This is Earth. It's a sphere. Well, technically it's an oblong spheroid but it is not flat. Stick that fact in your brain and keep it there.

You know the saying, "Everyone knows that." The fact that Earth is a three-dimensional oblong spheroid no longer applies to that idiom.

There are people in this almost perfect sphere of a world who believe the earth is a flat surface surrounded by a wall of ice (and wait, that's not the best part) because "The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world," according to the actual FAQ page of the totally serious Flat Earth Society.

The largest gathering of flat Earth believers, who are also called "flat earthers," "flat earth believers" and "no seriously, they believe the Earth is flat in the 21st century," are coming to our little corner of the globe (not "giant Frisbee"). The Flat Earth International Conference 2019 will hold their next gathering on Thursday and Friday, Nov. 14-15, at the Frisco Conference Center.

Why are we writing about an entity that promotes patently false and easily disprovable facts even in this age of widened enlightenment? Well, for starters, it's incredibly funny. We know it's not kosher and sometimes not fair to joke about someone else's beliefs, but believing something referred to as a "fact" while demonstrably opposite of true, then the fact cannot possibly be a belief. It's many other things: a wish, a hunch, a whim, a feeling in your gut, aka the place in your body that holds the poop.

The guest roster and schedule for the November conference have to be seen to be believed. Some of the guest speakers include the conference's founder Robbie Davidson who showed his IQ when he got fooled for a prank documentary by Logan Paul, the YouTuber who didn't possess enough intelligence to know that filming a dead human body while giggling and wearing a stupid hat isn't a great idea.

Other guests include a musician named Alex O the "Flat Earth Man" who's a mix of Toby Keith, Johnny Cash and severe mental strain and alt-right comedian Owen Benjamin, who's best known for posting anti-semitic and racist rants on YouTube and for questioning the authenticity of the moon landing and the Earth's roundness while sometimes playing a piano because, um, comedy?

The second reason is it's no longer a fringe idea. A survey conducted last year by the pollster YouGov found that 2% of American citizens believe Earth is a flat object in space. It's big enough to merit taking over a massive conference center to fill with people who believe the Earth is flat, are on the fence that the Earth is flat or believe the Earth isn't flat and need a good laugh on a boring afternoon.

In November, if you come across someone who believes in the flat Earth theory or you find yourself at the conference, you should treat them the way everyone would like to be treated by a stranger. You should be polite, courteous and maybe even a little affable because a sense of humor can bring all of humanity together.

However, if you should happen to get into a debate about a basic fucking fact of life that humanity figured out over 2,000 years ago, long before we all agreed that shoes should be a requirement for outdoor traversing, you should still be polite, courteous and a little affable if you can muster the strength. You can also arm yourself with the truth. You probably won't convince anyone who hold a flat earth theory as truth but you can walk away knowing you were polite, courteous and right.

Fact 1: The Goddamn Horizon

If the Earth was actually the universe's biggest drink coaster as the conspiracy theorists claim, then you wouldn't be able to see objects sink into the horizon. When a ship moves away from someone over a vast ocean landscape or if a person is on a ship moving away from a solid object, both will eventually sink out of view. Is the ship sinking or (gasp!) is the landmass sinking into the ocean? No, it's showing you that the Earth is friggin' curved, according to one of many NASA astronomers. If the world was flat, the object would just get fucking smaller and smaller. Then again, if it was, some self-proclaimed scientific "geniuses" would probably theorize that the objects are actually shrinking because we all have Ant-Man's superpower but the government doesn't want you to know about it.