Rapper B.o.B acha que a Terra é plana e está a tentar convencer o resto do mundo disso

Na escola, aprendemos todos o mesmo: que a Terra é redonda. Contudo, por mais estranho que pareça, há quem não esteja completamente convencido desse facto. É o caso de B.o.B, um rapper que muitos provavelmente conhecem da música “Airplanes” (que bateu lá para 2012), que veio esta semana para a Internet defender a velhíssima teoria de que a Terra é plana.

Bobby Ray Simmons – mais conhecido por B.o.B – partilhou esta segunda-feira, no seu Twitter, uma foto dele próprio no cimo de um monte e disse: “As cidades ao fundo estão a aproximadamente 25 km de distância… onde está a curva? Expliquem-me.”

Esta é a foto:

E este o tweet:

The cities in the background are approx. 16miles apart… where is the curve ? please explain this pic.twitter.com/YCJVBdOWX7

— B.o.B (@bobatl) January 25, 2016

O ponto de B.o.B ganhou alguma atenção, nomeadamente vários retweets e favoritos, e a resposta do conceituado astrofísico Neil deGrasse Tyson, que é também autor e apresentador da nova série Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey:

@bobatl Earth's curve indeed blocks 150 (not 170) ft of Manhattan. But most buildings in midtown are waaay taller than that.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016

@bobatl Polaris is gone by 1.5 deg S. Latitude. You’ve never been south of Earth’s Equator, or if so, you've never looked up.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016

@bobatl Flat Earth is a problem only when people in charge think that way. No law stops you from regressively basking in it.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016

@bobatl Duude — to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016

Uma rivalidade ímpar, que culminou com B.o.B a responder a Neil deGrasse Tyson através do SoundCloud. O rapper lançou uma música chamada “Flatline”, que está cheia de teorias da conspiração, falsas, antissemitismo e referências a negadores do Holocausto.

A música vem acompanhada de uma capa sugestiva da opinião do rapper:

Para aqueles que não conseguirem acompanhar a música, deixamos a letra em baixo, segundo o Genius:

Verse 1

Yo, you ain’t seen my best
Checkmate, ain’t a game of chess
Globalists see me as a threat
Free thinking, got the world at my neck
Hah, am I paranoid? Picture Malcolm X
In a room full of pigs, trying not to bust a sweat
Aye, Neil Tyson need to loosen up his vest
They’ll probably write that man one hell of a check
Aye, I’m over here on this side of town
Come on over, over, over, over here try to clown
Aye, I never pipe down
If they weren’t coming for me then
They definitively coming for me now
I can’t even keep my phone charged up
All this shit I’m talking, I should get my
Rappers get off of my dick, get your own bars up
Now the mirror lizard’s breath got the clones scared cuz
Woo, use your, use your common sense
Why is NASA department of defense?
They divided up the seas into thirty-three degrees
Feeding kids masonry, bruh, be careful what you read

Hook 1

Flat line, flat line
There’s no superior blood line
Flat line, flat line
You got me once but that died, aye

Verse 2

Voice, voice, do I have a voice?
Do I give a fuck? Do I have a choice?
Joint, joint, I roll up a joint
Keep my shooters in the game like I hate to disappoint
I see only good things on the horizon
That’s probably why the horizon is always rising
Indoctrinated in a cult called science
And graduated to a club full of liars
Heliocentrism, you were the sixth victim
Fuck you and your team, you could sit on the bench with ‘em
But before you try to curve it, do your research on David Irving
Stalin was way worse than Hitler
That’s why the POTUS gotta wear a Kipper
I’m a man first ‘fore an artist
Get a lawyer, look up Doctor Richard [?]

Hook 2

Flat line, flat line
You fooled us for the last time
Flat line, flat line
There’s no superior blood line

Interlude: Neil Tyson

So you want to find farthest point from that center. And it turns out sea level from the equator is farther away from the center of the Earth than sea level at the poles. It has nothing to do with global warming and melting of the ice caps

(Why is that?)

Because we…Earth we know it spins, once uh…a day. Yes thank you. Three people know, uh, how long a day lasts here

(Good for row number two, they’re off to a great start)

So you, you know when you spin pizza dough it kind of flattens out. It gets wider in the middle…so Earth throughout it’s life, Earth, even when it formed, it was spinning. And it got a little wider at the equator that it does at the poles. So it’s not actually a sphere, it’s oblate, it’s officially an oblate spheroid

But not only that, it’s slightly wider below the equator than above the equator

(A little chubbier?)

Little chubbier, chubby’s a good word, it’s like pear-shaped. It turns out the pear-shapedness is a bigger than the height of mount Everest above sea level

Hook 2

Flat line, flat line
You fooled us for the last time
Flat line, flat line
There’s no superior blood line
Dead

Neil deGrasse Tyson respondeu a B.o.B também com uma música. Foi feita por Steve Tyson, sobrinho do astrofísico, e intitula-se “Flat to Fact”:

Por mais que B.o.B fale, a ideia de que a Terra não é redonda não é sequer discutível. A teoria está provada e verificada há muito, muito tempo.