Just a thought experiment, let’s say the earth is flat, looks like many professionals would know, including
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Pilots/ATC/sea captain
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Land surveyor and civil engineers
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Astronomers and Geologists, at least the one dealing with experimental data
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Militaries, at least radar operator and artillery
Just these categories are already a lot of persons, I assume I miss a lot of others. So how many person does it make in total ? 10 % of the population ?
Add the entire population of Denmark. Country is dead flat yet you can’t see one city from another one. Nor can you see the mountains of neighboring countries.
The guards that patrol the ice wall.
Entirety of NASA. Entirety of NOAA. Meteorologists. Cartographers. Everyone who works on Google Earth. Every engineer who works on satellites, rockets, and planes. Physicists.
However, I do think 10% is probably too high an estimate. While these are a lot of people in a lot of areas, they represent pretty small demographics each.
Wouldn’t you assume that their family would know and be in on it? I was gonna suggest it has to be more than 10 percent. Since it’s not a life or death conspiracy like the Manhattan project I would assume a lot of those people ‘in on it’ would tell spouses, best friends or even older kids. If you knew a huge secret like that would you want your close loved ones to be lied to and indoctrinated into a false truth?
If you’re in on the biggest conspiracy in the history of the world, you don’t tell anyone about it. There are CIA agents who live their entire lives without their spouses knowing they work for the CIA. How much more powerful must the round earth agency be than the CIA to maintain such a conspiracy for thousands of years? I don’t want to say illuminati, but it sounds an awful lot like the illuminati.
More than just people. Some form of greater intelligence has to be at work since anyone can run a simple experiment to prove it’s round.
The ending of the Netflix documentary where the flat earthers prove the earth is round is hysterical.
Is that the one where they use the lighted poles at night and a board with a hole in it to prove the earth is flat? In that one they seemed a bit baffled and said they’d need to do the experiment again. To their credit, when they ran it again with the same results, they said they’d need to reevaluate their beliefs.
during the credits the guy was making excuses for why it failed, did he come out later saying he was wrong?
That is unironically part of it. When people do experiments that show the earth is round they get told to pray and do it again. This suggests that their rationale is that the devil is tricking you into seeing bad results and if you pray hard enough you will eventually see five lights.
Anyone who lives near the sea an can see ships disappear behind the horizon.
This is a bit extreme, but maintaining a conspiracy with lots of “insiders” isn’t impossible. Just think of how many people worked on the Manhattan project.
First you compartmentalize, so that only a core few know the whole picture. Then you threaten everyone involved with serious jail time for informing. (This is why we know Bob Lazar is full of shit, where he telling the truth, he’d be in prison)
It’s true that secrets can’t be kept forever, but they can be kept for a while.
The flaw in flat earth is not the number of conspirators, but the purpose of the conspiracy. It all falls apart when we ask why the government wants to keep flat earth from the public.
Manhattan leaked before they even started work.
From memory, a sci-fi magazine seller figured it out, just based on address changes. He even figured out it was likely an attempt to make an atomic bomb. The USSR also had it completely compromised. The first soviet bomb was basically a direct copy of the American one.
That was also with most/all the workers in 1 location. They also had a very good reason to maintain security (grunts on the ground, not just leadership).
Wasn’t the Manhattan project compromised from within because of communist sympathizers, or even outright communists working on the project?
Depends what you mean by compromised.
Some of the scientists there were communists, or at least sympathetic to the communist cause. Since the USSR was currently an ally, they leaked information to them.
Other scientists didn’t follow security rules, either because they didn’t care, they hated the lockdown, or they wanted a challenge. Information slipped out because of that, even if it wasn’t a deliberate attempt to compromise the security of the project.
I wish Oppenheimer had spent less time on the trial, and more time on some of the really interesting scientists on the project. People like Richard Feynman, who was famous for playing bongos, trying to learn throat singing, and cracking the safes on campus just for fun. And, although slightly after the war, Louis Slotin and the Demon Core incident would have been an excellent scene for a movie.
Flat earth is just a variation on the “It’s the Jews!” bullshit that’s existed forever. See Folding Ideas youtube video for details.
