Who laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round?

In 2020, an American pilot and daredevil named ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes launched himself in a homemade steam-powered rocket, hoping to achieve enough altitude to prove to himself that the Earth was flat. Unfortunately, the rocket crashed and Mad Mike was no more. ‘I’m not going to take anyone else’s word for it, or Nasa, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX,’ he had once explained in an interview. ‘I’m going to build my own rocket right here and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on is.’ In this way he became a martyr to the modern conspiracy theorist’s mantra: ‘Do your own research!’

When people who claim that the Earth is flat, or that Covid didn’t exist, or that the moon landings were faked (all these crank opinions go together, along with, inevitably, vicious anti-Semitism) say they have done their own research, of course, they usually mean they have done zero research but have instead watched hundreds of hours of other conspiracy theorists’ videos on YouTube.