Opus 5.5 and Three.js recreate the hollow-earth cosmology of Koresh
The author used Opus 5.5 and Three.js to recreate the 19th-century belief that we live inside the Earth, with a slider for light bending that snaps the sky back to normal.
In 1869 a doctor in New York had a vision. We don't live ON the Earth. We live IN it. The ground curves up around you. The Sun hangs in the middle. The stars are a tiny ball at the center of everything. He changed his name to Koresh. Started a commune in Florida. Hundreds of followers. In 1897 they built a giant wooden machine on a Naples beach to prove the ground curves up. They said it worked. Okay. So why can't you look up and see Australia? Their answer: light bends. Sounds like a cope. Here's the weird part. In the 1980s a mathematician showed that if light bends exactly the right way, you can't tell the difference. At all. Sunsets. Stars. Ships over the horizon. Every single thing you can see from the ground matches a normal globe. It's still out there on YouTube. I couldn't stop thinking about it. What would that actually look like? So I built it with opus 5.5 and threejs. You stand on the inside of the world. Real Sun, Moon, planets and star positions. One slider for how much light bends. Zero: the whole planet hangs over your head. One: the sky snaps back to normal. I just wanted to see what it would look like to stand inside the Earth...