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238 is NOT that volatile. I'll say that right now. For the rest of your education, read this.

"Noone seems to be talking about the danger that there are 40 pounds of Plutonium-238 (the most volatile form) on board this craft. Plunging into ever increasing pressure, no one knows for sure if this will cause a chain reaction, but the potential energy and temperatures are enormous."

You are an idiot. Please die. NOW!

Wipe the drool from your slack lips and have someone click HERE for you and read the facts.

Oh, and don't forget to please die, NOW!

Thank you kindly.

an ac above posted this link. I'm still not quite convinced, as their main argument seems to be that form of plutonium is *impossible* to fission.

Well we are talking about a lot of material under pressures (within jupiter) that I'm pretty sure havn't been tested at that level on earth. Perhaps 238 just needs more material/pressure than we have tested it at, but when it does go off the reaction could be gigantic.

Good grief, sometimes it's getting a little ridiculous with this whole "WOW MARS IS SO MUCH CLOSER OMG WTF LOL BBQ"

Mars is all of 1% closer this year than it has ever been in the last 600 years. This is an almost insignificant amount. "Even with a good telescope and a camera", writes "Bad Astronomy" debunker Phil Platt in on a page about the closeness of mars and a variety of bad astronomy being spread about it, "you'd have a hard time seeing the difference. In fact, the difference is so small it would just barely be detectable using Hubble."

Good grief, sometimes it's getting a little ridiculous with this whole "WOW MARS IS SO MUCH CLOSER OMG WTF LOL BBQ"

Mars is all of 1% closer this year than it has ever been in the last 600 years. This is an almost insignificant amount. "Even with a good telescope and a camera", writes "Bad Astronomy" debunker Phil Platt in on a page about the closeness of mars and a variety of bad astronomy being spread about it, "you'd have a hard time seeing the difference. In fact, the difference is so small it would just barely be detectable using Hubble."

Phil Plait has a site called Bad Astronomy which features all the bad astronomy, and various other forms of science, that are inappropriately represented in contemporary films, news, and television. The site is excellent, and journeys into other areas, such as debunking common myths and misunderstandings about astronomy and science in general. I'm surprised it wasn't one of the ones mentioned in the title.

Always informative and often hilarious... check it out!

Another site collecting this sort of stuff is Bad Astronomy

M@

It has to be said that Velikovsky was so completely wrong that it's a wonder anyone can quote him and keep a straight face!

I bet that won't stop the wackos getting worked up into a lather. After all, astrologers and their ilk have never let facts, figures or even reality get in the way before now, so it's doubtful they'll start any time soon.

This issue is sometimes raised in support of the claim that the Apollo moon photographs are an elaborate hoax. You can read a good debunking of this at Phil Plait's excellent Bad Astronomy site.

Actually, according to the Bad Astronomer, the Hubble is sometimes pointed at Earth, for some sort of calibration tests. The images it returns are utterly useless, though. The Earth moves so fast relative to Hubble that all the images consist of is a mess of blurry colors.

I suspect the grandparent poster was referring to this program by Fox. While I certainly agree that that program was utter trash, it was not produced by Fox News, but by the same folks that gave us the X-Files show. Same company, different set of people.

Your anti-hoax site says 6% of americans believe it. I think that's a lot ;)

Christ, who knew there had to be a time when I had to post this link in a geek forum?
The Moon Hoax

//H

Sticking is not the question. It is what form the kinetic energy of the comet is converted to (if it sticks then 100% of the kinetic energy has to go somewhere).

Imagine this scenario : stick a very large pole on earth, with one end of the pole out into space. Shoot the comet into that end of the pole. The comet sticks to the pole, but very little damage is done to earth although earth (with its pole) has just effectively gained the same amount of energy. It is just not in a destructive form.

But yes, it is still arguable. When in doubt, ask Mr Bad Astronomy :).

The earth's rotation is not staying constant, though. In fact, it is slowing down.

I know this is a bit off-topic and may seem somewhat inflamatory, but I really feel I need to respond to this.

Implying that the moon landings were a hoax is foolish at best, but more so very insulting to the thousands of people involved in the project and the dozens of astronauts that risked (and in some cases lost) their lives for it. I'm not going to say any more about this except to recommend that you read Philip Plait's Bad Astronomy web site, more specifically the section on Moon Landing Hoax theories.

Regarding the use of the Saturn V booster since SkyLab... Why? Whilst these were powerful and flexible boosters and had a perfect launch record, they did not have a perfect test record and it was only a matter of time before a launch accident occured (which, I might add, could have been catostrophic at and around the launch pad). They were also pretty expensive and difficult to operate. I highly recommend you take a look at one of the Saturn Vehicle Histories you'll find on-line. If you have any lingering doubts as to the existance of the F-1 or the Saturn V, there are still some in existance you might want to have a look at for yourself.

I know this is a bit off-topic and may seem somewhat inflamatory, but I really feel I need to respond to this.

Implying that the moon landings were a hoax is foolish at best, but more so very insulting to the thousands of people involved in the project and the dozens of astronauts that risked (and in some cases lost) their lives for it. I'm not going to say any more about this except to recommend that you read Philip Plait's Bad Astronomy web site, more specifically the section on Moon Landing Hoax theories.

Regarding the use of the Saturn V booster since SkyLab... Why? Whilst these were powerful and flexible boosters and had a perfect launch record, they did not have a perfect test record and it was only a matter of time before a launch accident occured (which, I might add, could have been catostrophic at and around the launch pad). They were also pretty expensive and difficult to operate. I highly recommend you take a look at one of the Saturn Vehicle Histories you'll find on-line. If you have any lingering doubts as to the existance of the F-1 or the Saturn V, there are still some in existance you might want to have a look at for yourself.

BadAstronomy.com

> Hollywood has a real problem with doing accurate explosions.

And aerodynamics. And astrophysics. And OSes . And science in general.

And don't even get me started on martial arts flicks.

Proof? And White House press releases don't count.

Oh please. I suppose you also have your doubts about the Apollo moon landing. There is plenty of evidence that Iraq has been aiding and abetting terrorists. Heck, in my opinion paying the living relatives of suicide bombers is enough in itself. Saying that Iraq isn't a rogue nation and a sponsor for terrorism is just ridiculous. They've been killing the Kurds for years. Of course, Kurds are somewhat like Jews. They don't really count as people.

Even worse, there is another effect: the Sun is constantly blowing a solar wind. This wind is only a very tiny fraction of the Sun's mass, but that mass is lost forever from the Sun. It's the Sun's mass that controls how much gravity we feel from it, and since the Sun is losing mass, its gravity gets weaker too. That also moves the Earth very slowly away from the Sun. So if you think the years are flying by faster, it's an illusion! They're getting longer.

Think of all the Moon landing hoax sites claiming they are fact.

The blessing is smart people will keep looking for answers even after they've found an "answer" they were looking for.

http://www.badastronomy.com/

The web is full of weirdos showing off photos of UFOs, faces on mars, alien crop circles, water finders, magic spirals, health magnets and garbage like that.

Why does NASA care what these people are quacking about? Don't they have anything better to do?


Put it another way. Why should the nutters have it all their own way? What we need on the web are more sites saying that all this UFO, face on mars, crop circle, dowsing stuff is a load of old cobblers, to redress the balance in the name of science, sanity and common sense.
For every Bad Astronomy or James Randi there are dozens of web-enabled nutcases spouting the most insane bollocks, and where this concerns something NASA is involved with I think they've got a perfect right to put the case straight.
Good for them.

After all, it was once said that the moon was too bright for Hubble to image, but color tests were acknowleged to be done using clouds over Earth.

At the resolution necessary to resolve a LM, the moon probably is too bright. Color tests likely don't require any kind of resolution at all. Anyway, see this link for some discussion of this issue.

Don't tell me you're one of those idiots who thinks the moon landing was faked.

Dunno why you guys got modded to 3, you're talking rubbish. The flag doesn't flutter.
The "sun wind" isnt even enough pressure to make michael jacksons penis flutter either. In one instance, the flag got photographed when it was being held in the "blowing in the wind" position by a piece of metal at the top of the pole (the astronauts thought it looked cool). In the other instance, the astronaut rotated the pole (thus the flag got centripetal acceleration).
More info

The flag flutters because of the "sun wind", i.e. light pressure.

Um, no it doesn't. The solar wind is much too weak to make a flag flutter. The flag 'flutters' in all the movies because the astronaut is still holding the damn pole. :)

Check the bad astronomy site.

You might have noticed several links to Bad Astronomy. The reason people keep pointing to that site is quite simple: it contains answers to these questions. Your particular question is dealt with here.

You might have noticed several links to Bad Astronomy. The reason people keep pointing to that site is quite simple: it contains answers to these questions. Your particular question is dealt with here.

Thanks, I'll look for his book as the library today.

Debunking is intellectually challenging because here are a set of facts you can't add to or modify, and here is (hypothetical) cretin who requires the most brutally elegant of persuasion to come around. Imagine explaining something to someone with the mental age of a five year-old, not because the hoaxsters are idiots but because that's the fun of the challenge. To can't send the hoaxsters to the Moon, however tempting it would be, for reasons of expense and that they'll disbelieve the experience anyway. (Thank you Capricorn One.)

Remember, it's not about proof but persuasion. You can't just throw a sheaf of paper and pictures on the table and say, figure it out. A famed critic-killer is Pasteur's swan-necked flasks.

So the challenge: What do you think, based on what we've done so far, can be used to construct the ideal, concise argument that we went to the Moon?

An example is an IMHO irrefutable debunk of the backlighting theories can be found here.

But your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with the killer argument that settles the whole thing. Think of it as the simplest proof of the Pythagorean Theorem (there are many alternatives). Sell the solution to NASA, or in the spirit of free info just post it here.

My joking argument is that it would have been a hell of a lot easier to go to the Moon, and probably cheaper, that create a sinister murderous hoax of such dimensions. More seriously, who really thinks our government is this competent?!? NASA bumbling is ironically a beautiful defense.

Given the nice videoptape of the punch, and the certainty Sibrel put up a howl, it is interesting the prosecutors tooks a pass. Apparently Sibrel was poking Aldrin with a Bible, lured Aldrin to the hotel, is significantly larger than the 72 y.o. Aldrin, and was yelling insults at him at the time. You can see the video clip online. Details. So it's plausible that Sibrel was not merely annoying but threatening.

I don't think violence is an acceptable or effective way to settle the hoax dispute, or any other situation short of necessity. To Aldrin's credit in this case it appears to have been self-defense, and even if not then it was under extreme provocation.

Indeed violence is good for the bad guys; you can see here how much international publicity Sibrel got, and his fundamental motive is likely profit. I bet he made money off the incident from people inclined to believe conspiracy. Obvious senior citizen Buzz Aldrin is a ninja warrior loosed by NASA to silence their enemies.

The Sibrels of the world are best ignored, and there lies countered discreetly. NASA should focus on communicating its message clearly, not engaging in dialog with scam artists. SO perhaps it should refing its histories with additional details and replies to "but why did..." questions (except for example the allegation they murdered their own astronauts!) without once referencing their critics. (Why a handful of the criticisms are false is actually interesting, like why their are no stars in the pictures, or the source of the fill light, is not intuitively obvious -- see badastronomy and related sites.)

So, what other crackpots are out there, besides the moon hoax? And besides, aren't these people an overwhelming minority?

It already exists, although not run by nasa.

I prefer Buzz Aldrin's response... The Daily Show featured a video by a hoax advocate as he harrassed the astronaut on a city street. Aldrin simply ignored the guy until he got in his face calling him a liar and demanding that he tell the world the truth, at which point he punched the guy in the face and continued on his way.

More at Bad Astronomy

Bad astronomy

Bad astronomy

highly readable and extremely illuminating for the common reader with no prior knowledge of extraterrestrial existence

In other words read this book, and you'll know ET exists, too.

I have no doubt there are UFO's. I think it's far more than likely there is life "out there." But conspiracy theories about simmering gov't schemes to keep us from the truth ... make me ill. How can we go from the scientific proposition that extraterrestrial life and exists to the unscientific speculation and leap of faith demanded in these volumes?

Also explored in great detail is the intelligence of our sea life

OK, there's a creative twist. Methinks they needed more pages to call it a book.

The author's use of a plethora of written documentation ably enhances his description of personal civilian and military accounts...

"Plethora" actually means excess or superabundance. Here the plan appears to be that if you pile enough of it on...

Forgive me for skepticism, but speculations like these are not a whit different from theories that man did not land of the Moon or that President Bush orchestrated 9/11, and so on. They sound kind of interesting, suggestive evidence can be shown, but the web of speculation leads nowhere. I'm tired of con artists like this.

I emphasize that these people are not mere wackos, if they are wacko at all. They are scam artists who do not deserve your money. Visit the good old library instead, or drink deep of the wonderful nonsense available for free on the Web.

So someone needs to create www.badbiology.com, like www.badastronomy.com

Ofcourse the conspiracy believers will not accept any proof. They will just counter it with a stupid explanation. This is one of the characteristics of pseudoscience; they refuse to listen to anything that might spoil their own beliefs. Right now it seems to be the radiation. While I'm certainly not an expert in that field, here is a link that explains more on the topic:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html# radiation

You might want to read this.

I believe the link that you found was at badastronomy.com, an article by Ian Goddard. There is another great page at badastronomy that goes point by point to debunk the Fox special

I believe the link that you found was at badastronomy.com, an article by Ian Goddard. There is another great page at badastronomy that goes point by point to debunk the Fox special

Regarding why creation "science" is not science see the The General Anti-Creationism FAQ and perhaps also this page by a guy named Lenny Flank. Those two sites summarize my arguments quite succinctly.

As for moon landing conspiracies, check out the page at Bad Astronomy which talks about it.

Im with you on this. For me, the radiation belt, and the photo of the flag where the pole covers part of one of the +'s on the camera lense. Actually, Im very suprised at the slashdot crowds attitude on this manner. Neither view has been proven, but there is indeed evidence to support a potential conspiracy. Anyone who has paid any close attention to this issue will have seen at least one piece of evidence that causes serious pause.

From BadAstronomy: The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation

And...

From BadAstronomy again:

"Strong luminosity can washout thin lines"

-T

Im with you on this. For me, the radiation belt, and the photo of the flag where the pole covers part of one of the +'s on the camera lense. Actually, Im very suprised at the slashdot crowds attitude on this manner. Neither view has been proven, but there is indeed evidence to support a potential conspiracy. Anyone who has paid any close attention to this issue will have seen at least one piece of evidence that causes serious pause.

From BadAstronomy: The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation

And...

From BadAstronomy again:

"Strong luminosity can washout thin lines"

-T

The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation.

The lego links to which you refer are sprinkled throughout this page. Some of the claims of the non-believers really are quite funny and far fetched.

By the way, for all those who were dissappointed that NASA is no longer making the book, the guy that runs the site link above appears to have his own book for sale. It's probably a rough equivalent.

• The Russians were watching very closely, and would have cried foul had anything been "faked"
  
• Amateur radio enthusiasts tracked the saturn v's trajectory as well, and monitored the radio signal being sent back to earth
  
• The astronauts left mirrors behind, off of which we still bounce lasers today to measure the (increasing) distance to the moon.
  
• The "facts" as given by the moronic and scientifically illiterate media whores of Fox are trivially debunked
  
• For any conspiracy or coverup to have worked would have required a worldwide media conspiracy, on the part of several neutral nations as well as several nations who were, at the time, military foes (China, Russia, Eastern Europe)