Kyrie Irving hasn’t really said any things in the past few months about the shape of the earth, but he is still the NBA’s most prominent flat earth conspiracy theorist. Because this is a stance that spits in the face of a scientific consensus, it makes Bill Nye really upset.
Nye appeared on Complex News to discuss flat earthers, and while B.O.B. was the primary person he was asked about, Irving’s public stance about the shape of our planet (that he kind of claimed might have been sort of a joke, no one really knows) popped up.
Once that happened, Nye went off on the Celtics guard, pointing out that it’s bizarre how Irving is willing to think deeply about the game of basketball but will ignore something as obvious as the roundness of the earth.
“They think about basketball defense, complicated business,” Nye said when asked about how a person as influential as Irving uses his platform to spread something that goes against a scientific consensus. “They think about their statistics constantly. They’re constantly evaluating their shooting percentage, their field goal percentage. They get to the court early and they dribble the ball to see which parts of the court are kind of dead compared to the lively parts because somebody spilled a soft drink five years ago that didn’t get wiped up fast enough. Yes, they think about that.
“Yet they’re somehow able to look at pictures of the earth from space, they’re somehow able to accept weather forecasting from satellites, they’re able to listen to CNN from the other side of the world bounced off spacecrafts, and yet conclude that, since they can’t see Florida from Manhattan, the world must be flat,” Nye continued. “It’s just weird.”
To be fair to Irving, he has said he doesn’t believe that any real pictures of the earth and its shape exist, so Nye saying that Irving has been able to look at pictures of the planet ignores that Irving doesn’t think he has ever actually seen a picture of the planet. This is all incredibly silly and I really hope it leads to some college holding a debate on the shape of the earth between Kyrie Irving and Bill Nye.
