First off, I need to say I am not saying either of these are true or false, I am merely stepping through the logic of evaluating conspiracy theories in general. The most important thing to look at first when you hear a new theory is to put things into prospective. How hard would the deception/crime be to commit, cover-up, and keep secret? Who has the motivation/power to conspire to cover-up or change the perception of reality of the general public (who benefits)? This might not always be obvious but it is important to try and understand the motivation for the potential conspiracy. How much do they benefit from the deception/crime? Then put it all together, compare the amount of effort to commit the action vs the potential benefits for the conspirators. If the benefits are extremely small compared to the risk and effort than this is strong evidence that the theory is probably wrong. How easy is it to prove/disprove (how hard would it be to obtain the knowledge needed to know the truth)? Finally are there alternative explanations for the evidence? Lets see how this looks in action.
First lets take a look at the Flat Earth theory. It would be extremely hard to keep this a secret in the modern era, it would take many thousands of people from around the world, from many space agencies, many scientists and many histories to be lying. So to the first question, it would be very hard to achieve, and we already identified who would be the conspirators (space agencies/scientists/historians). It is hard to say that they would benefit from hiding the fact that the earth would be flat, unless there is a huge amount of land and they have access to huge amounts of resources that they don’t tell us about (though they would be in very inhospitable climate and very hard to get to, much harder than the resources we already have outside the arctic. So the effort to benefits ratio seems highly skewed towards the effort, and the benefits seem non existent.
How could we prove that the earth was round and not flat? Well we could measure the angle to constellations from different latitudes and if it was consistent with a flat or round earth. This would be pretty easy to do, we could take flights around the southern hemisphere and see if the times are consistent with the calculated distances on a flat/round earth, or we could even get a boat and sail from around the southern hemisphere and measure how far we went and figure out if it was round or flat. So it seems would be rather easy to prove one way or the other.
Lastly, it seems NASA and other space agencies are clearly faking some things, is there any other explanation than a flat earth? It could be that they are trying to use propaganda to make the rivals think they are more advanced than they are in order to have a psychological advantage if there was ever a war, so just because NASA fakes something does not mean there are not other reasons for it than they are hiding a flat earth.
Next lets look at Nuclear Hoax Theory by the same method. You would have to have key people in the government come up with the idea to fake the weapons. From there you would have to have key people at the tests help setup the fake explosions and then either have real or fake photos/videos of the explosions. The average person watching it has no experience with extremely large explosions and would not know a nuke vs a tnt explosions, so they would not need to be in on it. Next you would have to have people to fake the photos/videos and lie to the media, a few scientists that are at a high enough level to understand the actual physics involved and finally you would need other countries that claim to have nukes to lie about them as well. So you would need a few thousand people at the high end to carry out the conspiracy. Everyone in the manufacturing lines and elsewhere would not know anything about it. The benefits to those that commit the conspiracy are many. It gives them a huge psychological advantage over all over all countries that don’t “have” nukes, it keeps the populations afraid and compliant to the government, it allows many billions of dollars to be spent on other projects or stole or used for personal gain, it allows you to justify going to war with countries “trying to acquire nukes”, and finally it leaves all your enemies chasing a unicorn. So the effort, while would be a lot, would be shadowed by the amount of benefits that the conspirators would gain.
Next, it would clearly be very difficult to obtain the knowledge in order to disprove that nukes were possible, it would only take a few lies in a few text books to mislead anyone trying to find out the truth, they have not tested any in a very long time that we are able to see the aftermath from or modern videos of. So in short it would be very hard to obtain the knowledge to prove one way or another if nuclear weapons are real or not. There are clearly fake photos and videos of nukes, also the pictures and videos got more and more sophisticated as we became more and more adept at creating fake videos. Could this evidence be used for another purpose other than the conspiracy? It is hard to think of anything other than to prove that nukes are real and to create fear in the population and enemies.
With the amount of deception we are currently exposed to it is best to think more in terms of probabilities than absolutes. So neither of these should be 100% believed or disbelieved, but by using a simple method we can quickly decide some sort of probability on what is more likely true. The Flat Earth conspiracy is very weak, this does not mean the earth is round, it means that most likely the conspiracy to hide that the earth being flat is not real. Nuclear hoax on the other hand is much more plausible based on this simple logical evaluation. So while it is easy to let emotions and use our colored perceptive of the world to evaluate evidence it is much better to try to keep a rational head and use a logical method to evaluate information we are presented and always look at both sides to keep conformation bias to a minimum.
Thanks for reading,
Oz
:)
(Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe)