I’ve essentially been on vacation from work this week, five days off. I wish I’d been more productive, but you just don’t want to do anything when you get time away from your “real job,” right? I was actually off because of jury duty. I got a letter in the mail a few months ago about it and, to my surprise, they wanted me and the others in my “jury panel” to return fourteen other days for a chance at actual service. I’ve only actually had to go back once and I was dismissed from the case, the other days were canceled for one reason or another. Today, my final day off this week, I made it a point to get out of the house, do some writing, and get some exercise. I just posted The Pierced Arc: Part 5, and will probably schedule this talk to go live tomorrow.

I’m embarrassed to say I spent a lot of time this week down one of those Youtube rabbit holes, watching videos debunking conspiracy theories. Those people are utterly fascinating. A lot of videos I saw dealt with flat-earth believers who had a tendency to disprove their own theories with their experiments. Aside from these were people who seemed to just pull theories on anything, from altitude to life expectancy, from anywhere and it had me developing my own theories. My first theory is: some of these people are just playing a character. A few of them had claims so outlandish that I had to wonder if they were just trying to draw a crowd. Concerning the people who are true believers of what they preach, I began to notice a trend among them: they didn’t seem to grasp just how vast, or alternatively minuscule, the world they live in is. When the evidence is placed before them, they would simply dismiss it as “impossible” because, for example, “If the earth is a sphere rotating at roughly 1000 mph, everything would fly off.” Smarter people than me can explain to you that it’s more accurate to say the earth rotates at fifteen degrees per hour, and when you think of a tennis ball rotating at that speed, you can better understand why nothing is simply thrown into space.

So why is it that these people have such a disconnection between reality and scale? It’s a common claim among conspiracy theorists that everything is smaller than we think. Well, one could possibly make a case for the ease of connectivity we humans experience in the information age. I remember watching an educational kid’s show when I was young that presented a small fact: in order to send a message from North America to Great Britain during the age of sail, it took three months, whereas, at the time the show aired, it took a mere three seconds for an email to travel the same distance. We’re even better connected now, able to have live video conversations with people on the opposite side of the globe, and I think that could be a contributing factor. It bears researching but that’s not my department, I’m just a writer.

God Bless.