https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/...
If NASA really faked the moon landing in 1969, about 411,000 people would have worked together to keep that information from the public, and the whole thing would have been exposed about four years later, according to an Oxford researcher who has found a mathematical way to examine the viability of conspiracy theories.
David Robert Grimes is a physicist and cancer researcher, but he also writes science pieces for the Irish Times and the Guardian. As a science writer, he’s used to being contacted by people who adhere to science-based conspiracy theories, which generally involve accusing the scientific community at large of colluding on fake data for nefarious purposes, Oxford University said in a release about Grimes’s new paper, published in PLOS this week.
To help demonstrate the viability (or lack thereof) of several well-known conspiracy theories, Grimes wrote an equation to show just how hard it would be to keep large-scale conspiracies — if they were true — a secret.
“For a conspiracy of even a few thousand actors, intrinsic failure would arise within decades. For hundreds of thousands, such failure would be assured within less than half a decade,†Grimes concluded. In other words: bad news for a lot of the Internet’s most persistent conspiracies.