Equation that expresses how long alleged conspiracies survive before being publicized

The factors in the equation included the number of co-conspirators, the length of time, and other factors that arise from the amount of time passed, such as how many deaths would occur in the population.

And when it came to the theories himself, Grimes chose four well-known examples – the faking of the Moon landing, climate change purportedly being a fraud, vaccines supposedly causing autism, and the belief that pharmaceutical firms are blocking a cure for cancer. I hope that by showing how eye-wateringly unlikely some alleged conspiracies are, some people will reconsider their anti-science beliefs, ” he says.

In the wilder reaches of the internet, lots of people still believe that NASA faked the moon landings – and possibly even its entire space program.

By these calculations, the United States moon landing of 1969 would long have been exposed, as it involved a whopping 411,000 NASA employees.

Dr David Grimes, of the University of Oxford, developed a formula which showed that the numbers of people involved in sophisticated conspiracies, such as fake moon landings, would have led to them being exposed.

Math and statistics were able to answer a very interesting question of our age: how long do conspiracy theories last?

Dr Grimes then looked at four alleged plots, estimating the maximum number of people required to be in on the conspiracy, in order to see how viable these conspiracies could be.

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”. It predicts that any massive group of conspirators will inevitably let the cat out of the bag within a few years.

His work begins with an equation to test the probability of a conspiracy being either deliberately revealed by a whistleblower, or inadvertently, as a result of a mistake.

All of which are, obviously, vehemently denied by those who are accused of hiding up the truth, but this denial in the mind of a conspiracy theorist only cements their belief that a huge plot to hide the truth is the real reality.

The equation was especially missing an estimation of the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing.

Back on Earth, a climate change conspiracy with 405,000 conspirators – based on scientists and staff at institutions like the Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – would have lasted just three years and nine months. For 10 years, this dropped to below 1,000 people.

Grimes published a study on his findings in the journal PLOS One. 736,000 people if, as would be more likely, pharmaceutical companies were included; that the cure for Cancer is being supressed by the world’s leading pharmaceutical firms (714,000 people).

“However, not every belief in a conspiracy is necessarily wrong – for example, the Snowden revelations confirmed some theories about the activities of the NSA”.

He wants to urge the reader to consider looking at what we are as a species more responsibly, because embracing reality could be obscured by “ideologically-motivated fictions”.