FE Meme
Uncarbonated Water: Thus Earth Is Flat?
#104: Seventy percent of the planet is uncarbonated water, wordplay on "flat" versus "carbonated", therefore Earth is flat.
The Meme
Charlie Day conspiracy-board meme: yellow Impact text "70% of the planet is made of uncarbonated water" / "Thus, the earth is flat" over red-string wall photo.
Why It Spreads
The Charlie Day conspiracy-board format delivers a pun with full manic energy, making it shareable as an in-joke inside flat-Earth circles and as absurdist humor outside them. The FE label lands because the wordplay on uncarbonated water sounds like a logical chain even when nobody treats the syllogism as serious science.
What It Gets Wrong
The Charlie Day conspiracy board declares "70% of the planet is made of uncarbonated water" and therefore "Thus, the earth is flat," conflating beverage slang with geometry. "Flat" meaning uncarbonated and "flat" meaning a planar shape are unrelated homonyms; 70 percent water describes surface coverage, not carbonation. Liquids at rest form surfaces perpendicular to local gravity on a spheroid, and h ≈ d²/(2R) with R ≈ 6371 km still predicts measurable ocean-scale curvature over tens of kilometres. TestTheGlobe's Water Finds Level Means Flat and TestTheGlobe's Curvature Calculator walk through the observations and predictions this image skips.
The Debunk
Water finding level means settling perpendicular to gravity on a body with R ≈ 6371 km, where h ≈ d²/(2R) predicts measurable ocean-scale curvature over tens of kilometres; that fits observation. Conflating beverage "flat" (uncarbonated) with planetary shape via a Charlie Day conspiracy-board pun is inconsistent with any geodetic measurement. Use TestTheGlobe's Curvature Calculator to compare the meme's claim with a measurable prediction.
- TestTheGlobe's Water Finds Level Means Flat page explains that "level" means perpendicular to gravity, not flat in Euclidean space forever.
- TestTheGlobe's Curvature Calculator shows how ocean-scale surfaces curve over tens of kilometres, h ≈ d²/(2R) with R ≈ 6371 km predicts on the order of 8 m of drop over 10 km, even when a glass of water looks perfectly flat.
- "Flat" in beverage slang and "flat" as a planetary shape are unrelated homonyms; the meme's "70% uncarbonated water / thus Earth is flat" syllogism conflates them deliberately.
- TestTheGlobe's Gravity Is Not Real: replacing physics with a pun leaves flight times, eclipses, and opposite-season star fields unexplained on a disk model.