Kyrie Irving and the Boston Celtics are off to a great start to the 2017 season despite the horrific loss of Gordon Hayward. Irving looks like a great fit for the Celtics offense and he’s played well to start the year.
But he keeps talking, man, and when Irving talks weird stuff comes out of his mouth. The latest weird thing he said is yet another pivot back to his statement that the Earth is flat. Remember when that was the talk of All-Star weekend in New Orleans this year? It feels like years ago by now, but it was just a few months. We’ve all grown so old so fast.
Anyway, Irving has already clarified that it was some grand thought experiment and that he doesn’t actually believe the Earth is a flat disc. But the more he talks, the weirder things get. Such as Irving saying that there has never been a real picture taken of planet Earth.
Irving was on UCONN women’s basketball head coach Gino Auriemma’s podcast and Boston.com has a recap of things we learned from it. All of them are pretty weird, most notably that thing about celestial photography.
“The whole intent behind it, Coach, it wasn’t to bash science,” he said. “It wasn’t to like have the intent of starting a rage and be seen as this insane individual. When I started seeing comments and things about universal truths that I had known, like I had questions.”
“When I started actually doing research on my own and figuring out that there is no real picture of Earth, not one real picture of Earth — and we haven’t been back to the moon since 1961 or 1969 — it becomes like conspiracy, too.”
The actual number of photos taken of the planet on which we all currently reside is, of course, incalculable. There are satellites circling Earth taking photos and the International Space Station takes photos of Earth all the time. The Apollo missions took so many photos of Earth from the Moon that you’d think the two were announcing their engagement on Facebook. But Kyrie’s gotta make himself think that he’s making you think, so here we are.
“I just wanna open up and have that conversation,” Irving said. “I wanted to just ask other individuals, like do you really think this actually happened? I just wanna know. Because I don’t know either.”
And hey! Curiosity is good. Asking questions is good. And the simplified history we are taught growing up is often much more complicated and darker than we initially realize. But science, too, is complicated. And often the truth in science is much bigger than something you can see in a conspiracy YouTube video. Questioning history and the biases inherent to said history is important. Being denying science in this modern age is dangerous and, quite frankly, damaging to the discourse in our culture.
