German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist
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There is no city there.
Pretending it's a fake conspiracy seems to be convincing people otherwise, though.
A contest with an unreasonable deadline seems, well, like a not very good attempt to prop this thing up.
After ~25 years of this running conspiracy if none of the evidence was collected we can call it evidence that the conspiracy theory is indeed fake.
Of course you are talking about evidence which is not the same as proof. However, if we do think in terms of proof for a moment and following that line of reasoning, is it even possible to have a fake conspiracy theory? That is to say, is it possible to have a fake theory? I think the notion is absurd. The moment someone makes a hypothesis the theory is real and by definition, pending proof to qualify as fact. If someone provides evidence disproving the theory, then the theory would be wrong, but not fake.
I like your comment though :-)
1) The contest has a very specific standard for evidence. Just because I went there and saw no such city existed doesn't mean that gets me a million bucks. That's my testimony.
2) Even going back, I need a high standard of evidence. They want irrefutable proof. That means I'd need to have some way of, in a photographically-secure way, guaranteeing I was there, and some kind of temper-proof photos or similar. That takes time to figure out.
This contest is great since anything submitted will be discredited. They'll claim they proved their existence. It does no such thing. In the rules, they say they'll only post entries online they find amusing (in other words, not the best ones), they decide if the evidence is irrefutable, and that the contestant waives the right to sue / contradict that judgement.
I hope you see the problem here. They'll claim to have generated proof of existence (hey, no one can disprove it), without providing people time to do so, and with tools to bury any proofs which would convince others. They'll post the comical ones, and be done with it.
You should have been able to provide irrefutable proof even without the $1.1M. Otherwise you just admitted having an unfounded supposition and pretending it's a fact. Again, 25 years is plenty of time to obtain irrefutable proof. I mean it's not rocket science.
Put a camera on your car (or even have a caravan of cars, harder to fake), live stream the video including a GPS, driving along the known route and filming the mile markers until you get to the vast empty field that is that town. Get people on reddit or something to decide at every step which speed to have, if you should flip the wipers, this kind of thing that proves you're live. You can rent a helicopter, I mean $1.1M will cover a lot of expenses.
And once you have irrefutable proof other people will just claim everyone and everything in there is part of your conspiracy setup. I mean that's the go-to explanation for any conspiracy theorist whenever they are presented with any proof, no matter how solid. So if it works for you it should also work against :).
> They'll claim they proved their existence. It does no such thing
You are correct. This will not prove its existence. It will prove that nobody can provide evidence to support the conspiracy theory even after having 25 years to collect it and $1.1M to motivate them to present it.
> they'll only post entries online they find amusing
Of course. The other entries don't exist. And they'll show you irrefutable proof of that only if you offer a prize.
Perhaps for some odd reason, a bunch of Germans thought it'd be funny to make up a city, claim a conspiracy theory to cover it up, and posted some things about it to the Internet. Perhaps there's more to it than that and there's a great government coverup. Do I really care? Not so much. There's a bunch of people pretending there's a city. I don't know why, and I don't really care why. It's somebody else's problem.
Now, would I go to Europe for 1.1 million dollars? Sure. If I knew I'd get paid. Everything here screams I won't get paid. For the possibility of getting paid, I might even generate proof next time I'm traveling in that part of the world. But at the end of the day, I'm not dropping work deadlines on a few weeks notice for likely not getting paid.
This will absolutely not prove that nobody can provide evidence to support the conspiracy theory even after having 25 years to collect it and $1.1M to motivate them to present it. It will prove no one decided to drop everything in their life and spend a couple grand for the possibility of maybe getting paid by some marketing ploy, con artist, or otherwise.
Someone mocked conspiracy theories by spinning an undoubtedly and obviously fake theory which was in turn promptly absorbed by actual conspiracy theorists and also became a bit of pop culture absurdity and now the city is taking this supposed non existence as an opportunity to promote itself back into the real world of money, tourism and goodwill. Nice turnaround.
It started in 1994 on the German Usenet.
Edit: this is the original posting http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2r570dINNahh%40snofru.i...
You'll notice the usenet group is de.talk.bizarre so it is completely understandable that people think this is just a hoax.
reality is that at one point all highway exits to bielefeld were closed (that's what i was told), and that triggered the joke. that this joke is still alive is astonishing.
source: i have been to a conference in a city that claimed to be bielefeld. now i am not so sure anymore...
But surely the German city officials would not make a mockery of such things by frivolously asking for something they know would be logically impossible. So thereby the only conclusion that we can draw is that the proof of non-existence does both exist and yet by logic can not exist.
This would have been a curious case of a macro superposition had it not been for contest communication from Bielefeld insiders leading to an observation of the phenomenon collapsing said superposition were it not that with the collapse a new instance of the superposition is created without delay out of the logical fallacy and the now created instance of the past communication which makes this an even more curious case as we are now facing an endless series of both collapsing and superimposing states of Bielefeld's existence.
We thereby incontrovertible proved that the only possible state is that Bielefeld does in fact perpetually both exist and does not exist fulfilling and exceeding the requirements for claiming the offered cash price.
We realize that this proof could be refuted if the city officials were able to proof the absence of the offer's communication as in that case the superposition of Bielefeld's existence could remain intact and unobserved, in which case I will gladly refund them their $1.1M minus expenses.
IMHO, not a professional philosopher
Like an integer greater and less than 0.
Do other countries have their own non-existent places too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molise
Why does it not exist to Italians?
See the book Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler [1].
"Scarfolk is a town in north-west England that did not progress beyond 1979. The entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. In Scarfolk children must not be seen OR heard, and everyone has to be in bed by 8 p.m. because they are perpetually running a slight fever..."
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493657-discovering-sca...
Impostor clearly
Why not "pick a number youself" instead!
They should keep the original €1M in the title. It is what they offered.
I probably wouldn't have any idea if this were some other European non-Euro currency.
I'd agree with you if they didn't have Euros in the article but the headline is really just there to entice readers. And it doesn't really do that with a number that's essentially meaningless to the reader. "Germany city offers 50 zorkmids to whoever..." ADDED: If you don't want a conversion then just say offers reward.
And who will pay ?
Too bad, it was a good idea out-of-the-box !
Got downvoted to hell so clearly hn didn't appreciate/understand my town no longer exists joke