he majored in biology: “At long last,” he wrote his parents, “I’m getting what I was looking for in biology: ecology, ‘the interrelation between living organisms and their environment ...’ This is the ‘living whole, not the dead parts.’” Much of the organizing tension of Brand’s life—as a promoter of environment and community, on the one hand, and of technologically equipped personal freedom, on the other—comes from his efforts to square his youthful individualism with the ecologically minded holism he discovered in college. The Whole Earth Catalog would call for planetary life to be seen as one integrated system and, at the same time, seek to release its readers into splendid isolation, through “access to tools for self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,” as early copy had it. The question has always been whether these two aims were complementary, as the Catalog suggested without really stating as much, or contradictory.

In June 1960, Brand, the future icon of the counterculture, attended Stanford’s commencement ceremony in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps dress uniform. Little about the next two years he spent in the Army appealed to him, besides the opportunity to take photographs from a C-123 transport plane. According to Markoff, he passed the bulk of his time at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, attempting, without success, to use “his skills with a camera and typewriter” to secure a new posting in Europe, as a military photographer or public affairs officer. Unsurprisingly, Army life chafed against Brand’s individualism. Drawing on several dozen interviews with its subject over four years, Whole Earth comes across as something like a third-person memoir, and here as elsewhere Markoff sticks to Brand’s point of view: “Right here in America [Brand] was experiencing regimentation, pettiness, and institutionalized stupidity—all the attributes he hated about communism.” Granted early release from the Army to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, Brand packed up his VW bus and, in August 1962, lit out for the Bay Area.

Within a few months, the former second lieutenant was regularly ingesting considerable quantities of LSD under the auspices of the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park. As Brand, who would take acid throughout the ’60s, wrote to a friend: “I vote Yes on drugs. Yes with huge capital letters that spill over into everything else.” Less rhapsodically, he also defended psychedelics in a letter to his concerned parents back in Illinois, who, in spite of their misgivings, continued to subsidize Stewart’s bohemian lifestyle: cheap San Francisco lodgings; hallucinogenic socializing; and a more or less stalled journalistic career, consisting in large part of failed pitches to The New York Times.

Like many people in his Bay Area milieu, Brand associated psychedelics with the possibility of a new kind of society lying beyond the staid, salaried, hierarchical variety he’d inherited as a child of the postwar Midwest. After a friend who had participated in enough indigenous peyote sessions to acquire the title of a “roadman,” or leader of peyote meetings, introduced Brand to the drug, he ate peyote buttons in the company of Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico. The experience fortified Brand’s penchant for big-picture consciousness, ratifying “his conclusion,” as Markoff puts it, “that for whites, time was a rapid sequence, whereas Indian life was land time. It was geological and astronomical.” Brand soon requested and received admission into the Native American Church, complete with membership card.

In 1964, Brand’s attraction to indigenous society converged with his training as a photographer to produce a portable multimedia spectacle or “ambitious traveling sensorium,” in Markoff’s words, called America Needs Indians! In miscellaneous venues around the Bay Area (a courtyard, a nightspot, an architect’s studio ...), Brand would project on a pair of screens photos he’d taken on Indian reservations, as well as images of middle American life, to a soundtrack of chanting and drumming. “One of the first multimedia exhibitions defining an emerging American counterculture,” in Markoff’s description, America Needs Indians! was screened at one of the Bay Area psychedelic parties that Ken Kesey called his Acid Tests. The work’s message seems to have been that the audience might learn to emulate the Indians’ communal, rooted, ecstatic life. “To many of us—white kids who had grown up watching Westerns in the fifties—these revelations struck like lightning bolts,” recalled Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Tests. Before long, Brand, with his talent for networking, was helping Kesey to organize a successor happening, the Trips Festival, at San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall.

Brand and Lois Jennings, the half-Ottawa mathematician who would become his first wife, promoted the Trips parties wearing what Markoff calls “Native American regalia.” Revolutions, whether real or merely would-be, typically present themselves as reviving the spirit of some previous historical period, and, during the ’60s and ’70s, the real or would-be cultural revolution that came to be called the counterculture often liked to invoke pre–Wounded Knee Indian societies for this purpose. The geographical shift of the counterculture, circa 1970, away from cities and college towns and toward rural communes, only reinforced this tendency, for the obvious reason that the indigenous peoples of North America (at least after the abandonment of cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan) lived on the land rather than in conurbations.

No publication flattered this back-to-the-land shift more than the Whole Earth Catalog, started in 1968 with the decisive assistance of an inheritance from Brand’s adman father. Consisting of information “continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff,” the publication turned its readers on to how to order farm implements and carpentry tools, Volkswagen repair manuals and Carlos Castañeda novels, bamboo flutes, calculators, Army surplus jackets, and potters’ wheels, as well as larger “tools” like canoes and geodesic domes, all with the idea of facilitating a hazily indigenous rural self-sufficiency, along somehow modern lines. In this, it drew inspiration from Aquarian settlements in rural Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere, with names like Drop City, Libre, and the Lama Foundation, which promised to bring communitarian self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship into harmony. The idea appealed to many more counterculturalists than those who actually decamped to the countryside, as a vision of the good life—good for you and good for the planet, too—they might one day realize.

A contradiction inhabited the heart of the project. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner writes that the back-to-the-landers who “embraced the notion that small-scale technologies could transform the individual consciousness and, with it, the nature of community” also “celebrated imagery of the American frontier. Many communards saw themselves as latter-day cowboys and Indians, moving out onto the open plains to find a better life.” Much as Brand and the readers of his Whole Earth Catalog did, the passage confounds settler colonialists with the indigenous people they displaced, as if these antagonistic parties were one and the same. In retrospect, the back-to-the-land movement consisted of cowboys (in the sense of transient settlers, with an unsustainable relationship to the earth) who liked to imagine themselves as Indians (in the sense of a rooted and symbiotic relationship to nonhuman life). The movement’s rural communes almost all succumbed to bankruptcy or strife before the 1970s were out, and expired. By that time, Brand himself had noticed that compact cities made for a more efficient use of energy and materials anyway.

Brand has been a compulsive founder of new institutions—from the Whole Earth Catalog’s more intellectual heir, CoEvolution Quarterly (1974); to the digital community known as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (1985); to a corporate consultancy, the Global Business Network (1987); and, finally, to something called the Long Now Foundation (1996). In the fall 1975 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, Brand ran 25 pages of stories on “space colonies”: “Practical, Desirable, Profitable, Ready in 15 years,” announced the cover. The physicist Gerard K. O’Neill insisted that “Space Colonies show promise of being able to solve, in order, the Energy Crisis, the Food Crisis, the Arms Race, and the Population Problem.” Such extraterrestrial environmentalism provoked indignant responses from many of Brand’s readers. It was clearly less the gesture of a self-created Indian than that of a cowboy, with a taste for new frontiers.

Brand had imagined the Whole Earth Catalog not only as a clearinghouse for information on useful commodities but, through the publication of letters and product reviews from its readers, as host to a geographically diffuse, nonhierarchical community. In this sense, the Catalog can be seen as a sluggish, analog anticipation of the internet: In 2005, Steve Jobs, who often invoked Brand as an inspiration, described it as “Google before Google.” Living among the computer programmers of the Bay Area, Brand was well-placed to hail the emerging cyberculture of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and in a 1972 article for Rolling Stone he’d already announced: “Ready or not, computers are coming for the people.” As a magazine publisher familiar with the travails of manual typesetting and longhand bookkeeping, the Brand of the early 1980s found word processors and spreadsheets the most immediately mind-blowing feature of PCs. More astutely, he also perceived that a web of networked personal computers could—like the Whole Earth Catalog, but at a different scale and speed—bring into being specialized and temporary communities of far-flung people, united by shared interests: the sort of thing familiar to us today as Reddit forums or Facebook groups.

In the early ’80s, Brand joined the faculty at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, which pioneered “the use of teleconferencing,” as Markoff says, to bring together scholars in various related fields. This experience led to Brand’s establishment of the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, which charged its users’ credit cards a few dollars each month so that from their separate terminals they might participate in digital “newsgroups” on whatever subjects interested them. For reasons of both personal liberty and legal liability, WELL users retained title to their own content (“you own your own words”). In practice, they didn’t discuss ecology or geopolitics or even technology so much as the Grateful Dead, a band beloved by hippies and programmers alike.

The savvy Brand also gave tech journalists access for free. The idea was that an amorphous, leaderless, nonhierarchical flock of discussants of anything and everything would shepherd one another toward a continuously better-informed state of mind. “On the one hand,” Brand stood up and said at a Hackers Conference in 1984, “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.... On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower all the time.” Both aspects of the statement proved prescient: Here was a casual prophecy of the expensive IP (vaccine recipes; superhero franchises ...) and cheap posting habits of our own digital culture. It’s less easy today to endorse what Brand told a San Francisco journalist around the same time: “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.” Angels must delight in bandying about ill-tempered fallacies more than theologians had suspected.

Over recent decades, Brand has become less a prophet than a consultant. Through his Global Business Network, “THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT,” as a Fortune profile called him, has counseled corporate boards on flexibility, adaptiveness, and learning. Here were the familiar precepts of neoliberal capital—a regime ever more spontaneous as to organization, and ever more unequal as to money and power—in Brand’s preferred idioms of biological evolution, systems theory, and self-education. Markoff writes that GBN “rose to prominence based on several big ideas: that globalization would change everything, computer networks would change everything, and the internet would change everything.” These two or three ideas are also, in another way, none. To predict that everything will change is not to identify the differential components of transformation and persistence that make any emergent phenomenon, including global capitalism, legible at all. At most, pointing hectically to globalization indicates the setting—Brand’s whole Earth again—of the titanic development.

Stewart Brand is an earnest and serious-minded person. Nevertheless, one of his moments of illumination, as related by Markoff, caused me to laugh out loud. Here Markoff recounts the courtship of Brand and Patty Phelan, his second wife, in the 1970s: “Brand and Phelan lay on a hillside in the late afternoon sun. He had taken off his shirt, and he suddenly realized that she had taken off hers as well. Phelan, who was living with someone else at the time, had fallen for Brand head over heels, and it would soon be apparent that he had finally found his great love.” It’s as if the baring of Phelan’s breasts unveils, at one fell swoop, a destined and enduring love.

Everyone knows that breasts lie under women’s clothing in much the way that everyone knows that Earth is a frail blue dot zooming through space: These things are always the case, only mostly you don’t see as much. Nothing is so hippieish about Brand as his sense that radical improvements to life as we know it derive naturally, or at any rate ought to, from sudden, flashing revelations of the already known, glimpsed as if for the first time. The principal undertaking of Brand’s Long Now Foundation, the main preoccupation of his later years, has been to build, with funding from Jeff Bezos, an enormous clock that chimes only once a century, with the aim of promoting “long-term THINKING” of the kind otherwise in short supply in the twenty-first–century United States. Like the planet in its entirety, deep time is always there, and often overlooked.

Brand has surely been right in believing that to register the full dimensions of Earth, and the whole span of historical and evolutionary time, would be the start of wisdom. The trouble is that this enthusiast of new beginnings so often mistook such preliminary awareness for a meaningful conclusion. The revolution in consciousness promoted by Brand forever toggled between two vastly different scales: the planetary, and the individual. Its great shortcoming was that it never learned, or seriously studied, how best to integrate the two scales—that of the liberated individual, on the one hand, and the imperiled planet, on the other—through human institutions on an intermediate scale. There was only the dead end of the commune, or the default of the corporation. And so a kind of smog of dissipated insight hangs over Brand’s life and that of the boomers. You might even say it covers the earth.

The modern movement is decentralized, relying on global online communities.

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Indian farmers protest near New Delhi on December 11, 2020. (Photo: Randeep Maddoke/Wikimedia Commons)

Building the Global Movement

By centering the movement-building process—we transcend the historical failures of elite constitutional design and build the strategic capacity to mobilize the necessary resources in sufficient time to reconstruct our global political economy, avoiding the worst possible climate futures.

Ben Manski

Does the process of constitution-making matter more than the particularities of constitutional design? Recently published research by a growing range of social scientists and legal scholars indicates yes. For instance, in their book Constituents Before Assembly, Todd Eisenstadt, A. Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi provide their findings from a sweeping empirical analysis of the effects of popular participation in constitutionalization. The takeaway? As noted in my Law & Society Review review, "participatory constitution-making…has a lasting and systematic effect on subsequent democratization."

Regardless of the particular terrains on which global constitutionalization moves forward, it is the deliberative mobilization of millions of peoples that ultimately is vital to success.

My own doctoral research built on the works of Maboudi and his colleagues, as well as sundry others, and asked about the role of democracy movements in making constitutions. A comparative analysis of the eleven top-30 GDP countries that underwent formal constitutionalization processes between 1974 and 2001 showed that the strategies of democracy movements in relation to constitutional openings were significantly determinative of subsequent democratization. In cases where such movements engaged in a revolutionary constitutional practice (mass engagement in deliberative constitutionalism from below, producing clearly articulated constitutional programs as in Brazil, Canada, Poland, South Africa, and Spain), both textual and substantive democratization followed. In cases where democracy movements failed to practice revolutionary constitutionalism (Australia, China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey), the outcomes ranged from middling to disastrous.

Of course, these stories are complex. But the argument involves, in part, the ideas expressed in this excerpt:

"A social movement can be defined as a collective application of human energies through the medium of society for the purpose of agitating and reconfiguring social relations toward common goals. Thus, a social movement is a wave. There is significant variation among different movement forms in their scope and intensity. When constitutional movements arise, they assemble broad coalitions out of diverse sectors of society. As a result, if successful, their effects extend far beyond formal law."

What does this mean for the idea of an Earth Constitution? Among other things, it suggests that approaches to global constitutional change that center the state, government, governance, nations, and existing global institutions are misguided. Yes, we should consider plural approaches to constitutional change. And the structures through which movements move matter; they condition possibilities. But regardless of the particular terrains on which global constitutionalization moves forward, it is the deliberative mobilization of millions of peoples that ultimately is vital to success.

By centering the movement-building process—in this case, the question of how a global constitutional movement builds itself through plural yet concerted democratic engagements—we transcend the historical failures of elite constitutional design and build the strategic capacity to mobilize the necessary resources in sufficient time to reconstruct our global political economy, avoiding the worst possible climate futures. The emerging technological revolutions of this period make possible decentralized coordination on a global scale. The prefigurative constitutionalisms of earlier efforts such as the Constitution for the Federation of Earth as well as the more recent Encuentros, Cochabamba, Occupy, Movement for Black Lives, solidarity economy, climate strike, and Social Forum processes, among others, make a global constitutional transition from below that much more likely.

The question that matters most is not whether an Earth Constitution is a good or necessary idea. It is also not what we, ourselves, believe the design of such a constitution should be. The question we must take up is that of how to engage hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings in a mass constitution-making process from below.

This article was originally published on the Great Transition Initiative as part of the Forum "An Earth Constitution: Has Its Time Come?"

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Ben Manski

Ben Manski is Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Mason University where he is building new programs in Next System Studies. Manski’s work takes in social movements, law, politics, climate and ecology, and the corporation, focusing on democracy, democratization, constitutionalism, next system studies, and he has published widely on these themes. Manski is a lifelong union member. He was an instigator of many pro-democracy mobilizations and organizations, including the Democracy Teach-Ins (1996), 180/Movement for Democracy and Education (1998), Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution (2004), Move to Amend (2010), Wisconsin Wave (2011), and the Global Climate Strikes (2014).

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Notable Advocates: Mainly alternative media personalities (YouTubers, event speakers); rare involvement of mainstream celebrities like Egyptian artist Mohamed Sobhy, who has sparked regional debate.

Main Arguments: Focus on visual observation, conspiracy theories about scientific institutions, misinterpretations of physics, and religious literalism.

Demographics: Supporters found worldwide, most active among young to middle-aged adults consuming alternative media; no consistent pattern for gender or economics.

Risks: Broadly seen as harmless, but deep involvement may lead to social isolation, distrust, or further conspiratorial thinking.

Parental Action: Emphasize respectful communication and education on critical thinking and evidence-based understanding.

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Content: Malaysian minister: Time for urgent joint action to find innovative solutions to climate issue - Sunrise Portal
Thursday 7 December 2023 9: 21 AM Cairo Cairo 24 °
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Malaysia: Time for urgent joint action to find innovative climate solutions
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Published on: Thursday 7 December 2023 - 9: 07 AM | Last updated on Thursday 7 December 2023 - 9: 07 AM
The COP28 Religions Pavilion continued for the sixth consecutive day, with several sessions focused on wise leadership for the transition to clean technology, religious philanthropy catalysing climate action, and increased trust and transparency for a just transition to clean energy.
The Interfaith Pavilion began with a speech by Lekibria Kanogam, the youngest climate activist in the world, and the founder of the Children ’ s Movement for Climate Justice, who is 12 years old, praising the organization of the Faith Pavilion for the first time in the history of the COP to support solutions to climate challenges, through the profound impact of religious and spiritual values to save the planet. These impacts challenge the delicate balance of ecosystems, which we all have a responsibility to protect the planet.
She stressed that the announcement of Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, to establish a $30 billion fund for climate solutions globally, is a realistic and tangible start to confront the climate crisis, which requires all governments to work together to ensure a just transition of renewable energy to protect the future of future generations.
The first session, entitled “The Libra Earth Charter for Life ”, provided a glimpse of the Libra journey, with the aim of launching this pioneering movement in the future. Participants reviewed the suffering of many people due to climate change, as well as the provisions of the Earth Charter for Life Covenant through fundamental principles and the possibility of helping to form a global interfaith movement to promote environmental action, values-based education, youth advocacy and participation.
In the second session, entitled “Wise Leadership for the Transition to Clean Technology ”, participants discussed the role of empty places of worship in the transition to renewable energy and the profound impact of individual choices on the environment and the power of collective action. Influence policy changes towards a sustainable future.
The participants in the third session, entitled “Religious Philanthropy: A Catalyst for Climate Action ”, stressed that religious philanthropy plays a transformative role in bridging the financing gap for climate challenges to save the planet from the dangers of climate encroachment. Implement policies to reduce the risks of climate change.
The participants in the fourth session, “Increasing trust and transparency for a fair energy transition under the Paris Agreement, ” stressed the need to work transparently to address climate challenges to enhance trust between actors, based on recent studies in different countries, and to develop results related to local climate action and a fair energy transition.
The fifth session, entitled “Clerics Telling Stories from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis, ” presented real-life stories about how their religious communities have been affected by floods, fires, droughts and hurricanes, and how they are responding as religious leaders not only to rebuild, but to try to reduce the climate emergency by changing climate patterns.
Nak Ahmed Nazmi, Minister of Natural Resources, Environment and Climate Change, Malaysia, who participated in the fifth session, stressed that the time has come to take urgent and concrete joint actions, find innovative solutions, and involve all segments of society in climate action, pointing out that the commitment to environment and sustainability is rooted in our Malaysian culture, which has the greatest biodiversity, cultural and religious backgrounds.
The COP28 Religions Pavilion, organized by the Muslim Council of Elders in cooperation with the Presidency of COP28, the Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence of the United Arab Emirates and the United Nations Environment Programme, includes many events and activities, including about 70 dialogue sessions and more than 300 speakers from around the world.
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Detailed Report

The contemporary Flat Earth movement draws its roots from the 19th-century revival of the belief by British writer Samuel Rowbotham but has reached far more people through the Internet since the 2010s.

The movement today no longer relies on formal, centralized organizations.

Instead, it consists of a vast number of online communities formed around social media groups, YouTube channels, discussion forums, and event-based gatherings.

Online platforms have facilitated the movement’s spread not only in English-speaking countries but also across regions such as the Arab world.

Rather than being dominated by legacy societies from England or New York, the global network now acts through a patchwork of decentralized, often private groups .

Specific Organizations and Public Figures:
- Modern Flat Earth societies reference 19th-century groups but are now organized mainly through digital affinity groups, not traditional membership organizations.

- Online communities flourish in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, often with region-specific social media groups.
- Notable individual advocates are typically alternative media personalities—social media influencers, YouTubers, or event organizers—rather than widely recognized celebrity figures.
-

In the Arab world, Egyptian performer Mohamed Sobhy is among the few mainstream celebrities who have generated controversy and discussion publicly associating with Flat Earth claims .

Common Arguments Used by Flat Earth Believers:
1.

The horizon appears flat to the naked eye, supposedly disproving curvature.

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Content: When it comes to space, failure isn't just an option — it's a requirement

Sometime next month, SpaceX will likely try to launch the largest rocketship ever flown, known as the Starship. If successful, this flight will herald a new space age, as humanity opens the solar system. This begs the question: Will it fail or will it succeed? And if it fails, what will it mean?

Anyone familiar with space movies, or who has visited a NASA gift shop, knows the phrase "Failure is not an option." Actually, it is. In truth, if one is to win at anything, failure is a requirement. We only learn by what we learn from making mistakes. That is if — and this is an important "if" — we accept the learning we gain from the failure and apply it to our future endeavors.

The exploration and development of space are no exceptions. Or rather, they highlight the rule.

Related: Spaceflight: Danger at every phase (infographic)

Generally speaking (and in my humble opinion) there are four types of failures when launching a rocket or rocketship.

  • 1. A new, untested tested technology or group of technologies fail.
  • 2. An incorrectly tested technology or group of technologies fail.
  • 3. Humans in the loop ignore rules or design criteria from their own plans or cut corners, usually for financial, performance or political reasons.
  • 4. Having had one of the three types of failures above, no learning has occurred, or learning did occur and was ignored, and they happen again.

While any "rapid unscheduled disassembly" (RUD as some engineers jokingly call a rocket explosion) is a problem, number 1 in my list is an expected part of the development of any new complex system. Sadly, and by far, it is the second, third and fourth failure categories that most often result in tragedy. The two most spectacular American instances of this were the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters. In both cases, the failures were predictable, if not specifically identifiable.

Like all NASA human spaceflight programs, the space shuttle program was a rock star show of enormous proportions and massive implications for the agency and the government. In both cases, the inconvenient truths of possible deadly mishaps or results were spotlighted before the accidents by members of the mission management teams. While the case of the Columbia disaster is more complex and nuanced, in the case of Challenger, clear warnings from savvy employees were ignored because the show had to go on, and, sadly, people died.

Due to fear of such high-profile failures, our space agency usually over-corrects, or perhaps more correctly, over-corrects for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way, as every tiny malfunction, mishap and mistake becomes the fodder of media pundits and agenda-driven critics. Witness the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) — as it was rolled out to the launch pad, rolled back, rolled out and rolled back, as engineers worked to assure everything was perfect — even as the wait, the holds and the rollbacks themselves actually added potential risk to the system.

In the end, the politically designed contraption flew — successfully, on the Artemis 1 mission, but if this is to be the vehicle that opens the solar system, such fragility means none of us are going any time soon — if ever. It's all just too precious. Yes, I was one of those critics. I still am. And while an in-depth discussion of the disastrous pork program I've long called the Senate Launch Scam must wait for another time, it is clear that even as the space agency tries to rationalize one of the most expensive and complex rockets ever built, it is ironically hostage to its fear of failure. Failure made more likely by the very system that created the vehicle in the first place.

Related: The 10 greatest images from NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission

This is no one's fault. It is a result of a systemic fault created over time. Today, especially in the government, too much rides on every liftoff. The weight of fear of failure means that it will not be gravity that stops the human breakout into the universe, it will be bureaucracy, and a system that has gone off its tracks and rolled off the playing field into a swamp of its own making.

But it wasn't always that way. Starting after World War II, as missiles previously designed to kill people in wars and tested under the military's cloak of secrecy began to be employed in exploration, experts understood that, when testing new tech, failure wasn't just an option. It was the rule — until the cameras showed up.

A good example occurred in the late 1950s, as the massive global science project known as the International Geophysical Year (IGY) was getting underway. Launching shiny objects into space was an obvious yet new exploration arena, and those in charge adopted fairly pragmatic expectations. In the U.S., the National Academy of Sciences agreed that if only one of every six satellites in the program made it into space, it would be considered successful. Flying on the Air Force's Vanguard rocket, three of them did. Yet to many in Washington and the public, the program was considered a failure.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were driving hard, and while they had their own fair share of failures, some of them spectacular, the world would only hear of those that succeeded. To be clear, Soviet, Russian and Chinese space failures deserve their own essays and volumes, and in many cases make the causes and results of U.S. failures seem small by comparison. This is in some ways the point. When you allow the world to watch, and give taxpayers a veto based on what they see, the pressure to perform becomes a force of its own.

For example, under pressure from the Soviet Union's Sputnik surprise, from 1958 to 1960 NASA tried eight times to launch Pioneer satellites to the moon using early variations of the Atlas rocket. One probe was never launched. The others all failed. Only Pioneer 5 could be called a success.

Thus, NASA was born in the spotlight. And it was forced to either entertain the taxpayers for its funding or be dragged off the financial stage. Failure, even expected failure, even failure followed by success, became less and less of an option. It just didn't make for good TV, and bad TV shows get … well, they get canceled.

NASA's official history website is surprisingly frank in its assessment of this reality (italics mine):

"(The Atlas failures) made plain that success on space missions would be neither automatic nor cheap. There was a price to pay, and part of that price was the failure of some missions. This price NASA management would never find comfortable. The trouble with a philosophy of accepting a certain number of failures as normal and inevitable was that even 'learning failures' in an open program like NASA's, conducted under the watchful eye of a whole world, looked to the public and Congress like absolute failures. The press treated them as failures. It didn't matter that previous development projects like the V-2, Atlas, Thor, Polaris and almost any other major rocket development one could name, had had their share of unsuccessful early firings, and that this had been accepted as a necessary growing pain. Those difficulties had been hardly visible under the cloak of military secrecy. But space program difficulties were highly visible and distressing."

"Distressing." An understatement, to be sure. It became clear to supporters of NASA that, in many ways, our space program wasn't just about exploration or strategic victory over our communist opponents. It was entertainment. Thus, the show must go on. Whether it meant creating massively over-engineered systems, massively over-papered bureaucracies or both, NASA had to be damn sure that whenever the eyes of the world were on it, its people would deliver a Right Stuff performance.

Thanks to an incredible level of proficiency on the part of NASA's team, for the most part, this approach worked during the Apollo program. Yes, there were terrible disasters like the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three of the agency's top young astronauts. But that disaster happened during practice, and no one was watching. It slowed down the program, as NASA reviewed its mistakes, and made serious improvements in its systems and procedures. But had the fatal fire happened live on screen, the entire program would most likely have slipped years into the future as the various branches of the government each took their turn at reviewing how such heroes could have died — and quite possibly, given the horrible nature of their death in a burning capsule, it might have ended the entire program.

Related: NASA's 17 Apollo moon missions in pictures

What is remarkable about Apollo is that there were so few significant failures. Think about it. NASA went from almost zero spaceflight experience to humans on the moon in less than 10 years, with only three people dead in one major accident — which didn't occur during a mission. Yes, there were spacecraft failures and blow-ups, but history has already correctly rewarded the entire program with a well-deserved mark of excellence. Ever hear the term "Moon shot?"

Then, as I mentioned, came the shuttle program, with an entirely different system and an almost all-new management team, given the time lag between the end of Apollo in 1972 and the first flight of Columbia in 1981. Ironically, the space shuttle was supposed to be the system that would make human access to space safe and routine. It was almost the opposite. To get it funded, the original plan was compromised to save money and gain support. For example, as proposed to Congress, the shuttle system consisted of two totally reusable flyback systems that would take off vertically and land on runways, ready to fly again. As political sausage-making took over, however, this approach was replaced by the massive hydrogen and oxygen tanks and solid rocket boosters we are familiar with today.

As is usual when trying to win votes, political games took precedence over practicality. Worse, while trying to deal with the political compromises being forced on it to get the funding it needed for its dream ship, NASA layered even more bad choices into the mix. Here's one example of many cited in the many retrospective books on the disaster: To win votes from the then-powerful Utah congressional delegation, military intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) solid rocket manufacturer Morton Thiokol in Utah was chosen to manufacture solid rocket booster segments that had to fit perfectly together. These were then shipped to the Cape in Florida on their sides on train cars over hundreds of miles of railroads.

In the end, the shuttle was only partially reusable, and became so complex that the entire vehicle had to be torn apart and rebuilt between flights. It was, according even to NASA leadership, a recipe for disaster. After Challenger, former NASA Administrator Norm Augustine mentioned on a conference call his concern for a program based on "flying space shuttles in circles until another one falls out of the sky." And it did. And it was Columbia.

So now the shuttle program is gone. Frankly, this is a good thing, in spite of all the good it did to inspire a generation. I helped make it go away. It was too expensive and dangerous, and rather than helping open the space frontier, it was helping keep it closed. Once the quasi-military propaganda campaign to win the race to the moon was won by Apollo, our government should have switched to commercial fleets to take over basic shipping and people-carrying to and from space, just as we do in the rest of our economy. A group of us in the Space Frontier Foundation spent over a decade making that happen. Eventually, at least to and from the International Space Station, we won.

This begs the question: Are private space transportation systems safer? Are private operators more careful than government agency contractors? Good questions. The first answer is that no engineer or project manager ever wants anyone to get hurt — no matter who they work for. But systems don't care, and systems designed around an internal conflict between the need to break things to learn things, and not being able to break things because it doesn't look good, are inherently dangerous.

At the end of the day, blowing up very expensive hardware is not fun for anyone, government or commercial. Unfortunately, sometimes one has to blow up a few things to get things right, and the way our culture is wired, the private sector has more freedom to do so than NASA right now — at least the part of the sector with enough money to blow up stuff and replace it.

And so, here we are. In the coming weeks, Elon Musk, the man who has blown up more big rockets than anyone in the last 10 years, will try to fly the biggest rocketship of all time, the Starship. But, if you recall my opening list of why rockets blow up, Mr. Musk has focused on #1 — blowing up new and untested rockets to learn how to make them better. Better yet, he and his team are actually applying — rather than ignoring — their data to make the next rocketship safer! This is where he and other NewSpace companies have a distinct advantage over their government competitors. Their process is complete when they deliver a highly reliable, low-cost, reusable space transportation system that actually works.

A good way to spot a technology-edge crossing company that is a bad investment is one that does not have this built into their budget, either through overconfidence or naivete. A potentially successful company combines vision with pragmatic pessimism. They err on the side of expecting early failure, and their budget includes funding reserved to try again until they get it right. Thus, to these companies the optics of failures do not matter as much as the application of lessons learned by those failures. Be it satellite companies, government customers or, eventually, citizen space pioneers, there is no inherent conflict in the success metric for a private commercial space transportation provider. It delivers, or it does not. The market handles the rest.

And so, as critics and competitors wail at his failures, Elon has rolled out, blown up, rolled out and blown up half a dozen test vehicles to get to the point he and his SpaceX team are at today.

So what about Starship and the Super Heavy monster first stage on which it will ride? Well, we know Starship has been vetted, broken and vetted again, but Super Heavy has not. Yes, SpaceX has fired the engines many times. And in some cases, they have not worked perfectly, so engineeers made some tweaks and fired them again. But will they all work when needed? Will all of the myriad of systems work that are required in order to push that shiny but heavy-as-hell rocketship sitting on top of it all the way to a successful splashdown or landing? We shall see.

What we do know is that, if it doesn't work, two things will be true: 1. Unless there is some strange anomaly in its trajectory if it fails, no one will likely die. 2. If it does fail, you can bet SpaceX will find out what went wrong, fix it, roll out another one and fly it again. And from what I know of Elon, Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, who's running the Starship launch program) and the team at SpaceX, they will keep trying until they succeed. But they won't stop there. According to their plans, Starship, once proven, will be flown dozens, if not hundreds of times, carrying satellites and other commercial cargo into space before a single human life is put at risk in one of the hundreds of available seats they will screw into the floor once those flights prove the system is safe.

Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing transportation system

This is part of the genius of Musk and SpaceX's plan. They have created their first customer base in the form of their own Starlink internet satellites, which can launch in the thousands on Starship. These relatively tiny revenue-producing robotic phone lines in the sky will fund SpaceX's development program and safety certification. Their own products will pay for the development of their own product as that product makes those products cheaper to use and vice versa. (It's brilliant, but I don't want Elon to know that, lest it goes to his head.) Thus, Musk can get his transportation system operating by risking his own money, then transition to outside customers who want their missions flown at less risk and then, in the long run, drive the risk down so low it will make sense for those first brave human pioneers to climb aboard and head off to the moon and eventually Mars. (Not to oversimplify, as each of those destinations will require yet another series of capabilities and the development of new systems.)

Contrast this with the broken system at NASA. Having just flown a significantly delayed first flight of an empty spacecraft on Artemis 1, it will be nearly another two years before the next flight, Artemis 2, attempts to carry a crew around the moon in a redux of the flight of Apollo 8 over 55 years ago, using a system — the SLS rocket and Orion capsule — that is essentially the same as those developed 70 years ago. One might expect it to be cheaper and more reliable given its heritage, but no, the opposite is true. At an estimated $4 billion per flight, the SLS is so expensive and complex that it will only fly every couple of years. This pace assures a stale learning curve and the turnover of experienced team members during the program's lifetime. Meanwhile, with the cameras of the world (and, more importantly, U.S. taxpayers) on them, each crewed SLS flight becomes so precious, once again, that failure will not be an option — within a system that increases the probability that it will occur.

Meanwhile, Musk states that Starship will eventually cost just a couple of million dollars a flight. I know too many engineers to believe such a number, so let's make it 10 times as much, $20 million a flight. That's still massively cheaper than SLS. On top of this, Starship will be racking up dozens of flights a year carrying expendable mobile phone systems and other commercial and (interestingly) NASA payloads. Some may fail, technologies will be replaced and upgraded, but the flight teams will become even more honed — before the first human payload enters the airlock.

Hopefully, the SLS will become obsolete before it is called on to try to carry too many astronauts into space. This is for the simple and obvious reason that all the government paperwork in the world, all the covering of one's behind and all the going slow and being afraid of breaking anything will not make up for a broken system that has lost the ability to build things, break things and then build them better, something our government used to understand and seems to have unlearned.

So, when you watch the upcoming first test flight of Starship and Super Heavy, understand it is a test. It is not the Super Bowl or World Cup. It is practice for the Super Bowl. It is a rehearsal for the World Cup. If SpaceX fails, they will learn, just as the other new commercial spaceship companies are learning. If they succeed, they will also learn; soon enough, they will fail anyway. Yet the difference will be that the necessity of that failure is understood, the minds to learn from it are open to the knowledge it will provide, the risks next time will be mitigated, and the commitment to getting back up and trying again is built into the game plan.

The difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner gets back up, learns from what they did wrong and does it again.

This is how we win the future.

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Founder of SpaceFund, Earthlight Foundation, Space Frontier Foundation and New Worlds Institute

Both a rebel and a respected leader, Rick is listed as one of the top 100 influential people in the space field. Called one of the world’s top space “visionaries,” Rick helped coin the term "NewSpace" and worked to create the new commercial space industry highlighted by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

A leading writer, speaker, and six-time Congressional witness, Rick helped start the first mission to find water on the Moon, signed the first ever commercial data purchase agreement with NASA, helped start NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, led the commercial takeover of the Russian Mir space station, signed the first private astronaut to fly to the space station, co-founded the Space Frontier Foundation, and was a founding board member of the X-Prize.

As a result of his world-changing work, in 2015 he won the World Technology Award along with Craig Venter of the Human Genome project. He founded the SpaceFund venture capital company with 19 space companies in its portfolio and is a member of the US Space Force Doctrine Advisory Group.

Rick's The Space Revolution "radiopod" is featured on IHeart Radio Network's iRoc Space Radio and is available on most major podcast sites. He hosts the New Worlds Conference and the Space Cowboy Ball in Austin, Texas, and his non-profit EarthLight Foundation is creating an inclusive new movement to use space to protect the Earth and expand life into the cosmos.

Photographs or videos from space are dismissed as fabricated, usually under an alleged global conspiracy.

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

3. Physics and optics are misinterpreted (e.g., misunderstanding why ships disappear from the bottom up, or how gravity works).

Literal readings of religious texts are offered as definitive proof.

Broad distrust of mainstream education and scientific institutions is framed as evidence of a cover-up .

Reasons for Resurgence:
- The accessibility and echo-chamber nature of online communities support the reinforcement and spread of fringe beliefs.
- Broader distrust of authority (governmental, scientific, and academic) and anti-globalist sentiment.

- The popularity of alternative media promoting “truth-seeking” outside of mainstream channels .

Characteristics of Typical Believers:
- A tendency toward conspiracy thinking and skepticism of official narratives.
- Varied demographics, but most active members are young adults and middle-aged individuals engaging frequently with alternative information sources.

- No strong biases based on gender, ethnicity, or economic status.
- Social or psychological factors such as dissatisfaction with mainstream explanations or alienation from traditional institutions may play roles .

Potential Risks and Expert Consensus:
- Flat Earth belief is widely regarded by mainstream science as a pseudoscientific myth, thoroughly disproven by centuries of empirical evidence and experiment.

- Most supporters engage harmlessly and treat their belief as a personal or eccentric quirk.
- Risks arise if individuals become deeply embedded in broader conspiracy communities, potentially leading to increased social isolation, distrust of education and public authorities, and exposure to more dangerous forms of misinformation .

Key Considerations and Recommendations for Parents:
Communicate Openly:

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Content: German foreign minister calls on Russia to abandon mines in Ukraine: increasing world hunger - Sunrise Gate
Tuesday 4 April 2023 10: 40 AM Cairo Cairo 24 °
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The team that decides the qualification from the Cairo Stadium on Saturday
German foreign minister calls on Russia to abandon mines in Ukraine: World hunger increases
German Foreign Minister Annalina Birbuck
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Published on: Tuesday 4 April 2023 - 10: 18 AM | Last updated on Tuesday 4 April 2023 - 10: 18 AM
German Foreign Minister Annalina Birbuck has called on Russia to stop laying mines on agricultural land in Ukraine.
In a statement issued by the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, Berbock said that the mines not only cause many civilian casualties, but also prevent many farmers from plowing their fields and bringing the crop, adding: “In this way Russia reduces the supply of food on the world market and thus increases world hunger. ”
Birbuck ’ s statement comes on the occasion of World Mine Awareness Day on Tuesday.
“Anti-personnel mines are brutal weapons.
“It ’ s why parents in countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia and Iraq still have to worry about their children every time they go out to play after decades of conflict. ”
According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines last fall, Russia used at least seven different types of internationally banned landmines in Ukraine.
Landmines are often the size of a palm and can be deployed over large areas either by land or by air via missiles.
Mines lie on the ground and explode when someone approaches or steps on them.
Most of the victims were civilians.
In 1999, the so-called Ottawa Treaty, which aims to combat landmines, entered into force.
The international treaty prohibits the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of landmines.
However, important countries such as the United States, Russia, China and India have not joined the treaty.
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Maintain calm, respectful dialogue with your teen about science, sources of information, and ways to evaluate claims in an evidence-based manner.

Monitor for Red Flags: Watch for signs of broader anti-social attitudes, secrecy, or manipulative behaviors from the friend’s family (such as pressuring your child to reject all science or shun dissenters).

These are uncommon, but when present are a cause for concern.

Educate on Critical Thinking:

Help your child understand why and how scientific consensus is reached, the importance of evidence, and the nature of online echo chambers.

Limit Contact Sparingly: Restrict contact only if you observe clear signs of manipulation, increased social isolation, or rejection of education/science stemming from involvement with the friend’s family.

In ordinary circumstances, exposure to alternative viewpoints—when accompanied by parental guidance—does not pose inherent danger.

Encourage Inquiry: Support your child in asking questions and seeking trustworthy answers, which can strengthen resilience against misinformation .

In summary, contemporary Flat Earth belief, while unusual and at odds with established science, is not in itself dangerous or “dark.”

Most practitioners are not actively harmful.

Risks arise mainly from deeper involvement with broader conspiracist worldviews or manipulative communities.

The most effective parental strategies are vigilance, communication, and proactive education on critical thinking and scientific understanding.

Title:

Content: Earth Day 2023: A Moment for Recognizing Employee Contributions

56 minutes ago

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 21, 2023 / SAP

Each year on April 22, Earth Day is celebrated in more than 193 countries to advocate for environmental protection. It may be hard to believe, but the first Earth Day was half a century ago.

During the 1950s and 1960s, industries were emitting vast amounts of pollutants with hardly any consequences from the law, consumers, or the media. People were mostly oblivious to environmental concerns and the threat to human health. This perception changed when a massive oil spill in California inspired an unprecedented movement that united students, politicians, and everyday citizens to demonstrate against the devastating impact of 150 years of industrial development.

The first Earth Day in 1970 signaled the birth of the modern environmental movement.

A Turning Point

As the chief sustainability officer at SAP, I am keenly aware of the fundamental impact business and industry have on society, the economy, and the environment. Despite growing environmental awareness, the Earth has continued to take a massive amount of abuse since the first Earth Day.

The facts are alarming: according to the World Wildlife Organization, wildlife populations have plummeted 69% in 50 years. Human activities have doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, causing climate change that severely impacts weather and natural habitats. Plastic pollution is growing relentlessly, with only nine percent of plastic being recycled. The devastation to life on land and in the oceans is heartbreaking.

But there is good news as well. The modern-day grassroots movement triggered by young people has been highly successful, inspiring older generations with their determination to make the world a better place. At the same time, there has been a strong surge in governmental action and other movements such as the United Nations (UN) Convention on Climate Change and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation for Circular Economy.

Importantly, business can be the game changer as companies realize that environmental preservation and social justice must be a prominent element in their holistic strategy to ensure long-term survival.

Enabling Sustainable Impact

At SAP, we are very aware of the challenges our customers face as they strive to meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments. Being able to reliably track and manage their progress is one major challenge. Our products and services aim to address this and help our customers record, report, and act on their ESG ambitions while incorporating sustainability in their business end to end.

SAP customers around the world generate 87% of total global commerce, which comes with a social and environmental footprint. We have an opportunity here to influence for the better - and we are taking it, with solutions supporting companies to measure and improve sustainability across entire networks, allowing them to effectively work toward an aspiration of zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality.

This journey is impossible without partnerships. SAP is teaming up to drive sustainable change with customers as well as a variety of other stakeholders. For example, we were among the first 50 signatories of the UN Global Compact and we co-founded the Value Balancing Alliance. In collaboration with the WBCSD, we work to enable companies to gain full transparency of their product life cycle and supply chain emissions. And we joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation network to accelerate the adoption of circular economy practices and processes.

Leading by Example

At SAP, we do not have a sustainability strategy, we have a business strategy that is sustainable. We believe economic, social, and environmental factors and performance are interrelated and integrate these in the holistic steering of our business. Consequently, SAP executive short-term incentive compensation includes sustainability targets (key performance indicators for sustainability) such as our carbon impact on top of financial targets.

We have set ourselves ambitious environmental targets in our Global Environmental Policy to foster the continuous enhancement of our environmental impact. This includes our science-based target to achieve net zero along our entire value chain in line with a 1.5° c future in 2030 - 20 years earlier than originally planned.

Executing on these targets is a company-wide effort and I am proud of our collaborative achievements. Our data centers and buildings worldwide have been running on 100% renewable energy since 2014. We use internal carbon pricing to offset business-related carbon emissions. We are phasing out single-use plastics. By 2025, one-third of our fleet will be ecofriendly cars, and all cars procured thereafter will be electric. SAP's environmental management system is implemented in over 50 sites in 29 countries worldwide and is certified by the renowned ISO 14001:2015 standard.

SAP is also one of the most diverse and inclusive software companies in the world, dedicated to building a business without bias. We have built an inclusive workplace, giving people the skills to thrive in a digital world and a culture that supports their health and well-being.

Besides following ethical business practices that respect and promote human rights and secure human rights due diligence as required, for example, in the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, we are very active when it comes to promoting social and inclusive entrepreneurship, offering programs and partnerships that range from inspiring early-stage innovation to scaling mature social enterprises.

Earth Day 2023 is a day to remember what we can accomplish together and how much more we still need to do. The movement pushed by the first Earth Day in 1970 has become a global force that has changed the way people think and act upon the environment. Regulators, investors, companies, consumers, and everyday citizens increasingly recognize the need to invest in our planet. But time is of the essence: "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all," the latest IPCC report states.

I feel humbled by the contributions we have achieved as a company. These results were only possible thanks to visionary leaders and SAP's highly motivated, dedicated employees working in every line of business and every region of the world. As our latest employee engagement surveys showed, 82% of SAP employees actively contribute to the company's sustainability goals. Many of them are driving specific programs today to inspire even more colleagues to join in.

In celebration of Earth Day 2023, I want to acknowledge our employees' outstanding efforts, alongside those of like-minded supporters across the globe, and invite all of us to collectively step up in safeguarding our planet.

View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from SAP on 3blmedia.com.

Contact Info:
Spokesperson: SAP
Website: https://www.3blmedia.com/profiles/sap
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE: SAP

View source version on accesswire.com:
https://www.accesswire.com/750645/Earth-Day-2023-A-Moment-for-Recognizing-Employee-Contributions

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