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.
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.
What's the documentary called?
Stealing this from OP, it's called "Behind the Curve" and it is hilarious.
They do an experiment with a navigation unit from an airliner and it consistently proves them wrong too.
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.
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.
Even math is involved? Dang this thing goes further than I thought.
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).
Flat earth is just a variation on the "It's the Jews!" bullshit that's existed forever. See Folding Ideas youtube video for details.
Literally everyone with eyes and a functioning brain who has ever charted the stars, flown in a plane, or looked out to sea. I'd wagers that's far more than 10%.
Since flat earth nonsense is just rebranded creationism, the only being who really needs to be part of the conspiracy is satan.
Then anyone who tells you that the earth is round is either deceived by satan, or is a satan worshiper.
This makes it super easy to dismiss anything that would hint at reality, like ships sailing over the horizon.
I was going to add other groups that would have to be in on it, but it is only required that you are all not real.
I am real. My family is real. But outside maybe 30 miles from my house, no one else needs to be real.
Sure, I can and have driven farther, but the trackers alert the actors. This has the advantage of the Earth's population can be just a few hundred thousand total.
Why? Clearly, I am the last truly important person, for reasons that are not yet clear.
So ... 50,000 people are in on it at least. And they are.... 40%+ of the Earth's population.
Edit: to finish the thought. OP's 10% puts those in on it at 800 million people. My 50 thousand is a much smaller number.
GPS is in on the hoax, too. Think about how much they had to hide the fact that those satellites can't "orbit" a flat disc....
I'm still trying to figure out why Russia used to own Alaska. Hell of a trip across the world to have sold that portion to the U.S.
Don't forget everyone who works on the moon
Checking in during moon lunch, thank you for making me feel seen.
What time do you take moon lunch?
I dunno about moon lunch, but I can tell you the best time to go to a dentist.
And the ISS.
No, that one is fake.
The entirety of Australia, because Flat Earthers often deny that this continent even exists and claim that it's the "counterweight" of the plate or some sh*t like that, and everyone living there is a paid actor employed by NASA to cover up The Truth™
No idea what Flat Earthers living IN Australia think of this tho...
Maybe yore thinking of the counterweight continent from Discworld?
Where do you think Pratchett got the idea?! They got to him first and paid him off so we'd think it was ridiculous!
No joke, it wasn't a flat earth thing, but I had a coworker years ago who was big into conspiracy theories and he claimed that movies like Men in Black were made to make everyone think that kind of thing only happened in fiction so we'd laugh at people who think it's real.
When I tried to point out to him that there was no evidence for the things he claimed were real, he said the lack of evidence was proof, because it meant they were hiding the evidence.
So obviously they had a brain because there's no evidence of one. Checkmate.
The thing about flat earthers is that they don't believe one thing, pretty much every group has a different believe system. The chance that a globe eartger and a flat eather have a similar system they believe in is higher than a flat earther and another random flat earther.
You're forgetting that with the microchips in vaccines, they can control our thoughts, so most of the participants don't need to be willing or aware. Cuts it down to just a few people in control of the 5G vaccine chip program.
You're welcome.
And the "few people in control" are members of which out-group...? All aboard to Q-land, everyone. Final stop, domestic terrorism.
Mathematicians. On a sphere, you can make a triangle that consists of three 90 degree angles, adding up to 270. A flat triangle will require that all angles add up to 180, i.e. 60, 60, 60.
Edit: I'm not a mathematician, and yet I know this. So this one could probably include anyone who has ever had a math teacher that covered spherical geometry.
I'm not sure that works though. For it to have all three angles at 90 degrees, wouldn't it need to cover a full 1/8th of the planet? Flat earthers would at lest understand that much. They would just deny anyone had measured that accurately. After all, anyone could go up in a spaceship to see the true shape of the earth, but only bigger governments and a few shitty billionaires have the means to do so.
I've always wondered how the Soviet Union and the Cold War fit into the NASA conspiracy. Did Korolev receive paycheks from across the ocean to fake Gagarin's spaceflight too?
You missed the Memo, both countries were controlled by Reptilians who live inside the hollow earth. Have you ever see Stalin and Reagan in the same room ? It's because it's the same person
If the lizard people live in a hollow Earth, aren't they afraid to fall out of the bottom?
Anybody who has ever flown far enough Eastwards or Westwards and saw how the time of day changed either much faster or slower than the time their clock said it was.
(Which can't be mathematically explained for a flat Earth but is a pretty simple effect to explain with a round Earth)
Forget that. It's even simpler. Phone someone in a different time zone around sunset. If they say the sun isn't setting where they are, either the earth is a sphere, or they're lying and part of the conspiracy.
Functionally? It's gotta be well over a billion.
It's actually just me. I mind control everyone else. It's easier if I have some "nutjobs" as an opposition who know the real truth. And more fun for me.
There are no conspiracists on the tail side, only on the heads side I am told, because they fell off
10 % of the population ?
More or less... good estimate BTW.
In any case, a lot of people... way too many to cover up a lie that big.
Obviously only the programmer/team of programmers who wrote and maintains the simulation.
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!