(Warning! plot spoilers)
Mark Sargeant's "Under the Dome, Edge of the Firmament"
Shell Beach segment
Transcribed from video
Images mine.
Lets look at something small, take an ordinary mouse and put it into a glass cage. It doesn't have to be a mouse, could be a snake, a lizard, insect, it makes little difference for this exercise.
People identify with mice because they're used to seeing them in lab experiments. Mice also don't have any sinister cannotations. They're seen as relatively innocent and benign. The perfect test subject as it were. I have yet to meet anyone who has a bias against the lab mouse.
So the mouse goes into the box for the first time and the reaction is always the same, it explores it's surroundings. More importantly tests the barrier around it. Probing for exits or potential exits.
The mouse inspects every inch of its new glass home and at some point settles into the acceptance that the walls are indeed solid and it may be there for a while.
Every so often it will repeat the process. Again checking the boundries of the cage just in case something has changed. What it doesn't do is act as it would in the wild because it realizes that it's in a form of captivity.
The glass box doesn't even remotely resemble it's natural environment. You could put this box in the middle of the forest and the mouse might feel slightly better about it's situation but it still knows that it's been trapped against it's will then will settle into a non native lifestyle.
You could take all the other small animals that could be substituted for a mouse, the snake, the lizard, the insect, it makes no difference, the result will invariably be the same, repeated probing for escape routes, then acceptance.
Take the same animal and now put it into the middle of a hundred mile square wildlife preserve surrounded on all sides by a similar type of glass enclosure. The creature doesn't even bother to rush the sides of the preserve and start testing the boundries mostly because its out of visual range.
It could be days or even weeks before it even encounters a single fence. The animal's routine is spent doing what it normally would do, it eats, it sleeps, it breeds. It does everything that it would naturally do in the wild.
If one day the animal approaches the fence there might be some curiosity but any anxiety is quickly resolved by just turning around and heading back into the vast expanse from which it came.
The fence does not pose a potential problem for the animals in the preserve because it is so small compared to the expanse they live in and dwelling on that does not hold any interest.
We're assuming here that the fence is high enough to discourage flying creatures as well, deep enough to stop burrowing classes, and if you want, reaches the floor of any nearby body of water, stopping any clever aquatic types.
The point here is that all creatures great and small inside a giant wildlife preserve encountering the fence wouldn't care. They would all in their own way just shrug and move on with their lives.
However, if you take a human, male or female, regardless of education, of nurturing and put them in the exact same wildlife sanctuary the response would be quite different. When the human approaches the glass fence, they don't see it as a minor distraction. They pause, they wonder. More importantly they ask questions either internally or among others.
Why is the fence here? How far does it reach? Can I dig underneath, or climb over, or go around it? These questions continue in a way you might imagine.
But, eventually a bigger question jumps to the top of the list, who built the fence? It is that which changes not only the type of questions being asked but how the human being or beings look at their world.
The giant wildlife preserve suddenly gets smaller. Each new fence border discovered starts to artificially constrict their expanse even though the dimensions haven't changed.
Before long the preserve, their home, loses some of it's relevance. The fence is a reminder of the unknown.
It provokes fear and endless speculation within the human. Given enough time the importance of the preserve continues to be reduced. Especially in relation to the fence. And the reason why its so engrossing for the human is simple, its there, its real, they can see it, and maybe even touch it.
Adding more humans to the equation increases the disparity of the situation by orders of magnitude. Have you seen the fence? Do you know how long its been there? Have you ever known anyone thats been outside it?
Its older than us. Who is responsible for the fence? What can we do to appease the group that created it?
You can see where this might lead to.
A longlasting group hysteria would entrench itself within the population, grab hold and never let go. The fence is bigger, older, and wiser than they are. It humbles them, it angers them and it is forever. It is their proof of a higher power.
Maybe not god but certainly god-like. No civilization regardless of technology, discipline, or age would be able to cope with the existance of it.
For the human psyche there are just too many questions that go unanswered. Life would never be able to progress normally.
To summarize: a garden variety wildlife preserve would work for 99.9% of all the world's life forms. For human beings, however, you would need to make some modifications or really just one big one.
So lets take a look at a few examples of how this could be accomplished and from there expand it.
The first failed example can be seen in the 1998 movie Dark City. This is a good starting point to get you in the right mindset.
The premise here is that an advanced race creates a small flat earth area complete with a traditional dome. The design, however, is initially flawed in that they built the city all the way to the outer edge leaving no room for error.
To compensate for this they altered the memories of the human population on a regular basis therefore repressing any longterm investigations.
However, in movies there are always anomalies like the police officer who realizes that even though he remembers visiting a place called Shell Beach, there is no way to reach it because Shell Beach is outside of the flat world and never existed.
He just keeps going around the circular city that has no exits. In the end, another man, the hero of the movie, makes it to the edge, steals the advanced race's power, and creates an ocean which really should have been there in the first place.
Move from there to a movie released only 4 months later called The Truman Show.
Inevitably, all flat earthers have to take a hard look at this movie from a technical point of view
The movie follows the same lines as Dark City but in a much more relatable premise, that of a giant television stage built so that the outside world can watch a person go through his life without any knowledge that he is living inside a flat world surrounded by a physical dome.
The movie is interesting on so many levels including construction. Using their existing model of a small town bordered on one side by a large lagoon and wilderness and on the other a seemingly expansive ocean.
While better than Dark City it still had it's flaws. For one, it was less than 20 miles across and even though Truman's desire to explore was repressed there was still a chance that he would venture to the outer edge which is where the movie ended. But for the most part it worked.
Truman believed the entire scenario because he was born into it. And then lived 30 plus years without any reason to doubt where he was. Which could be said for any of us.
If it wasn't for the, and we'll say, "movie mistakes", that the studio fell victim to, then the show would have never ended.
And this then raises hypothetical scenarios like how many kids like Truman could you have raised inside that dome. 10..50?
Now, logistically you can see how it might be problematic in keeping tabs on that many kids especially as they get older.
But with enough slight of hand it could be possible. A fictional situation just like that was made in the 2004 movie The Village. And even though it turned into one of those M. Night Shyamalan plot twistings, the premise was very feasible.
A wealthy group of idealists buy a large parcel of land in an existing wildlife preserve, create a small town from the 1800s and raise children there.
They pay off government officials to keep planes far away and spread a myth that monsters live in the forest. As far as the kids are concerned they are actually living in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1800s.
And being born into it why wouldn't they?
Eventually the elders that founded the town would all pass away leaving the children to pass on the legacy free from any burden of guilt that their world was not what it appeared to be.
And keeping in mind this was done with very little land manipulation and no dome. This then circles back to how many actors the fictional Truman Show really needed to hire.
Other than the leads who did product placement the rest of the town could actually just live their lives like everyone else. Use phone lines to call outside, go to restaurants, watch televion at home and so on. But again I digress.
Assuming the technology was possible how many people like Truman could you keep in a dome the size of, say, a state that was hundreds of miles across? Probably thousands.
If you kept expanding the size of the dome to few thousand miles, well, then you are talking millions. But when it gets that big something interesting happens, you don't need actors anymore.
Start it up like The Village within just a few generations everyone is oblivious and you can leave them to their own devices.
Starting to sound familiar?
In fact, the larger you make the enclosed world the less micro-managing needs to be done. It gets easier as it scales up.
This brings us back to the missing modification you need for the human race. To keep the storylines consistant and remove all the hokus-pokus of monsters in the woods or that you can't get to Shell Beach. You place in gradual negative reinforcement. One that creates an illusion of choice.
Say for example that Truman went out in the sailboat the same as before but this time the dome was twice the size and the simulated ocean far larger.
How far would he travel before getting hungry, thirsty, or tired? The movie ending is then in doubt. And if you compare this scenario where where you are now then you start to see it.
Look at the flat earth map again, continents grouped in the center, surrounded in all directions by hundreds of miles of salt water. Think about how much further ancient ships would have travelled if you could drink what you are sailing on?
As you move closer to the edge the temperature starts taking a nosedive. Then you start seeing icebergs. If that doesn't stop you, then, you run into what we call Antartica which is a steep climb 2 miles up with no plant life or indiginous livestock animals.
And if you had the where-with-all to make it that far you would still have hundreds of miles of endless ice and snow. Its easy to see why so few people have gone the distance.
Compare this to the upper ceiling which is much easier to maintain. You simply decrease the oxygen rates so that every thousand feet up it gets more difficult to breathe. This slows down exploration over mountain ranges and discourages limited control flight such as baloons.
Also keep in mind that the dome itself doesn't have to be that high in relation to the outer ring. With commercial aircraft capping out at 10 miles and rockets less than 400, the dome would actually look more like a stadium roof dependng on how you wanted to display the sun, moon, and stars.
An enclosed world with these types of safeguards would be able to sustain an unknowing population for say, what, 4500 years? Then you could artificially introduce a globe model into the scientific community before the civilization technology reaches a point that could lead to discovery. And 500 years later here we are.
A civilization inside an amazing structure doing what we would naturally do. While the authority stands by the gate and fears the consequences if we ever found out for ourselves.
