This is a common trope paraded by conspiracy perpetrators. “Do you really think we could keep something like that secret?” Also, it doesn’t have to be secret

This is a common trope paraded by conspiracy perpetrators. “Do you really think we could keep something like that secret?” Also, it doesn’t have to be secret to be a conspiracy. Fossil fuel companies more or less openly conspired to obfuscate, deny, discredit, and discourage evidence from their own scientists and the scientific community at large that fossil fuel use could cause significant heating and possible thermal runaway of the planetary climate for over 70 years in order to continue to exploit fossil fuels which they knew to pose a threat to human civilisation as a whole. Cigarette companies acted similarly. Automotive companies have done similar things many times over. Naively believing that collective human incompetence makes effective obfuscation impossible ignores a great many examples of successful collusion and implies a very naive optimism about the information dissemination mechanisms within society. It is more plausible that collective human incompetence makes perfect secrecy unnecessary.