A number of ancient cultures believed that the Earth was flat because, simply, they didn’t know any better. But incredibly, there are people today who still believe that the Earth is flat ...

has a branch called geodesy that’s devoted to studying Earth’s shape and how it’s positioned in space. Geodesy informs everything from building sewers and making accurate maps of sea level ...

This does have its drawbacks, as the Earth is round, but pages are flat, so what we see on a map is slightly distorted.Globes and maps are how we’ve seen the world for hundreds of years.