What If the Earth Was Flat?

Falling Flat

Contrary to popular belief, it's a misconception that many societies of serious, educated people ever actually believed in the flat Earth theory. "With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat," historian Jeffrey Burton Russell noted in 1997. "A round Earth appears at least as early as the sixth century B.C. with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere."