Did Nasa astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin really walk on the moon in 1969, or was it part of an elaborate ruse directed by Stanley Kubrick? Are aircraft leaving 'chemtrails' in the sky, chemical agents sprayed for mysterious and nefarious purposes? Is there actually a cure for cancer, suppressed by pharmaceutical companies in order to protect valuable 'alternative' medicines?
Unfortunately for the more imaginative conspiracy theorists among us, the answer to all of these questions is likely to be a resounding no.
That's not just according to wide and available evidence, either: it's also according to new research from University of Oxford mathematician David Grimes, who has devised an equation that expresses how long alleged conspiracies could exist without being exposed as fake.
The equation, which has been published in Plos One, is made up of three factors: the number of conspirators involved, how much time has passed since the alleged conspiracy took place, and the "intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing".
This intrinsic measure was estimated by looking at data from conspiracies that had later been revealed to be true – the PRISM surveillance program, which was revealed by Edward Snowden after several years, the Tuskegee syphilis scandal, which withheld the cure for syphilis from African-Americans and was revealed after 25 years, and an FBI scandal which led to the execution of innocent people, unveiled by a doctor after six years.
The data from these examples meant Dr Grimes could calculate the possibility of a conspiracy being revealed, which he determined is about four in one million. It may sound like a small number, but it increases as the number of conspirators grows and time passes.
Dr Grimes tested his equation on four of the most famous conspiracy theories:
- "The Moon landing was faked"
- "Climate change is a fraud"
- "Vaccinations cause autism"
- "A cure for cancer is being withheld"
The equation found that if any of these conspiracies were real, they were highly likely to have been revealed by now – the Moon landing would have been public in just 3.7 years, climate change fraud in 3.7 to 26.8 years, vaccine/autism in 3.2 to 34.8 years and the cure for cancer in 3.2 years. "Even if there was a concerted effort, the sheer number of people required for the sheer scale of hypothetical deceptions would inextricably undermine these nascent conspiracies," Dr Grimes concluded. "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 also warned against the "polarised echo-chambers" of ill-informed online debate, saying that people who are "deeply invested in a particular narrative...are closed off to other sources of information". "The grim reality is that there appears to be a cohort so ideologically invested in a belief that their convictions are impervious to the intrusions of reality. In these cases, it is highly unlikely that a simple mathematical demonstration of the untenability of their belief that will change their viewpoint".
This article was originally published in January 2016.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
