# Need help with a flat earth



## Alphabet (Aug 6, 2012)

In the story I'm writing, the earth is a large flat mass. There is no edge to earth, so it is infinite in size. Above the earth is of course our normal atmosphere the same distance up and then space, which works vastly different in my world, which is where I come upon some problems. 

I know that all of this is completely impossible scientifically. I'm not too concerned with being scientifically correct, however I do want to be able to give an explanation for how  some things work in my universe. 

The things I need help with are the following:

The Sun/Moon System - How does the sun and moon work in this universe?
Seasons - How do seasons work in this universe?
Different Climate Systems - The story is set in the modern day USA where they discover other civilizations living beyond the current known world. How do I work with climate systems?

I'm really having trouble thinking up explanations to give for these problems that aren't just hand waving. Can anyone help me out?


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## Neurosis (Aug 6, 2012)

Someones been reading Terry Pratchet.

You can solve all these problems by saying 'wizards made it so'.

You could also solve them as follows:
Invert our model of how the universe works.

*The Sun/Moon System - How does the sun and moon work in this universe?*
The Sun and Moon rotate around the fixed flat Earth, just as the ancients believed in the Bronze age.

*Seasons - How do seasons work in this universe?*
The Sun follows a gradually changing elliptical orbit and is closer during parts of the year, and further away during others.

*Different Climate Systems - The story is set in the modern day USA where they discover other civilizations living beyond the current known world. How do I work with climate systems?*
Climate systems have as much to do with the location of bodies of water, altitude and surrounding mountains as with the spherical nature of the Earth,


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## robertbevan (Aug 7, 2012)

if you don't mind sacrificing some of your intelligence, you can take a look at these:

The Flat Earth Society

The Flat Earth Society -- Home


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## ThinkerX (Aug 7, 2012)

A flat earth of *infinite* extent?  That creates some serious problems.

Still, maybe if you were to borrow a page from the oldest mythologies - Egyptian and Sumerian, specifically, something might be feasible.  They too, held with a flat earth, with the sun rotating around / through it, passing through a sort of 'underworld' each night.

So, your sun would do much the same, it would 'rise' through a gap in the earth, pass overhead, and 'set' through another.  Same with the moon.  The locations of these gaps would be seen as 'sacred' or 'taboo'.  (not to mention lethal to enter).  In this scheme, the sun would have to be a *lot* smaller than the earth to work on anything resembling a 24 hour cycle - probably no more than a hundred miles across.  Hmm...this would give a portion of the world, with a total surface area a few times larger than the real earth an acceptable climate.  

You might want to rethink the 'infinite' part though. 

Also, is the underside habitable or not?


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## Zero Angel (Aug 7, 2012)

There was something like this in the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Pryan, the World of Fire was a large (LARGE) hollow planet where the "surface" was the inside crust of the planet and the suns were hovering in the center of the empty space of the planet.

If you wanted to do something like this, then your flat surface would seem to be infinite, but it would actually just be closed. 

Incidentally, this isn't entirely unsupported by science. In fact, up until recently, physicists believed that space may be infinite and even operate like Pac Man games! Or it might just be infinite and go on forever. 

Putting your sun on an orbit where it passes behind a large moon of some sort would create nightfall and having the whole system wobble in its orbit (I mean both the sun and hypothetical moon move farther away) would create seasons. In fact, this would enable you to have seasons and latitudinal changes in climate/weather as well.


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## Lorna (Aug 7, 2012)

This is your chance to be creative. 

Our ancient myths are full of stories about the movement of the sun- pulled by a chariot, chased by a wolf. William Blake saw the sun as full of angels. What kind of beings could govern the motion of your sun? Is it simply a ball of fire or is it composed of something more magical? 

The classic example of a story explaining the seasons is the Greek myth of Persephone, daughter of Demeter (goddess of harvest / corn) being snatched by Hades (god of the underworld) in Autumn and returning in spring as a maiden with the first flowers. You could create your own seasonal myth. 

Climate changes could also be attributed to mythical beings. According to the local myths and place names where I live, boggarts are the guardians of boggy areas and faeries the woodland.


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## JohnKPatterson (Aug 7, 2012)

Though I like the questions you're asking, I am not sure about the "modern day USA" being a part of your world (if I'm understanding you right, that is). Readers are going to assume that today's USA is a part of the round, finite Earth. But if you present an alternate history version of America, that might work better for integrating it into a flat, infinite landscape.

Hope that helps.


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## psychotick (Aug 7, 2012)

Hi,

An infinite flat Earth? I don't see that as a winner within sci fi. You'd have no gravity and no days / nights. Nothing could orbit the world beause it extends forever in any two dimensional direction, and it couldn't roatate. However some of these problems could be resolved by making the world either a Dysan Sphere or a ringworld (a la Larry Niven). That gives you gravity by spinning it and a boundless world that is not actually infinite. As for days and nights, because these structures are essentially heat traps, you could have the world a fair bit further out from the sun so that it doesn't cook, and have a number of minor planets in orbit around the sun further in. As they go about their thing, you could get parts of the Earth in shadow. The ringworld is the better of the two options to explain these, and also gravity since the sphere even if it was rotation would still have poles where there was no gravity.

Hope that helps.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Steerpike (Aug 7, 2012)

Maybe you could have a tremendous mass underneath the flat earth that pulls things downward, toward the plane of the flat earth. And you could have a sun in the sky that has a spherical planet rotating around it in such a manner as to blot out the sun on a regular basis, giving the semblance of night.

You'd still have a pretty small habitable zone, though, so there wouldn't be much use for most of the infinite world. Unless you had a string of multiple such suns that also stretch into infinity.

All of the above seems to me to be a stretch, but its all I've got.


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## T.Allen.Smith (Aug 7, 2012)

The question I'd have to ask is why do you need the infinite flatness? Why do you need your world to fit these criteria you list?

If there's not a good reason that is integral to the story then there's really no point in my opinion.


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## Svrtnsse (Aug 7, 2012)

The sun and the moon is the same thing. Half if it is the sun and it shines light. The other half is the moon and it radiates darkness. It spins round and round and that's how days and nights happen.

Also...
How does the horizon work if the world is infinite and flat? Will it still be a distinct line or will it just be a thin blur off in the distans - when it's not blocked by trees or mountains etc. I guess this would mainly be an issue when you're at high altitudes - like when there's nothing blocking your view as far as the eye can see.


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## mbartelsm (Aug 8, 2012)

If you still want it to be infinite, you could try a bunch of suns scattered trough the surface, these would turn on and off (maybe only half glows and they rotate?) to produce day and night and would come closer and farther in an oscillating fashion to produce seasons and climate.

Or as someone mentioned, they could set trough a hole on the surface to produce night and then come out in the morning, this would make some damn impressive landscapes at night with an immense beam of light coming out of the ground


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## Sheilawisz (Aug 8, 2012)

Alphabet, the main universe of my first Fantasy series is composed by an endless ocean, I have other similar universes in my stories and the world of Fantastica (from _The Neverending Story_) is the same too, a flat world that extends endlessly in every direction.

So, you are not alone =)

About the problem of the day/night cycles and the seasons: The worlds in my endless ocean are continent-size islands. They have a magnetic field and a set of little moons that travel in circles at a huge elevation and around the islands. There is also a tiny sun-like thing for every island, which orbits like the moons and follows a cycle of light and darkness.

The island-worlds have day and night, but if you leave a world and venture far into the ocean, you just find a freezing, eternal night...

I hope that helps you =)


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## psychotick (Aug 14, 2012)

Hi,

The Horizon would still be a straight horizontal line somewhere in the distance, but you would likely be unable to make out any details of it because of the infinite distance.

And Steerpike raises a good point about the sun. On the plane directly underneath it it would look like a sun, but as you moved away from that point, heading in any direction, the sun would become smaller and smaller because the distance increases. Go to your house with a tape measure,  stick one end on a light fitting, and let it drop directly to the floor. This is the closest distance to it. Now walk north, south east or west, and watch as the tape measure grows longer. So either you have one sun and an infinite world where only a small circle of it is lit surrounded by ever decreasing circles of less light and colder temperatures, or you have multiple suns. And if you have multiple suns, they have to be in orbit around each other. 

But gravity is a bastard as well. Consider the Earth and the sun. The gravitational attraction between them is balanced by the centripetal force pushing them apart as the Earth spins around the sun. But you cannot have anything orbit an infinite plane. Because there is no orbit large enough for the sun to go around the plane. Draw a one inch line on a piece of paper and then a circle around it. It works. Now make the line two inches and see how much bigger the circle around it has to be. Now extend that line to infinity. So if the sun can't orbit the flat world, then only one force is in effect, gravity. Sooner or later the sun must crash into the flat world.

You could theoretically get around this problem by spinning the flat world so that the sun is in sink with the rotations, i.e. always perfectly above the dead centre of the flat world and in effect spinning around it. But then you have the problem that you can't spin an infinitely long object. The force that pulls the string apart as you spin a ball on a string around your head grows ever larger as the distance from the point of spin increases. Put a tennis ball on a string and twirl it around your head at a constant rate of spin. As you let the string out further, the force with which it pulls at your arm, grows, and sooner or later the string or your arm breaks. 

Infinite flat worlds even if they were possible, could not move.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Svrtnsse (Aug 14, 2012)

I don't think the way the sun becomes smaller is that much of an issue for most practical purposes. You'd have to travel very far in order for this to be noticable to the bare eye.

Climate may be an issue though. The lands just beneath the sun may be warm, even too warm (seas of boiling lava) and the further away you get the colder it will get. It probably won't be colder over the same distance it gets colder on earth. If I understand things correctly the reason the poles are colder than the equator is that they're not facing the sun at the same angle. If that's the case then with a flat world you'd have to go very far indeed in order to reach arctic climates.


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## ALB2012 (Aug 15, 2012)

You could check Terry pratchett. His Discworld is well, a disc, carried on 4 elephants on the back of a turtle.

The disk spins, like a spinning top (I think) and the directions are "Rimwards"- out towards the edge, and "Hubwards"- towards the middle where lies the BIG mountain where the god's live. There is a sea that goes around the edge and pours over with a fence around to stop fishermen falling off.

I think the sun and moon circle it. 

I think infinate is a bad idea. If you have a sun and moon it cant be surely. If you are standing on the world it probably _ seems_ almost infinite. 

Seasons- could be landscape related or closer to the edge is cooler or whatever. Mountains are still mountains. It would not be completely flat, there would always be some terrain in the way.

Does it need seasons- some places have 2 rainy season and the dry season, as opposed to the 4 in the temperate zone.
Or even darkness for a while when the sun is underneath. 

The orbit of the sun does not have to be circular, could be eliptical or even spiralling or something.

I think infinite will open  can of worms. of course you could just have "because it is", "god did it", "magic did it" or no one knows. 
"Well yes I know it is impossible but it is indeed so. Cool eh?"


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## Anders Ã„mting (Aug 19, 2012)

Alphabet said:


> In the story I'm writing, the earth is a large flat mass. There is no edge to earth, so it is infinite in size. Above the earth is of course our normal atmosphere the same distance up and then space, which works vastly different in my world, which is where I come upon some problems.
> 
> I know that all of this is completely impossible scientifically. I'm not too concerned with being scientifically correct, however I do want to be able to give an explanation for how  some things work in my universe.
> 
> ...



Hm, interesting. My take on this:

Since the world is flat and infinite, it's going to need multiple suns and multiple moons. The moons are enormous in size and rotate slowly around the suns. When the moon obscures the sun, it causes night in the geographical area directly beneath it. (Possibly each sun has multiple moons allowing there to be night in different time zones under the same sun. There may also be "dark" moons that causes night and "bright" moons that reflects sunlight the way normal moons do.) During night time, you would be able to make out other suns in the distance, resembling very large and bright stars.

The suns themselves would move around on the sky, probably in circular patterns, causing seasons as the amount of sunlight in a given area would change. When two or more suns come close to each other it causes summer, and there may even be deserts where a lot of sunlight overlaps. Likewise, there would be "twilight" areas that are perpetually cold due to lack of nearby suns.

That's just off the top of my head, though. Could probably need some refinement.


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## ThinkerX (Aug 19, 2012)

ANother thought here:

Take a steal from Niven's 'Ringworld' (which even came with a 1:1 'map' of earth.

Much, much simpler all the way around, plus scientifically phausible.


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## Anders Ã„mting (Aug 19, 2012)

ThinkerX said:


> ANother thought here:
> 
> Take a steal from Niven's 'Ringworld' (which even came with a 1:1 'map' of earth.
> 
> Much, much simpler all the way around, plus scientifically phausible.



Wait, so instead of a concept I've never even heard of anyone attempting before, your suggestion is to go with something that's been done several times already? Why?

Why does it have to be scientifically possible? Alphabet is clearly not writing hard science fiction here, and this is a forum for fantasy writers. I mean, if it was just a question of creating a world that's easy to make sense of, why would this person go for such a blatantly reality-defying cosmology? Clearly that's what this story is _about. _The whole selling point, if you will.


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## ThinkerX (Aug 20, 2012)

> Wait, so instead of a concept I've never even heard of anyone attempting before, your suggestion is to go with something that's been done several times already? Why?
> 
> Why does it have to be scientifically possible? Alphabet is clearly not writing hard science fiction here, and this is a forum for fantasy writers. I mean, if it was just a question of creating a world that's easy to make sense of, why would this person go for such a blatantly reality-defying cosmology? Clearly that's what this story is about. The whole selling point, if you will.



Depends on if the emphasis is the story or the setting.

If its the story, then a 'ringworld' type setting solves pretty much all of his problems.  

If its the setting, then there are a lot of complex problems he has to address somehow.


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## Astner (Aug 20, 2012)

Alphabet said:


> The things I need help with are the following:
> 
> The Sun/Moon System - How does the sun and moon work in this universe?
> Seasons - How do seasons work in this universe?
> ...


1. Consider the following (shitty) sketch modeling sun-moon orbits.








The squares represent vast (yet finite) areas of land, when the suns are far away not looming over a certain area the light disperses (Rayleigh scatters) into the invisible spectra and it's dark. Yet the reflection of the light on the moon travels a shorter distance though the atmosphere and thus moon-light is visible.

The world is obviously made of infinitely many of these square segments aligned next to each-other as illustrated in the picture above. So you'd have infinitely many suns and moons in orbit. But they are so far away from each-other that I'd be surprised if anyone has actually seen more than one sun.

2,3 . Some areas, like the center of the orbits, may be extremely cold and always dark. But it depends on the suns (which can be stars of different sizes and different energy-outputs), the seasons and climates are practically arbitrary to design with this model.


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## Zander (Aug 30, 2012)

If the world is infinitely flat why not have some sort of massive landmark (s) that are sufficiently high as to block out the sun? As the sun moves about the sky, around these landmarks (mountain ranges, etc), a sort of day night cysle could result. 
You could explain the motion of the sun and other celestial bodies by the influence of demons and gods and so on. They could even have a sort of astrological influence on the world.


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## gavintonks (Aug 31, 2012)

if it was infinite then the sun would travel in a circle infinitely over the landscape so either you have infinite suns which pass over till there is darkness


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## Astner (Sep 2, 2012)

Zander said:


> If the world is infinitely flat why not have some sort of massive landmark (s) that are sufficiently high as to block out the sun? As the sun moves about the sky, around these landmarks (mountain ranges, etc), a sort of day night cysle could result.


So the habitable part of the world would be a massive sundail. I like this idea. It would do well in a fairy tale-esque setting.


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## Vinegar Tom (Sep 4, 2012)

I assume that, since an infinite land-mass is scientifically unfeasible, this is pure fantasy, and no science need be applied. However, infinity always causes problems. Gravity is easily dealt with - if the entire universe has a floor, then presumably there's a universal down, and that's why things fall. In fact, if gravity existed as we know it, your infinite land-mass would have infinite mass, and gravitational forces would warp the whole thing into first a sphere, and then it (and the rest of the universe) into one huge black hole. And it would be a very short novel.

The thing is, how could the sun and moon (assuming you have one) possibly illuminate an infinite surface? There are only really three possibilities that make sense. Firstly, the sun and moon are the same body, which remains permanently over in more or less the same place, illuminating a circular area about the size of the Earth. If you want day and night and seasons, the Sun, which is probably fairly small and maybe a few thousand miles away at most, might slowly circle the middle of this area over the course of a year. Thus the centre of the world would always have exactly the same climate, which, if the sun's path was very long, might make it a permanent ice-cap, or it could be a temperate land with no seasons where the world's greatest civilization has developed. The lands directly under the sun's path would have ferociously hot summers, and would probably be a circular desert. land inside and outside the solar path would have less severe wather, but if outside, it would have much colder winters. A long way away, it would be colder all year because it got less sunlight even in summer, and eventually you'd come to an outer area not unlike Siberia that got almost no sun at all, and beyond that, an endless frozen waste. If you wanted day and night, the sun could be a rotating globe with light and dark hemispheres.

That would work quite well because there might be other small, low suns illuminating distant areas which could be seen with a really good telescope. However, going there might be a problem if they were at least as far away as Mars. Though it wouldn't be quite as difficult, since you could drive there, and at least you'd be able to breathe along the way. And since all these places would be part of the same planet, you could be pretty sure they'd be habitable.

The other alternatives basically amount to either having infinite numbers of sins moving over this infinite area in all directions, perhaps in an orderly row at regular intervals, or to have the entire sky get brighter at intervals. But that's a bit contrived. And even though they would allow the entire infinite world to have day and night, why bother? That way, the only point of the story is that the world is infinite and flat. Well, so what? If, on the other hand, only a few widely separated areas are illuminated, and the next one is on the far side of ten million miles of Siberia, you've got a better set-up for an alternative world than one with no wars or conflict between nations because everyone has limitless living-space, agricultural land, mineral resources, etc., which is what you get if the world's surface is infinite and all of it is habitable. Which makes for a rather dull story with a central gimmick which doesn't really motivate anyone to do anything.


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