[erulabs]

Well sure but that's exactly my point - anybody with some education. It wasn't until around the 1600s, being generous (really the 1800s), that it even started to become common knowledge or taught in schools (or that the western world even had wide-spread education at all). The default, uneducated assumption is that the earth is flat and there must be water above the dome that is the sky, because it rains - this is what I meant by "phenomenology" - they're just describing the phenomena of the earth - which is after all a natural place for human beings to start out if not educated.

So the "earth is flat" is almost not a conspiracy, it's just a lack of education. "Someone is fooling us into thinking the earth is round" is the conspiracy part.