Duke Blue Devils: Kyrie Irving Pronounces Earth to be Flat

Did the Duke Blue Devils imbue Kyrie Irving with his round Earth rejections? Probably not.

Perhaps the player who had the most fun All Star weekend was former Duke Blue Devils point guard Kyrie Irving. Irving started a bit of controversy before any of the events even took place by offering his unasked opinion on the curvature of the Earth.

Irving said that he believed the Earth was flat. Not flat in a conspiracy theory way, just flat. I had thought the Flat Earth Society was long gone or irrelevant. Apparently they are active enough to attract an NBA multimillionaire with one year of education at Duke University of all places. I don’t think he got this one from Coach K.

Irving went off on the ‘scientific consensus’ in a radio interview by basically saying that people lie to you and you have to verify things by yourself. Somehow ‘global warming’ was not the thing that scientists were hoodwinking us on, but the idea of a ‘globe’ itself. Irving’s defense of his beliefs were ideas about astronomy that had been dismissed by the time of Johannes Kepler if not dealt with by the Ancient Greeks. Eratosthenes had calculated the ‘circumference’ of the Earth back before the birth of Christ.

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Irving’s second point was that things shot into space never come back. That would be news to the hundreds of manned space missions from multiple countries. His defense was that everyone lies to us about that. Which was really the common theme.

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Irving wants you to question everything so that no one takes advantage of you. He just takes this view a little far afield. Ultimately to question everything is know nothing, and Irving’s skill in basketball suggests that this is not the case.

So does it matter that Juan Del Cano returned to Spain after a heart wrenching voyage past South America, away from the Philippines and disaster, and around Africa finally back home in 1522? Or that we have time zones? Not for Irving, who for some reason is humored that we find this to be a big deal at all.