And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

Beef Of The Week #374: B.o.B v Science

By | Published on Friday 29 September 2017

B.o.B

Rapper B.o.B remains convinced that the Earth is flat. Flat as a pancake. And despite the intervention of lots of people who are equipped to argue otherwise – like Neil de-fucking-Grasse Tyson – he’s still looking for definitive proof. So he’s set up a crowdfunding campaign to launch his own satellite into the sky to go and have a look.

We first reported on this story back in January 2016, when B.o.B first began speaking in support of the bizarre flat Earth theory. He was seemingly convinced that there was no way that we could be sitting on a globe, because he’d been up really high and could see no curve on the horizon. That’s basically it.

He then maintained that “the greatest liars in history” had “tremendously deceived” us all by telling us that the planet is round, when in fact it is definitely flat. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson quickly got in touch to go through the basic scientific points, but B.o.B knocked him back, accusing deGrasse Tyson of being in on the great NASA conspiracy to convince us that the planet is round. He even wrote a diss track about the celebrity scientist.

So that was all quite amusing for a few days, but by now you’d have thought that B.o.B had given up on all this. After all, the Earth is definitely round. But no, he’s still flogging this horse. And the thing is, I told you earlier that he was raising money to launch “a satellite”. Well, actually, he’s trying to raise $1 million in order to “launch multiple weather balloons and satellites into space for experimental exploration”.

Aside from the fact that $1 million is not nearly enough to launch one satellite, let alone multiple satellites, into space (although it’s a bigger budget than his original target of $200,000), there is another obvious flaw in this plan. The science and engineering behind satellites only works if the Earth is round. They go into orbit. That’s the whole fucking point of them. They orbit the Earth and beam stuff back down.

Sure, you could say that claiming that satellites orbit the Earth is part of NASA’s big conspiracy. You could say that. But NASA is not the only organisation that builds and launches satellites. The skies above us are jammed full of satellites put up there by governments, private companies and other organisations all over the world.

The cost of paying all those people to stay quiet about the conspiracy – and then the unlikely outcome of all of them actually staying quiet and keeping the ‘lie’ going – would be phenomenal. And to what end? What would be the point of making people think that the Earth is round when it’s not? Oh God, why am I so wound up about this? Why are we even talking about this? It’s all so stupid.

Anyway, you can donate some money to B.o.B’s cause here. But please don’t. Even if he raises the money, and even if he can actually get things in the sky with that money, I don’t feel like the evidence his experiments would generate – ie proof that the world is definitely round – would actually change his mind. He’ll just decide he needs to do some more crowdfunding to pay for some more conspiracy busting research. And we’ll just keep going round and round. Like the planet. Which is round.



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