SDS: Science Derangement Syndrome

There’s a strain of epistemological dysfunction spreading through certain corners of the political landscape. Its sufferers, setting aside those who deny nukes exist, will happily accept that a nuclear warhead can be attached to an intercontinental ballistic missile and guided to a target halfway around the globe by GPS satellites, yet insist that no human being has ever left the atmosphere. They will trust the engineering behind their smartphone, their microwave, their MRI, yet draw a hard line at NASA.

This type of cognitive dissonance I’ve coined Science Derangement Syndrome.

The ICBM alone should end the argument. You can’t believe that a missile follows a predictable arc through space using orbital mechanics and simultaneously believe that orbital mechanics are a fiction invented to hide the shape of the Earth. The physics don’t have an on-off switch. Either the equations work—in which case satellites orbit, rockets reach the moon, and the Earth is a sphere—or they do not, in which case every GPS device, every weather forecast, every intercontinental flight, and every nuclear deterrent on the planet should not function. They all function. Every day. Everywhere.

And if we can put rockets into space, why couldn’t we put humans into space? Okay, maybe they will admit that we have gone into orbit, but then they deny the footage of the globe taken while being in orbit. So they will admit we’ve been the orbit but deny the shape of the Earth.

But if we can get into orbit, why couldn’t we get to the moon? Of course—the Van Allen Belts! Yet these people don’t even know what the Van Allen belts are and what kind of radiation they consist of; they are just told they are deadly and impossible to pass through.

To be fair, governments lie. They lie about wars, surveillance, corruption, secret programs, and political assassinations. A healthy skepticism of official narratives is not only reasonable but a civic virtue. However, Science Derangement Syndrome doesn’t apply a healthy skepticism. It applies a corrosive, asymmetric acid—one that dissolves everything the government says while leaving every conspiracy theory standing untouched, no matter how many times those theories are proven wrong.

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The Asymmetric Standard

Here’s the test that exposes SDS for what it is: hold conspiracy theorists to the same evidentiary standard they apply to governments.

Flat earthers claim there is an ice wall at the edge of the world, maintained by a global military conspiracy involving every nation on Earth, including historic enemies. Yet they have no photograph of the ice wall, no video, no defector, no leaked document, and no ship captain who has sailed to the edge. Their entire evidentiary offering consists of pointing at NASA images and saying “CGI,” without ever demonstrating that any specific image is actually CGI, without producing original render files, without identifying the software used, without a single forensic analysis that holds up to scrutiny.

In any court of law, this case would be dismissed before lunch, not because courts favor governments, but because courts require positive evidence. “I don’t believe your evidence” is not evidence of anything.

And note what we “science shills” don’t do. We don’t look at flat earth maps, their videos, their diagrams, and say “CGI.” We don’t dismiss their experiments as staged, their photographs as doctored, their spokespeople as paid actors. We engage with their claims directly and show, specifically and systematically, where they fail. We extend a courtesy to their evidence that they’ve never once extended to ours.

I’ve done my due diligence and looked into all of their evidence, as I was curious. Those who suffer from SDS assume we haven’t, so they keep hammering us with the same narratives and memes we’ve already seen and know are false.

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Evidence They Demand and Never Accept

Consider what we actually have documenting human spaceflight. The recent Artemis II mission produced high-resolution photographs and video footage of Earth from deep space. The ISS has livestreamed thousands of hours of footage from orbit. In fact, you can not only track the ISS with an app and watch it fly over you, you can watch it live on YouTube.

Spacewalks have been broadcast live to hundreds of millions of viewers. Astronauts from over twenty nations—including Russian cosmonauts who had every geopolitical incentive to expose an American hoax during the Cold War—have confirmed the reality of human spaceflight.

Independent amateur radio operators tracked the Apollo missions in real time. Retroreflectors placed on the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts are bounced by lasers from private and university observatories worldwide, today, by anyone with the equipment. Japan, China, India, and the European Space Agency have independently imaged the Apollo landing sites from their own lunar orbiters.

Here’s a video clip I got from YouTuber Dave McKeegan, who is a professional photographer analyzing a video from the ISS shot without a fish lens, showing a globe earth that is impossible to fake:

But no amount of evidence is enough. The goalposts don’t move because they were never planted in the ground. The demand for evidence is not sincere; it’s a rhetorical posture. When your evidentiary standard is “everything is CGI,” you haven’t raised the bar; you have eliminated it.

Aside from sending each of these people into space, I’m not sure how else they could be convinced. And even if we did send a few of them to space, and they returned to tell their fellow deniers, I bet their fellow deniers would claim they “sold out” to NASA and the government.

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Then What Would It Look Like?

I came up with a question that stops flat earthers and moon deniers cold: If the footage is fake, what should real footage look like? They never answer, because they have no standard, only objections.

When someone claims an image from space is CGI, they’re implying they can tell the difference. So ask them: how? What visual artifact, what rendering error, what telltale sign of computer generation have they identified and documented? Name the software. Show the original mesh files. Point to the seam. CGI forensic analysis is an actual discipline—it looks for compression artifacts, lighting inconsistencies, and geometry that defies optics. No flat earther has produced this analysis for a single NASA image. They assert fakery yet they never demonstrate it.

And here’s the deeper challenge: if the moon landings were faked, why not fake it better? A modern CGI artist with a laptop could produce footage with perfect shadows, correct one-sixth gravity physics, dust behavior indistinguishable from vacuum, and flawless lighting continuity. Why would the most powerful government in the world, with an unlimited budget, produce footage that supposedly looks wrong to a man watching YouTube?

The hoax theory requires NASA to be simultaneously competent enough to fool the entire world for sixty years and incompetent enough to leave obvious tells for amateur internet conspiracy theorists. You can’t have it both ways.

The open challenge stands: if people believe all the moon landing footage is faked, let them produce a competing video. Replicate the dust behavior—parabolic arcs, no billowing, in apparent vacuum. Replicate single-source lunar lighting across an entire field with no crossing shadows anywhere in the frame. Replicate one-sixth gravity movement that’s physically consistent across every shot. Replicate the retroreflectors on the lunar surface that independent observatories bounce lasers off of today. No one has, because it cannot be done. They would literally have to go to the moon to do it.

What moon landing deniers fail to realize is that this video cannot be faked on earth:

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It’s Not Just NASA

The moon landing hoax and flat earth arguments rest almost entirely on distrust of a single agency: NASA. But confirmation of a spherical Earth and human spaceflight doesn’t just come from NASA. It comes from every space agency on the planet—many of them run by governments that are rivals, competitors, or outright adversaries of the United States.

Russia’s Roscosmos. China’s CNSA. The European Space Agency representing twenty-two nations. India’s ISRO. Japan’s JAXA. The space agencies of Canada, South Korea, Israel, the UK, Australia, and Brazil. Private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin with no government loyalty to protect. All of them would have to be in on it.

Russia had cosmonauts on the ISS. China has independently landed rovers on the moon and imaged its surface. India’s Chandrayaan missions have orbited and landed on the moon independently. These nations have every incentive to expose an American fabrication if one existed.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had an entire program dedicated to monitoring and countering American space claims. They confirmed the Apollo missions in real time, because they were tracking them and had no choice.

So the question must be asked directly: is it just NASA lying, while every other space agency on Earth stays silent? Or is every space agency—including those of America’s rivals and enemies—coordinating the same lie, across decades, across political changes, across hundreds of thousands of employees, with not one defector, not one leaked document, not one whistleblower?

At what point does the conspiracy require more faith to believe than the thing it’s trying to disprove?

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There’s No Flat Earth Model

This is perhaps the most damning fact about the entire Flat Earth movement, and it is almost never stated plainly: there is no complete flat earth model. Not one. Anywhere. No flat earther has produced a coherent, internally consistent alternative that explains, simultaneously, all the phenomena we observe every day.

They can’t explain why the sun sets instead of simply growing smaller as it recedes across a flat plane. They can’t explain why different constellations are visible from different hemispheres. They can’t explain why every eclipse occurs exactly when and where spherical models predict, to the minute, centuries in advance. They can’t explain why ships disappear hull-first over the horizon. They can’t explain why every long-haul Southern Hemisphere flight path— ydney to Johannesburg, Buenos Aires to Perth, Cape Town to Auckland—makes perfect geometric sense on a globe and is nonsensical on any flat map ever proposed.

This is why flat earthers never debate the whole picture. They can only deal with one claim at a time, nitpicking individual pieces of evidence, because the moment they are required to present a complete alternative, the entire narrative collapses. Any model they construct to explain one phenomenon immediately contradicts three others. They have been trying to build a coherent flat earth model for decades and haven’t succeeded, and that’s because it can’t be done.

A scientific theory does not merely cast doubt on competing explanations. It explains the data better. Doubt is not a model, and objection is not an answer.

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The Final Experiment

Flat earthers have long claimed Antarctica is sealed off—that no one’s allowed there, every researcher is a government plant, and the midnight sun can’t be independently verified. So someone decided to test it, with flat earthers in the room.

In December 2024, Colorado pastor Will Duffy organized a four-day expedition to Union Glacier Camp in Antarctica, running from December 14 to 17. He called it The Final Experiment. Duffy had spent three years planning it, motivated specifically by flat earthers’ claim that Antarctica’s phenomena could never be directly observed. The trip cost approximately $280,000 in total, with participants paying around $35,000 each. He invited roughly four flat earthers and four globe-earth advocates, equipped the group with multiple cameras including 360-degree rigs, and livestreamed the entire thing via Starlink in real time from the ice. No surprisingly, the biggest names in the Flat Earth community, such as David Weiss and Eric Dubay, declined the offer.

The test was simple: watch the sun. During the Southern Hemisphere summer at that latitude, the sun doesn’t set. It circles the horizon continuously—at midnight, at 3 a.m., at dawn, without interruption. This is precisely what a spherical Earth tilted on its axis predicts. It’s not predicted by any flat earth model ever proposed because there is no flat earth geometry that produces a twenty-four hour sun at the South Pole.

Here’s footage from the Final Experiment:

As expected, the sun did not set. The footage was unambiguous. The livestream ran and showed everyone the 24-hr sun. And at least one prominent flat earth figure, YouTuber Jeran Campanella of the channel Jeranism, publicly admitted on the spot that the twenty-four hour sun was real, stated that his previous model no longer made sense, and left the flat earth community. He, of course, was called a shill for doing so.

The others didn’t follow. Some acknowledged the sun’s behavior but refused to abandon the belief. When they returned home, the flat earth community largely rejected the results anyway, accusing the participants of deception, claiming CGI, questioning camera angles, and in some cases attributing the entire expedition to Satanic trickery. Will Duffy, who had spent three years and a quarter of a million dollars trying to end the debate in good faith, faced significant backlash and eventually stepped back from the debate entirely.

This is the closing argument. They were not denied the experiment. They were taken there. They watched it happen in real time. One of their own admitted he was wrong. And the movement absorbed it, reframed it, and continued unchanged. When the evidence shows up in person and still doesn’t count, you’re no longer dealing with a question about the shape of the Earth. You are dealing with something that evidence was never going to reach.

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Why are They Really Denying It?

To understand SDS fully, we have to ask the uncomfortable question: what’s actually driving it? For a significant portion of science deniers, the motivation is religious—specifically, the belief that modern science and space exploration are part of a coordinated effort to disprove God and undermine faith.

But this reasoning collapses immediately on its own terms. God, as described in virtually every major religious tradition, is invisible, omnipresent, and exists beyond the physical universe. God can’t be found or hidden by a telescope. A spherical Earth orbiting the sun conceals nothing divine. What exactly are they hiding, and where would they put it? The motive for the conspiracy makes no sense even within the framework of the people proposing it.

More critically, holy texts are being deployed as scientific refutation, and they have no standing to do so. These texts have made no accurate scientific predictions. They have gotten everything about the physical world consistently wrong: a flat earth covered by a dome, the sun orbiting the Earth, a universe a few thousand years old, all life created in its present form within six days.

The story of Adam and Eve directly contradicts everything we know from genetics. We can trace human DNA through populations across hundreds of thousands of years, map migration patterns across continents, and date lineages with precision through multiple independent methods. A single founding couple six thousand years ago is not a theological dispute; it’s a mathematical impossibility given what population genetics alone requires. The fossil record compounds this further: hundreds of thousands of specimens across every continent, dated through multiple independent methods, telling a continuous and branching story of life across billions of years.

I’m not trying to attack people of faith, but texts that act as moral guide are not a scientific instruments. A book’s value in domain of moral codes does not grant it authority in another, such as science. You wouldn’t use a cookbook to navigate a ship, so why are people using scripture to refute orbital mechanics?

The standard has to be simple: what has produced verifiable, reproducible, life-saving results? What gave us antibiotics, surgery, aviation, telecommunications, and the ability to predict where a hurricane will make landfall three days in advance? The answer is the scientific method—every time, without exception. Holy texts have given us no technology, no medicine, no engineering, not one cure. The moment you need to solve a physical problem in the physical world, you turn to science. So does everyone else—including the deniers.

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The Conspiracy Is Actually Theirs

Here what’s not stated plainly enough: the real conspiracy is on the denier side.

To maintain their position, those infected with SDS must reject simultaneously—geology, genetics, paleontology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, orbital mechanics, radiometric dating, atmospheric science, and the independent findings of every space agency on Earth across six decades. That’s an enormous, active, total rejection of the accumulated work of millions of scientists across centuries, conducted across dozens of countries under dozens of governments with competing interests, all somehow arriving at the same coordinated lie.

I’m not asking anyone to take anything on faith. I’m pointing at physical evidence that can be independently tested, repeated, and verified by anyone with the tools to do so. However, they are asking us to believe that every photograph, every measurement, every independent confirmation, every foreign government, every dead scientist, every living astronaut, every amateur balloon hobbyist with a GoPro, and every piece of physical evidence accumulated across human history is part of a seamless, never-leaked conspiracy.

And what do they offer in return? A book, and incredulity. They point at footage and say it looks fake, without showing us what real looks like, without producing a counter-example, without any forensic evidence whatsoever. All they have is incredulity dressed up as scientific analysis, while denying all the science we have achieved in the last 400 years.

The flat earther asks you to take a leap of faith that dwarfs anything science has ever requested. Science asks you to look at the evidence. They ask you to dismiss all of it, and trust them and their uneducated cult instead.

But they claim that they also do science.

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Their Science Is Bad Science

Flat earthers will tell you they do their own science. They run experiments. They perform calculations. They point lasers across lakes and invoke mathematical formulas. The problem is not that they reject science; it’s that they practice it badly, which is arguably worse. When you reject science you’re at least honest about where you stand. When you do bad science and call it proof, you’re fooling yourself and everyone watching.

The Bedford Level experiment is their most famous proof and the foundation the modern flat earth movement was built on. Samuel Rowbotham observed a boat remaining visible further than he expected across a stretch of canal and declared the Earth was flat. What he didn’t account for was atmospheric refraction—the well-documented phenomenon where light bends slightly downward through layers of air at different densities, causing it to follow the curve of the Earth rather than travel in a perfectly straight line. This is is taught in introductory physics courses. When the experiment is controlled for refraction, or conducted in conditions that minimize it, it confirms curvature every time. Flat earthers have been running a refraction error for two hundred years and calling it science.

Their laser experiments make the same mistake. They shine beams across bodies of water, the beam remains visible further than they expect, and they declare victory. Same error. Atmospheric refraction is doing the work they’re attributing to a flat surface. Control for it and the result flips.

Then there’s their curvature formula—eight inches per mile squared—which they cite constantly to claim that distant landmarks or bridges should be hidden below the horizon but aren’t. The formula is an approximation, not precise geometry, and they apply it incorrectly every time. They calculate how far below the horizon something should be while ignoring that observer eye height changes everything. Raise your eye level by a few feet and you can see dramatically further. They also ignore refraction, which lifts distant objects into view. When you use actual spherical geometry and account for both observer height and atmospheric refraction, the observations match the globe model exactly. Their own experiments, done correctly, prove them wrong.

Here’s a video shot with a Nikon P900 that shows two ships, where you can see one is clearly behind the curve, despite being zoomed in:

The gyroscope experiment is perhaps the most self-defeating. Flat earthers claim that if the Earth rotates, a gyroscope should drift over time, and when their cheap consumer gyroscopes show no meaningful drift, they declare confirmation. High precision gyroscopes—the kind used in aircraft, submarines, and navigation systems—show exactly 15 degrees of drift

per hour. That’s not approximate. That’s the precise figure a rotating sphere predicts. The experiment works perfectly. Their equipment is simply not sensitive enough to detect it, which they mistake for proof. They are running a valid experiment with inadequate instruments and calling the instrument’s failure their victory.

Finally, the zoom lens sunrise. This one has spread widely on social media because it looks convincing. They film a sun that appears to have set below the horizon, zoom in, and the sun seems to reappear—proof, they say, that the sun didn’t set due to curvature but simply moved away due to perspective on a flat plane. What zoom actually does is magnify. It does not recover objects that are below the horizon. In every single one of these videos, if you look carefully, the bottom of the sun is still cut off by the horizon. They are pointing a camera at the curvature of the Earth, watching it clip the bottom of the sun, and calling it flat earth evidence. The proof of the globe is sitting right there in their own footage.

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A Losing Track Record

Before extending conspiracy theorists the benefit of the doubt, consult their record of accuracy.

• Y2K (2000): The world’s computers were going to collapse, planes would fall from the sky, civilization would unravel. Billions were spent preparing. January 1, 2000 arrived without incident. No acknowledgment. No correction. Just a pivot to the next prediction.

• The 2012 Mayan apocalypse: The Mayan Long Count calendar supposedly predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012. It did not end. The Maya themselves never claimed it would—that was a Western projection onto their calendar system.

• Harold Camping’s rapture (2011): Predicted May 21, then revised to October 21 when the first date passed uneventfully. Neither occurred. Camping died in 2013 having never acknowledged the failure of his method.

• Planet Nibiru: A rogue planet was supposed to destroy Earth in 2003, then 2012, then 2017, then several additional dates thereafter. No planet has appeared. No apology has been issued.

• QAnon’s “the storm” (2017-present): Mass arrests of a satanic cabal were perpetually imminent. Hundreds of predicted dates have passed without event. The audience absorbs each failure and awaits the next promised reckoning.

• Chemtrails causing mass illness: Decades of predictions about population-level health collapse from aircraft contrails. No documented mechanism, no peer-reviewed evidence, no collapse. Life expectancy in countries with heavy air traffic is among the highest in human history.

• Covid jab mass deaths predictions: Before and during the pandemic, conspiracy theorists predicted that the vaccines would kill billions—microchips, depopulation agendas, immune system destruction, mass die-offs within months or years of the rollout. These predictions were specific, urgent, and confident. Billions of doses have now been administered across every continent. The predicted mass death event has not occurred.

I didn’t get any COVID jabs myself, because I didn’t trust the fact the government, the media, and big pharma were all pushing it so hard, but the claims made about the vaccine wiping out humanity, simply did not come true.

• The Charlie Kirk assassination: Not even after 24 hours of Kirk’s death, there were people talking about exploding lapel mics, multiple shooters, palm guns, drones, camera guns, and assassins shooting him from a tunnel. Every day there was another shooter from a different angle using another kind of secret weapon.

Governments are held accountable for their lies through elections, investigative journalism, FOIA requests, congressional testimony, and whistleblowers who face real personal risk to come forward. But none of these conspiracy theorists are accountable. They simply move to the next “prediction” when the last one fails, and their audience pretends like they never said anything. Why? Because this was never about the predictions. It’s about the identity of being someone who sees what others can’t.

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What SDS Really Is

Science Derangement Syndrome is not about science. It’s about identity, belonging, and the intoxicating comfort of believing you see what others are too foolish or cowardly to see. The conspiracy theorist is always the hero of their own story—the lone truth-teller in a world of sheep. That identity is self-reinforcing and impervious to evidence by design, because evidence is always recast as part of the deception. The more evidence you present, the deeper the conspiracy must be, and the more heroic the resistance becomes.

This is why engaging on the merits alone is so difficult. You’re not arguing about data. You’re arguing against a self-concept. And no dataset has ever dissolved a self-concept.

The irony is that genuine scientific skepticism is one of the most valuable intellectual habits a person can cultivate. Real skeptics demand reproducibility, transparency, and peer review. Real skeptics update their beliefs when evidence warrants. Real skeptics propose alternatives; they don’t simply tear down, they build something that explains the evidence better. And real skeptics apply the same standard to every claim, including their own.

Flat earthers have never done any of that. They have no model. They have no experiment they are willing to run and accept the result of. They have no standard by which evidence could, even in principle, change their minds. The same is true of moon landing deniers. Both, when pressed, expand the conspiracy rather than revise their beliefs.

What SDS offers these people is the costume of skepticism without the discipline. It’s doubt without rigor, rebellion without reason, and certainty without justification. It asks you to reject the entire edifice of human knowledge and replace it with nothing but the word of people who have been wrong about everything, every time, and have never once said so.

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