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Fox Moon Special Response
An anonymous reeader writes "The other day the Fox Network showed an ill-researched program about how the moon landings were hoaxed. Nasa has responded on their front page, here. Since the community here appreciates science, here is a page originally linked to on the NASA site about refuting the illogical arguments of non-believers: badastronomy.com."
You don't think it's a joke?? Um, some choice selections from the faq:
5) Does the "middle corner" prove that 5=6?
Yes.
11) Does this fit in with the Hollow Earth theory?
Yes. Beneath the Earth, or hanging off the edges, is a land populated by either green-skinned women or Nazis. All those claiming to have seen this have misinterpreted it to fit in with the spurious and false Spherical Earth theory.
Sure, it's not a joke...
To fake a moon landing and cover it up for 30+ years, or
To actually land on the moon.
Any thoughts?
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I watched the "moon landing cover up" show last week with some friends and I have to say it was the most asinine underhanded thing ever to be broadcast over the airwaves. The sad thing about this show is that threw clever editing of video and interviews taken out of context it was convincing to people of average intelligence unfamiliar with NASA. So convincing that my friends were buying into this shows conspiracy theory. I was constantly defending NASA threw out the entire program. It made me look like a shell to the government, like I was the crazy one not the guy on the show talking about a giant vacuumless film studio at area 51.
The 2 things that really pissed me off were
1. The use of unrelated video footage. Like footage from WW II of dieing Japanese children with radiation poisoning using that to illustrate what happens in the Van Allan belt.
2. Saying NASA may have deliberately sabotaged Apollo 1 to keep Gus Grissom form blowing the whistle on the moon cover up. The narrator of the show said it was a strange unknown mystery how the fire was started and how it spread so rapidly. That's completely not true there are 1000 of pages documenting how the fire started and spread.
In summery I now hate fox.
They owe every one in the world an apology for airing this turd of a program.
Fuck fox!
"Should we tell them the truth about how all the chimps we sent into space came back super-intelligent?"
"No, I don't think we'll be telling them THAT."
"What if the alien doesn't show up?"
"Then we'll fake it, and sell it to the FOX network."
"Yeah, they'll buy anything!"
"Now son, they do a lot of quality programming, too."
--Pregnant pause--
"Hahahahahahahahahaha!"
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html for the responses.
There are very, very few examples of societies, regardless of how ancient, that believed the world to be flat. Humans have known the world was round pretty well since they started writing such things down. The idea of people who thought the world was flat was actually circulated during the 19th century, as the result of an ignorant schoolbook publisher.
You don't have to take my word for it. Go to your library and read Jeffrey B. Russell's "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians"
Seriously, folks--don't you think that if there was any proof that we didn't land on the moon that the Soviets would have brought it up a long time ago?
The Apollo missions are among the greatest triumphs that mankind has ever achieved.
Please don't let the conspiracy wackos persuade you otherwise.
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This URL seems to address all of the stupidities of the 'Apollo Hoax' nutters. Take a look.
I find it worrying that 4% of the population of the "Last Superpower" don't just believe in UFOs, they beleive they've been abducted by one.
The moral relativism and the relativism in all areas that it promotes, where anything will go, is at the root of these various groups alternative synthesises of the Universe, be it UFO freaks or people claiming that the moon landings never occurred.
'Facts' are no longer believed in, and people think they can come up with all sorts of idiotic ideas. In this case we have the usual conspiracy theorising and reliance on big bad men with lots of power and a desire to hoodwink the public.
Why have we become like this? Carl Jung postulated that there is a 'Collective Unconscious' which is common to all of us, and when we dream, individually and as a society, we are similar.
Hence modern UFO sightings, he said, where the ancient 'Mandala' is interpreted by our SF crazy modern public as a UFO. In earlier times it may have been interpreted as an angel, or as the Virgin Mary.
I think that postmodernism is undermining our belief in objective truth and fact, and is promoting these kind of crazy ideas. We shall have to be wary, and guard against it. There is such a thing as irrefutable fact, and we would do well to leave our ivory towers and preach to the public of its existance, before they are lost to a medieval belief system.
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Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,
/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/* in its mouth... */
--Larry Wall in stab.c from perl
"Has sensational journalism gone too far? Find out at eleven!"
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore
This seems like a good time to bring up the flat earth society. It turns out there are some very smart people who believe that the earth is flat because it can mathamatically proved, and I don't think that anyone had been able to find flaws in the mathamatical proof. Check it out, I don't think that it is a joke but definitly interesting.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
It was terrible, they made a huge effort to put holes in the pictures shot on the moon and saying there were two light sources (therefore one had to be artificial). All the pictures they showed, though, could be easily explained by the fact that on the moon the Earth is a decent source of light if the Sun is shining on it (which it was in the pictures). They said that NASA didn't send ANY artificial light sources up there; I don't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure they would have had to send SOME up there. They also played on the fact that some of the pictures had similar backgrounds, but totally different foregrounds. This was just ignorant in my opinion because when they superimposed pictures with different foregrounds (ie the LEM at it's landing site, and then one without it) the back ground was still the "same" mountain structure, but shifted or a resized. Can't that be explained be being a different distance away? Yes.
I also never really saw any interviews with ex-NASA employees or anyone with any real connection to the space program (now or at the time), but just with photographers and conspiracy theorists (not many scientists). I didn't see the entire program, though, so I could be wrong. I just couldn't stand to watch it because it was so awful.
IANAL, but I play one on
Argument #2: if the moon landings had been faked, the Soviets would have known, just like they knew most of the USA's major secrets at the time (and vice versa of course). You think they would have kept quiet about it? Of course not! The best they did was to land a rover on the moon (which is still nothing to sneeze at) - if the human landing had been a fake they would have loved to let the world know about it.
I caught a few minutes of this program when it was on and my first thought was "Oh look, a sequel to "Alien Autopsy: Truth or Hoax?". Because that's basically all it was. You can get an "expert" on just about anything to go on camera all bearded and expert-looking and say whatever you want. Too bad the general public doesn't quite get that concept yet... :^(
Freedom: "I won't!"
What got me was some of the advertisers. Gateway? Sprint PCS? Would any of these companies even exist without the space program? What hypocrisy!
Seriously, does anyone have a list of advertisers during the show? I only saw the last 20 minutes or so, but I remember Gateway, Sprint, and Dodge. Perhaps we should write the advertisers and let them know their support for this dreck sucks. Fox dislikes criticism like masochists dislike whipping. They'll probably send a thank you note to NASA and badastronomy.com for the free publicity...
I'd rather trust a man who doesn't shout what he's found. -- Genesis
It's pretty bad when the most believible show on your network is the Simpsons.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
We may laugh this off, but this kind of nonsense has a corrosive effect. Even if I tell you that I'm going to tell you a lie, a false statement I make to you has been shown to influence your thinking and judgement later. Multiply that effect by several hundred million and who knows what happens? How much funding is NASA going to lose because of the false impressions this kind of show creates? The only thing I can see doing about this sort of thing is to express your outrage. If you subscribe to cable, unsubscribe and let them know why. When it comes to the dangers of media, this is the kind of stuff politicians should worry about.
This page shows that Jupiter's moon Amalthea is tidally locked.
This page discusses the case of Mercury, which as I said isn't yet tidally locked but does have a day tidally related to its year. "Although Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, its rotational period is tidally coupled to its orbital period. Mercury rotates one and a half times during each orbit."
This page states that all four of Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked.
That took about 5 minutes. Altavista found a total of 499 pages containing the phrase "tidally locked."
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Fox News is arguably a news channel. This means that in order for people to watch it as a news channel (and not entertainment) it needs to maintain some level of credibility with the public. Every time it airs a story that is erronious or foolish, people have less respect for thier journalistic integrity and will not watch it as news. You, for example, may think less of it. As their demographic changes from a news wanting audience to an entertainment wanting audience they'll move farther and farther into the trash that you decry. That's what their audience will demand and that's what they'll have to provide.
Now, channels like CNN want to remain a news based channel and they mostly act accordingly. You respect them for their news and even though they are commerically driven they're fairly respectable.
It's all just a question of news versus entertainment. It seems that Fox News is heading more down the "A Current Affair" entertainment route. Don't decry it for that.
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RumorsDaily
I'm slowly learning to just live stuff like this. The badastronomy.org link has beeen on Slashdot before, so I have checked it out. When I saw a commercial for the Fox special, I went on a 2-minute explanation to my girlfriend about how most of the evidence that we DIDN'T go to the moon is, in fact, better applied to the argument that we DID. Her eyes literally glazed over. I was in protracted-rant mode; clearly hellbent on showing the world how ignorant it really is, incited by things I read on Slashdot.
:)
I'm sick of making peoples' eyes glaze over. This stuff is definitely News for Nerds. It's definitely Stuff that Matters. But honestly, the world is very fickle about what it chooses to believe. There will always be people who say the landings were faked, as long as it's one person's word against another's.
People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore. The downside to this process is that nobody really gets the satisfaction of saying "I convinced the world they were wrong." The upside is, the ignorance is eventually conquered.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't let this, nor the misuse of the word "hacker," or anything else make you feel like we need a grass-roots movement to end the stupidity. The ignorance will just go away on its own, to be replaced by more sophisticated ignorance
Intercarve Networks, LLC
That's good, since judging by your message, you don't have a very good grasp of the issues you're discussing.
You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests, which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of mathematics.
You're also seriously confusing facts, interpretation of evidence, hypotheses, theories, and beliefs. Unless you're going to take things to the point of saying "this could all be a dream", all sorts of essentially "irrefutable" facts do exist. When it comes to logical, mathematical and scientific knowledge, we also have the ability in many cases to categorically determine whether a hypothesis is or isn't valid. In other areas, we aren't able to be so definitive, but we can be sure of the accuracy of a successful theory to a degree equal to our ability to test it.
An example might be Newton vs. Einstein: Einstein's special relativity replaced Newton's theories of motion, and general relativity replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, but in both cases, even though Einstein's theories have enormous conceptual consequences, the quantitative effect was relatively small and only affects extreme situations. While Newton's theories held force, they could be demonstrated to hold true under any circumstance which could be devised to test them. Once testing became more sophisticated, i.e. the evidence available to us changed, it became clear that the theory, while accurate to a point, didn't account for all cases, and more refined theories had to be developed.
The history of science has been characterized by this process: as we gather more evidence about the world around us, so we are able to develop better theories about how that world works. Galileo came to his understanding about the solar system based on his use of a telescope, a tool not previously available. In the early history of science, there were many cases in which large assumptions were made due to the limitations on the evidence available at the time. Theories about the Earth or the Sun being at the center of the universe were such theories: they were based not so much on evidence as on belief. As such, it's not completely accurate to characterize these beliefs as "science".
The point of all this is that when it comes to "hard" scientific knowledge, it is possible to assess the facts and theories we rely on as to the degree of "truth" they contain. Rather than talk in black and white terms, it is better to talk about degrees of certainty. On many subjects, we come close enough to 100% certainty to be able to talk about "irrefutable" facts. On other subjects, such as quantum physics, we're acutely aware of the shortcomings in existing theories, and are actively looking for ways to improve or replace those theories.
This process has been in progress for a few thousand years now - the process of gathering evidence, interpreting it, and developing theories to account for it. On many fronts, we're asymptotically approaching an "irrefutable" position, and the only reason postmodernists don't recognize that is because they haven't spent the time to understand it. It's certainly true that if one believes a theory is false, and refuses to consider the evidence that it is true, it will remain false, for you, even as you fall to your death over a cliff in an arc described by Newton's laws.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that even the physical laws of our universe only apply locally. And as I understand it, quantum physics tells us that nothing is impossible, just very very very unlikely.
It's silly to talk about such things when you clearly don't understand them. In what way do "the physical laws of our universe only apply locally"? What relativity says is simply that measurements necessarily apply to a reference frame. It's actually one of the most intuitive theories in existence today, and can be derived from first principles on a piece of paper, using simple thought experiments. It certainly doesn't create any uncertainty about the laws of physics throughout the universe. As for quantum mechanics, your understanding doesn't match that of the scientific community. It's true that any individual particle, while undergoing some change or interaction, has the potential to do all sorts of strange things, with some of the stranger ones constrained only by being statistically very unlikely. However, the mathematics of the quantum wave function, which is one of the most well-tested formulae in existence, shows that every interaction which a particle undergoes with its environment reduces the possibilities available to it, so that impossible things remain impossible, and you don't come home to find your sofa hanging three feet above the floor.
Having said all that, it certainly isn't possible or wise to ignore the social construction issues and linguistic/conceptual constraints which we all, as non-omnipotent beings, face. But that doesn't mean that all beliefs are created equal. I agree with you that skepticism is important, but never more so than when evaluating the application of postmodernist relativism to hard science.
The softer sciences, of course, are another story entirely, but that's largely because of the issue I've already mentioned: solid evidence is harder to come by, which necessitates much assumption. But we know this, and if we're being honest, we can assign a lesser degree of certainty to our theories about anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.
But sometimes I think of Apollo as having done more harm than good for the space program, not in the sense of having been expensive and useless (which it wasn't IMO), but of having desensitized the public while not going far enough.
The point is, Apollo's goal never was to do good science, setting up an outpost and/or preparing to colonize the Moon; a lot remains to be done there. But now, in the eyes of the public, going to the Moon "has already been done", is expensive, etc.
So maybe we should tell them all it was a hoax, perhaps they'll be more supportive of new Moon landings?
Anyway, what I find more offensive is that US taxpayers money is spent on garbage like astronomy, when it has been widely debunked. The idea that my future depends on the position of uranus when I was born disgusts me, and quite frankly I find it hard to take this idiots seriously.
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After reading the post, there were a couple of followups where teachers asked this question on some tests:
Test Questions 1
Test Questions 2
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
The FOX TV network has cancelled plans for a "Vietnam: Was it a Hoax?" shockumentary, as well as a "Cuban Missile Crisis: JFK's Popularity Stunt" miniseries...
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
These are quite a good (and funny) read.
http://www.primeline-america.com/moon-ldg/
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/eth69.html
http://batesmotel.8m.com/
http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html
Some people are crazy too, like this guy, who says the MOON is a fake.
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Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII
Later: Is Clinton more evil then Hannibal Lecter?
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Teflon was not invented for heat shields. (It would perform poorly as one.) It was invented for the Manhattan Project, where it was used to create grease-free seals in the miles of pumps and piping in the Y-12 gaseous diffusion U235 separation plant.
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Q:What do you call someone who's crazy about the moon?
A lunatic
Mmmm.. Donuts
Dust does not "kick up" in a vacuum. It follows the same trajectory as a rock. Dust blown away from the lander during its descent would not land on the lander.
2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon.
The astronauts used standard Hasselblad 2-1/4 inch film cameras and TV cameras. These cameras do not put "crosshairs" on the film. Those would have been added later. I haven't seen the show or the pix you are referring to, but I do know that some pix I have seen on the Web have clearly been tampered with -- not by NASA but by someone else out to make "unbelievable" moon photos.
3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)
The moon's surface isn't entirely dust and sand, it is also rock. Again, there is no atmosphere; only particles big enough to be directly moved by the blast force will be moved at all, and they will follow a parabolic trajectory away from the lander. They will hit the ground long before the hatch is opened as there is no atmosphere to suspend them.
4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?
Not really. The LEM didn't need a lot of thrust to lift off (1/6 gravity), and there was no atmosphere to carry the blast sound back to the lander. The lander's engine noise might have been comparable to the hiss of gas escaping under pressure from a container -- a high frequency not readily picked up by low-frequency mikes and not readily transmitted through the frame of the lander.
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> I'm waiting for Murdoch to green light the Fox special "The Great Holocaust Hoax" and "The Great Spherical Earth Hoax."
LOL
Years ago when I was in Junior High, I had a Science Teacher who posed a very simple, yet very challenging question:
Prove that the Sun is the center of the Universe, & not the Earth.
(For the sake of the exercise, he ignored the question whether the Sun is in revolution around another point, or that point is in revolution around still another point.)
The point of this exercise was not to convince us that Gallileo & Copernicus was wrong, but to consider facts & draw our own logical conclusions. Most people would have to say that the Earth rotates around the Sun because that's what they were taught in school. And some of these people eventually realize that that not everything they learned in school was correct, & so start questioning other things they were taught.
Such as Evolution. Or the Holocaust. Or whether the Earth is round.
And when someone questions these things, instead of an informed argument, the questioner is greeted with derision & unsympathetic laughter. Very similar to the youthful nerd who asks a difficult question of her/his teacher that shows she/he knows more than the instructor. Or that she/he bothered to do the homework.
Or begins twisting another person away from logical thinking into the land of superstition & faulty thinking. Read the books of L. Ron Hubbard with a critical eye, & you will be amazed what bizarre creations one can create based on urban legend, lazy research & a fevered imagination.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Three of your four questions were answered in the link given in the article.
Another good source was Michael Shermer's "E-Skeptic" email for February 17, 2001. I won't copy and paste it in because I don't know if that's allowed; unfortunately I also can't find it online at the Skeptic magazine website. Oh well...
As Skeptic's writeup commented,
"Unfortunately, this NASA guy had obviously never read any of the conspiracy claims, or the answers to them, for this is the biggest no-brainer debunking in skeptical history that anyone who actually knew something about the Apollo space program could have handled."
This is a common trick used by sensationalistic crap TV. They have an "expert" who has not had time to think about debunking the specific issues, and then frame the presentation as if his failure to immediately respond means that all scientists everywhere are similarly dumbfounded. This is not science, it's National Enquirer type entertainment.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
First, the lunar dust is denser than what we think of as dust; it's apparently more like dense sand.
Second, your intuition about how much dust would be "kicked up" is based on your experience in an atmosphere. If you spread out dust and blow straight down into it, the pressure of your breath into the atmosphere will spread around the dust a lot more than your breath alone. You'll see dust curling up and around, and being pushed out, and drifting down slowly, due to the atmosphere.
With a rocket in a vacuum, only those dust particles directly pushed by the rocket exhaust move. An area directly underneath the rocket would be swept clean, but just a few feet away there may be no effect -- or there may be thicker dust because what was under the rocket had to go somewhere.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
It's bleed-over. When the thin black lines appear in front of something light-colored, the exposed film appears to erase the thin black lines. You see this all the time, and it's something photographers have to be aware of.
Besides, what is the claim here? That NASA didn't actually use crosshair cameras in their $30 billion "simulated" moon landing? Is the theory that NASA instead went out of their way to meticulously paint black crosshairs on the background of the photo? Absurd.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
See number 1 above. The crater was there, but more localized than your experience in an atmosphere would expect.
Also, the main point here is the rocket motor which the non-moonie suggests had "30,000 pounds" of thrust. Guess what? It had a throttle. Would the astronauts endanger their lives and mission by roaring down at the surface at maximum velocity so that they had to have the throttle wide-open to land? Of course not.
They did the 30,000-pound burns high above the surface, and by the time they were a few feet above the surface, it was operating at a fraction of its capacity.
I didn't see the show and I don't know what was said about this; this is the only point that isn't addressed at badastronomy.com or in the Skeptic writeup.
I guess the issue is that the LEM lander was doing rocket burns during descent and we should have heard the noise on the tape. I would point out, first, they were not doing continuous burns, I don't know what fraction of the descent time the rocket was actually on. Second, I do not believe the comm link was open the whole time. Third, I would not be at all surprised if the rocket motor caused more vibration than noise inside the LEM. Again, our experience in an atmosphere can be counter-intuitive, and rockets are constructed so that most of the energy, sound and otherwise, goes out the nozzle.
Fourth, given the deceitful way that these charlatans try to convince the gullible, I would not be at all surprised if they distorted the evidence regarding rocket noise.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
Isn't the real answer that the flag was made with springs so it would stand out straight on the pole? That's why it's not hanging limply.
The moon is pretty damn far away. Go look at it sometime. About the size of a dime held at arm's length, it is really about the same size as the entire continental United States.
We can in fact detect reflections form the very carefully machined retroreflectors left behind by the astronauts, but even the best telescopes ever built would not be capable of resolving the LEM as a distinct object, much less resolving the other junk left up there by NASA.
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HB=Hoax Believer
PHB=Pointy Haired Boss
Coincidence? I think not.