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NASA Wasting Time and Money on Moon Landing Doubters
Rob Miles writes "Yahoo! News has this article about how NASA is paying aeronautics engineer James Oberg $15,000 to write a monograph gathering up materials answering the skeptics of the 1969 Apollo Moon Landing, point by point. It's a shame that even $1 has to be spent to debunk these conspiracy theorists with too much time on their hands. And it's unfortunate that the nutters will see this as validation of their ridiculous claims ('if our charges weren't true, NASA wouldn't bother answering them' they'll snivel.)"
I rmeber reading a while back(a couple of month's) that a private comapny has gotten goverment approval to go to the moon. SO when this happens they can take pictures and disprove the naysayyer once and for all.
procrastination is a way of life aka i'll think up a sig later
Then again, since when our network executives concerned about what is good or bad TV, let alone good or bad science?
if they are only willing to risk $15k, they are obviously lying about the landing. it is all clear now... DUCK, the second shooter is back!
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
The fact that we such an abundance of blue-cheese dressing to go with our wings is enough proof for me.
This is the best option for the money. The alternative would be to send them all up there in the cargo bay of a shuttle and then crack the bay doors for a second or two and see if they'll finally believe you.
As Monty Python said:
Well let's see, look around now. Can you spot the loony?
*KAPOW!!*
Ah yes, another loony spotted...
The fact That I MUST pee with the Forrest Newmans!
Be Be Boop Boop Be Be Be Boop Boop!
This booklet is for educators, to help them address concerns brought up by students who might have stumbled on a True Disbeliever's website or seen that atrocious Fox program!
That's not a waste of time nor money.
Stefan Jones
Johnson, flag this message for section 721 investigation. Potential Conway incident - auth code 786C-1943.
NASA Wasting Time and Money on Moon Landing
and wondered what I'd missed?
I just put them in the same circle as the people that think Rush Limbaugh reports news objectively.
Casca
why don't they just point Hubble or something at the moon? Shouldn't they be able to see the lander remanents (sp?) even with a high powered observatory or something?
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
This issue should fall far below the attention-radar of NASA. The act of giving it even a moment's notice fans the flames of the conspiracy theorists (and will be adduced by them as yet further proof that the agency has something to hide).
It was a sad day when Fox stooped to entertaining the theory on its special (the company should have lost priviledges to the monicker "journalism" that instant).
from a recent news article...
:)
The controversy recently emerged from cyberspace in the person of Bart Sibrel, who has made a film questioning the Apollo Moon missions and who confronted astronaut Buzz Aldrin at a Beverly Hills hotel on Sept. 9 and demanded that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he had in fact walked on the moon.
The 72-year-old Aldrin, the second man ever to touch the lunar surface, punched the 37-year-old Sibrel in the face. Sibrel asked that assault charges be filed, but Los Angeles County prosecutors declined. A videotape of the incident showed Sibrel following Aldrin on the street with a Bible and calling him a "thief, liar and coward," one prosecutor said.
How's that for refutation?
-fester (Good for Buzz.. I'm sure he and the others who risked their ass at the top of that Saturn V are sick of this crap)
-'fester
We went to the moon??!!? When did that happen? Maybe I ought to get away from this terminal more often!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It is too bad one of the astronauts did not trudge a gigantic NASA WAS HERE into the moon dust so that the image could be seen from a large telescope. That should silence the idiots.
On another note it always amazes me that a significant segment of a human population will believe the unbelievable and doubt the obvious.
They're only spending $15k. They'll sell a few thousand copies as college textbooks for useless social sciences courses over the next five to ten years and turn a tidy profit.
Consider it a fund raiser.
www.badastronomy.com
or for less than $15 the printed version at Amazon, or your favorite bookseller.
Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax"
by Philip C. Plait
Paperback: 288 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.76 x 8.62 x 6.44
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471409766; 1 edition (March 1, 2002)
NASA should say they're actually correct to get the funding it to really do it this time. ... The saddest thing is that it seems the government actually did send up people instead of faking the moon landings. Think how much cheaper it would have been. I mean how much did we really gain from the landings other than social pride ;-).
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Maybe they could just send Buzz Aldrin out. With a bat. Or his manly fists of iron. That should "silence" the doubters!
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
... has to have a bottom.
God is omnipotent yet it would be impossible for him to create a rock he could not lift. Therefore, God does not exist. Right? Right? Is that a paradox?:-)
Since I moonlight in my spare time as God, let me answer this one for you. It's child's play.
I simply would create a rock exactly the size of the universe. I wouldn't be able to lift the rock, because by definition there would be no room for the rock to move.
Happy to clear that up for you.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Not a troll (wonder how long it will take to get marked as one?) But please tell us why you blindly believe man has landed on the moon.
If the gov't says it's ok for MS to be a monopoly, or copyrights need to be extended, you disagree. But if they make the miraculous claim that they sent a group of men to the moon and brought them back, you don't question it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
www.badastronomy.com
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Drink beer and believe everything instead.
It's Fox...what more did you expect?
I remember having seen a link on /. to a perfectly good debunking of the doubters' arguments, but I forgot where. It must've been either Space.com or Badastronomy.com or something.
But it doesn't surprise me that people ``choose to believe what they were programmed to believe''...
I'm sorry I don't have the time to find the article I'm referring to. Someone else might post it, or you could ask Google if you're interested enough.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
is not in this post.
This 'skeptic' (Bart Sibrel, who has spent seveal years 'debunking' the moonlanding) approached Mr Aldrin at the elevator in a hotel or conference center. Mr Aldrin seemes visibly angry at Mr Sibrel and says "leave me alone!"
Instead, the skeptic calls Mr Aldrin a liar and a coward to his face, literally.
The reaction is straight out of a John Wayne movie -- POW! right in the jaw
the skeptic is suddenly falling backwards shouting to the camera crew "did you get that on tape?!"
references
They should just pay this guy to go around to each of these doubters' houses and personally punch them in the face a la Jay and Silent Bob meets Buzz Aldron.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
You mean that the people actually doubt the US goverment and believe that our leaders would lie to us? Naaaaaahhhhh......why would they do a thing like that... Well at least they are spending money on something that noble instead of battling terrorist or trying to improve the NASA program...lord knows they get all the money!
for 4 24-packs of Natty Light, a handful of Elisha Cuthbert, some E-Z Slide, and an 8-iron
and i quasi-work for nasa (gotta love grants) =)
Easiest, and best, way to dispell doubt about moon landings?
Establish an ongoing lunar presence.
Stop and think about it. The American government spent untold billions to develop technology for travelling to the moon... and, following a few visits, hasn't been back there for three decades.
Is it any wonder that simple minds have difficulty coping with truth this bizarre, and instead seek more comforting fiction?
Why do people even CARE if the moon landing was staged? What benefit does it get them, except to be made fun of by those who know it was real? All the conspiracy theorists aren't old enough to remember.
I just read this week's copy of Aviation Week, and it said somewhere that NASA's overall budget is like somewhere like 15 billion bucks. Who cares about 15k? It's spit in a bucket!
BOSTON SUCKS!
I have no problem understanding that they actually did land on -- and take off from the moon, and return to earth. My compassion for the conspiricy theorists only extends to the fact that if we did so much with so little (technology) why have we done so little (in comparisson) since.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I would think that given that the moon landings happened during the height of the cold war, the Soviets would have been watching them very closely and would've been all over them like a bad stink if they could've even come close to demonstrating that the moon landings were faked. By the same token, if you were NASA, would you put your and your country's "face" on the line by staging such a stunt and risking discovery?
You're using her as bait, Master!
If you aren't doing anything illegal, why do you insist on privacy. What are you hiding?
I would expect, however, that the document will be rather redundant. It's not like one cannot find several very well documented debunkings out there (and on NASA's web site as well).
I could see the point if the document is ultimately meant to be printed to dead trees, but then who will get it? Teachers would make sense, and perhaps FOX programming executives. :-)
I don't think a great deal of money should be spent on wider distribution though, the only people likely to pick it up are those who didn't already buy into the cranks' insanity.
-- MG
(Ha! You can't mod it down 'cause it's actually relevant!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
I used to live in Brazil, and one day while I was going about my buisness, I asked everybody I saw whether they beleived that man had ever gone to the moon. About half of them didn't beleive it.
Why can't people just believe The Onion.
Yup, wasted. The doubters aren't going to belive no matter what we do. A report isn't going to change things. They'll always find another angle. Did the Warren Report stifle conspiracy theories about the first Kennedy assasination? No, all of it's conclusions were merely brushed aside. This report won't sway any doubting minds. If it suits them, I say let them live in their fantasy world (and I count a relative that lives there. He doesn't belive we went to the moon either). We can't convince them with reason or evidence.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
before I believe it. Even then, how can I be sure.
But this has no bearing on my day to day life, so why bother.
If you're going to make big changes in your life based on wether the US have been to the moon or not, then maybe it's is interesting.
Unfortunately, with the current administration, we're a lot more likely to see our tax dollars going to religious schools that teach the reverse
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Who else has thought about this: what if, durring the first moon landing, the astronauts had successfully landed on the moon... but had been unable to take off to return home?
Obviously, this didn't happen, but the White House was aware of this posibility at the time, as this fascinating memo indicates (written by William Safire, now the NYTimes columnist and english language maven).
...and rather well, I thought, by the guy who runs BadAstronomy.Com.
Here is a direct link to the article where he does so, where he tears apart the horrible Fox TV special that was on in 2001.
Bart Winfield Sibrel, the guy whom Buzz punched, made a movie about the so-called "conspiracy."
His site is here: Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.
Anyone seen it?
Perhaps we could all leave a comment for him on his site...
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
St. Petersburg Times" has more info on the incident, if you must.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Buzz Aldrin Punches Moon-landing Conspiracy Theorist
btw...The video is pretty funny!
Money spent educating people is never a waste.
Can we not prove it in a less expensive manor? When we landed on the moon we left behind many thing; roller, flag, foots prints, and other junk. Our telescopes are powerfull, can we not zoom in on these objects and take pictures of them? Maybe even allow the public, at certain planeturiums to look at them? Just a thought. By viewign the flag alone should be proof enough.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
"Jim, you don't ask the Almight for his I.D.."
If they didn't answer, they'd say "If NASA really did it, they'd prove it in a response."
:-)
So they are basically screwed either way they go.
Derek Greene
It is a sad statement for science in this country that NASA has to spend money debunking the absurd. I watched the Fox special and I kept shaking my head in bewilderment by the conspiracy theorist's "evidence". A modicum of science education ought to have been enough to have the nation laughing at these poodle buggering ninnys. Instead everyone shakes their head and says "sounds 'bout right to me..." Blech.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
It's a damn shame that this book "has" to be written. It's not going to prove anything to the 12 morons who still believe we didn't go and walk on the moon. I'd like to thank the parents and teachers for the wonderful job they've been doing with children. Unbelievable...
Could god create a corn dog so big he couldn't finish it?
a billion is pocket change in our country. burn it, it makes no difference. get up a 100 billion and it starts to matter, but a billion, who cares. god forbid we try to learn something about that vast region called space. try to realize, humans amount to less than a single ant in the scheme of things
we dont matter in the end.
wow, you are an idiot. 50 cents will improve your life?
thats how much a hundred million dispersed to everyone would be. oooooh
Moreover, the astronauts reputedly had gobs of cheese between their toes when they came back. The smell alone would have been enough to convince most people.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
I was one of the special effects experts on the set. We filmed inside a warehouse and actually had huge fans blowing air to make the flag ripple with pride. Man was that dumb, now that we look back at it. If you look really close, you can actually see the shadow of one of those fans at the right edge of the screen. I almost got fired over that. Good times, though. Good times.
So an article about ignoring conspiracy theorists gets posted on slashdot, thus assuring that conspircay theorists get lots of attention.
Come on folks, it's not hard to understand why some people might he skeptical is it?
;-)
We're talking about 1969 -- when the cold war was at its peak and US pride was at stake.
Kennedy had promised to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade and time was rapidly running out. If it couldn't actually be done then (knowing the way governments work) it had to appear to have been done.
Yes, it would be a deception of the highest magnitude but also an extremely safe one. After all, who was going to be there waiting to prove you a liar?
I firmly believe that the USA *has* landed men on the moon -- but I'm perhaps not quite so sure it happened on the Apollo 11 mission (or even the Apollo 12, 13 missions).
The Fox documentary was pure tabloid TV but I don't think it unreasonable to suspect the government of the day of faking the Apollo 11 landing, just so that Kennedy's promise was (seemingly) kept and US superiority over the Russians was seemingly proven.
One issue that lends weight to the consipiracy theory is the sorry state of computing back in the 1960's. Hell, this was well before the invention of the microprocessor and many of the few "realtime" computers that were around in those days were analog devices with limited precision and badly affected by environmental factors.
The power consumption of even the smallest digital flight-computer of the 1960's would have been horrific -- and remember that power-cell, battery and solar-cell technology was also pretty crude in those days. This meant that hi-drain devices were a risky option.
Or I could be wrong -- it happens all the time
I don't believe these nutcases. However, I recently realized that one of my arguments against them is not as strong as I thought.
Here's the argument: Tens of thousands of people were involved in the Apollo program. There were thousands of them who would unavoidably know if the moon landings were faked. Several thousand people can't keep a secret for over 30 years.
What is wrong with this argument? Bletchley Park. For about 30 years, several thousand people kept the secret that the allies hand broken most of the axis codes during World War II.
(It is still a valid argument, however - there are differences between Bletchley Park and a hypothetically faked Apollo 11.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
And for what? They would simply claim that the images were faked, even if the Hubble could see the landers (which it can't).
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I don't see why NASA has to spend a thing to satisfy them, if they don't believe it that's fine, it's THEIR problem not NASAs.
Basically...
q:Can god create a rock he can't lift?
if he can create a rock he can't lift, then he can't lift that rock... Or he can't create that rock...therefore he can't do something.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Similarly, there is a growing contingent in the physics community that is questioning the feasibility of 1960's technology being able to land a man on the moon. Keep in mind the primitive computation available then and you will realize what I mean. Then there's the many scientific, errr, irregularities that have been noted in the films, transcripts and other records of the "landing". For instance, it supposedly took 3 days to travel to the moon, 250,000 miles away. That's a mere 3500 mi/hr and yet the propellent they (claim to have) used should have been pushing them in the 10's of thousands of mi/hr.
Until these issues are cleared up (and NASA has only ever concerned itself with the easily-confused issues such as camera angles) I feel the only logical conclusion is that the moon landings haven't happened yet.
Given the number of people who I consider reasonably intelligent who when on and on about the "facts" that Fox's moon landing special presented, I'd say having a big, well compiled body of information debunking those claims would be highly useful.
The masses are easily swayed by one-sided propoganda and shoddy science; as lame as it is, it's probably worth the $15k to breathe some common sense into the "debate."
This is just another attempt to hoodwink the public. I'd publish my point-by-point rebuttal but no one would understand the scientific terms that I'd need to use.
The government can already read our minds. Last year we saw that scientists have been able to have machines controlled by nothing other than thought by scanning brain waves. It's obvious that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Moving machines with thought is only the part that the government allows these scientists to reveal to the public. Just as civilians aren't privy to top-secret military aircraft designs until years after they become completely outdated, so is the thought-reading apparatus hidden while it still is useful.
You think I'm mad? Even private corporations are not allowed to release technology without government approval. Remember the Hoverboards in Back to the Future? They're real. But they still have military applications so cannot be released to the public. We know that it can work because the Japanese have maglev trains that work on identical priciples.
You still think I'm mad? Turn your Television to a 'staticky' station. Watch the chaotic series of dots and blips. Do this for about six hours until your brain becomes attuned to the frequency. Soon you'll be able to decipher the 8,192 bit encoded datastream that the government is using to communicate with the L'kelialia from Pluto. You'll hear their voices. You'll see their devilish grins peering back at you.
People ask, why would the government want to fake the moon landing? It's easy. Staking a claim. In 2053 the Global Congress will debate the issue of ownership of mineral rights on Luna. The government is only making sure that it has the most prior claim. The actual technology for a moon shot won't be available for another 16 years (I think, this is 2002, right?) but time travel has been well understood since Einstein. It's very complicated and scientific (I'd have to use terms like Schwartzchild radius and eigenvalues to really explain it) but suffice it to say that it's true. I read it on Slashdot earlier this year.
Anyway, I hope my detailed, logical, and coherent analysis and convinces you that this upcoming paper is total fabrication.
Why doesn't NASA simply point the Hubble at one of the landing spots and settle this for good? I think that'd cost a tad less than $15,000...
What's the best argument people can think of as proof that we actually went there in '69?
The Australian satellite dish T.V. broadacst fiasco comes to mind..
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Creationism is based on FAITH, so evidence is not going to change people's opinions. That being said, just because somebody believes something different than you doesn't make them wrong, especially since evolution is still just as much a theory as creationism.
No sig for you.
There are many websites that have already debunked the "faked moon landings" case. Too many actually to post here, so use google to search for it!!!
There's an optical corner reflector on the moon already. If you know where to look, you can see yourself (more or less) (okay, less rather than more) (but you know what I mean).
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Beautiful, beautiful....mod this up!
on an ashtray or a hammer for Buzz Aldrin.
and you may mod me down, but I honestly believe this country can do a lot of good by funding a mission to the goatse quadrant. It may not improve our lives or our children's lives, but it may improve our children's children's asses. Thank you.
"if our charges weren't true, NASA wouldn't bother answering them' they'll snivel"
Right, There's something to that though. If I were NASA I'd say, "Whatever man, If you want to be a dumbass, go ahead. I have rockets to launch."
No, Saddam Hussein is pissed off at us because we made him give Kuwait back, and we've been keeping him bottled up ever since. That, and a little fashionable Islamo-paranoia, just because it's in style this year. But 99% of it is the frustrated-conqueror thing.
Back when we were selling him weapons, his big enemy was Iran, to whom we sold precisely squat (where "squat" is defined as two pearl-handled revolvers and a birthday cake, or whatever asinine trinkets Ollie North handed over). That preening fool was nominally an ally of ours until pretty much the brink of his invasion of Kuwait.
Get your history straight, at the very least.
Just do it again.
I acknowledge as fact that the moon landings occurred, but I'm not at all surprised that some people don't. After all, what have we done since then? Apollo, while inspiring, exemplified "pyramid building" in its most extreme form.
We spent billions of dollars pursuing this grand enterprise and for what? To NEVER return? Where are the research stations? The power plants? The mines? Where's the grand plan for the future?
The saddest thing of all is that if NASA had the money and motivation to return to the moon, I doubt we'd be able to do it before 2015, since most of the engineers that worked on the Apollo missions have long since retired or died. I'm pretty young myself (24), and I don't mind saying that without the requisite experience base, all the technology we throw at the problem is utterly USELESS.
Sorry for the rant, guys and gals. I went to school, studied, and became an engineer because of Apollo. The fact that NASA's become little more than a budget problem is about the saddest thing I've ever heard.
-boredman
The moon landings gave us much more than material gain.
It literally changed the way a large part of the people here saw the Earth. Imagine, if you can, the feelings of the people here at home the first time they saw the video of the earth from the moon: a warm, beautiful, but FINITE blue ball in the blackness of space. Our home, seen not from within, but seen from outside for the first time.
Imagine, if you can, the feelings of the people all over the world as Niel Armstrong stepped onto the moon for the first time: knowing that a human being had actually trod upon another world for the very first time.
Those of use alive at the time will never forget it.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I don't doubt we landed on the moon. The questions that intrigue me are:
--Why is Earth's Luna the only satellite that does not reveal its dark side to the planet? It is amazing how many people refuse to believe that nobody on Earth ever sees the other half of the moon. I usually use my microwave carousel to explain the principle behind this.
--Why is the apparent size of the sun and the moon nearly exactly the same? Perfect eclipses are pretty bizarre events given the sheer odds of nothing remotely similar anywhere else.
--Why is the synodic period of the moon exactly the length of the menstrual cycle?
There's no weed required for being mystified by these questions.
Conspiracy... C-O-N... spiracy
Laws are for people with no friends.
Damn, can you spell "bias"? I know that most /. write-ups have a bit of spin, but sheesh! At least give people the chance to think differently before you label them extremists.
/.er, I still choose to think instead of believe. Why don't you?
And yes, I have my doubts (uh oh, just earned -1 Troll for that), but they don't have anything to do with waving flags or radiation. They revolve more around the doctored photos (where the crosshatches are covered by the image, when the crosshatches were etched on the lens), the obvious multiple light sources (when you look at the shadows, you can clearly see several different angles of shadows, suggesting more than one light source0 [and no, stars are not bright enough to cast shadows, even in space], and also the shadow effect (wherein objects and people standing in complete shadow were completely visible, even though technically, with only one light source and little to no reflective surface, they should have been completely dark).
Now, I'm not saying I firmly believe in the hoax, but I do find it odd that questions like these are never answered, while the easy ones are, and the rest put down to "conspiracy nuts". While I'm as much of a space nut as the next
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
This is EXACTLY RIGHT. Anyone who believes that the moon landings were fake to "win" the space race clearly believes that the Soviets, in spite of launching the first artificial satellite and first man into space, were too stupid to notice that:
No conspiracy theory concerning the lunar landing stands up to even five minutes of skeptical thought.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
The ultimate troll!
(Moderators : Check the link fer crissakes...)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In fact, I've come to grips with a new theory- it's one that we are all really part of a gigantic battery that powers some robots. Therefore everything about getting to the moon was nothing more than a computer simulation plugged directly into our collective concious....
;P
-thats humour for you
God is omnipotent yet it would be impossible for him to create a rock he could not lift. Therefore, God does not exist. Right? Right? Is that a paradox?:-)
It is within God's power to cease to be omnipotent. You got a problem with that, friend?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
According to anonymous sources, Christoforo Columbo, an Italian adventurer employed by the Spanish court, never landed in America. He forged his ships' logs, and hired actors to play the parts of his "Indian" captives.
A spokesman for King Ferdinand of Spain declined to comment.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Revisionist historians are in the same league that the NASA guy paid to expose the liars for what they are.
For more information visit the Institute for Historical Review.
and Area 51 do have a resemblance to each other you must admit. Though I still think we went to the moon.
I think you're all in a conspiracy to come up with conspiracy theories to sell to the American public and make a buck off of.
"As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue." ~A. Einstein
What do you mean the world isn't FLAT?!?
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
Truman: "Whistlin' dixie! I want this sent to Area 51 for study!"
General: "But Sir! That's where we're building our fake moon landing set."
Truman: "Then we'll have to really land on the moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies!"
Mulder and Scully first encountered the black cancer in a moon rock!
"People with opinions just go around bothering one another." -The Buddha
That stupid special from FOX did more to give the US a bad name than anything Ashcroft has ever done. When we went to New Zealand last summer people from all over the coutry asked me about that stupid special.
The problem is that in the US only morons watch that documentary crap. Then FOX ships it all over the world and kind of tells the world that the space program is made up of people who are extremely crooked. They don't ship it with anything resembling a balanced opinion. And then the rest of the world (In this case New Zealand) watches it.
There aught to be a Treason in Television act that puts TV Producers in jail for broadcasting bad fiction and calling it a documentary.
Barring that they aught to give Alan Shepard a medal for smacking the producer of that particular special.
Beware the wood elf!!!
>(including the "intelligent design" crowd)
including steven hawkings? in his book he pointed out that no one can guess what happened before the big bang, and he put it down to God, god created the universe before the big bang. since god is infalable he set the big bang up *exactlly* how he wanted it and we are here reading slashdot, by his design.
personally i'm not a christian, but i liked his reasoning.
"Maybe with some divine intervention, the next version of Microsoft's OS will actually be good." - Linus Torvalds
therefore he can't do something
That's like asking "can God add 1 and 1 and get 3". The answer is no, but the problem isn't with God, it's with the question. The nature of omnipotence isn't being able to "do" things that are logical fallacies.
The answer to whether God can make a rock so big that he couldn't lift it is Yes, as I described. The "out" is creating a scenerio such that lifting is a logical fallacy.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Score one more for moderators that aren't awake! Parent is Troll and Flamebait (although I don't doubt it is insightful too).
and was told that Hubble's focal length is too long.
it is just fair and balanced reporting.
Pretty soon, they will be reporting on the fact that everything goes around the earth.
This has been a myth for decades, what is surprising is that once the anti-American propaganda has been exposed as such new deranged individuals repeat the same lies spread by the communists years ago.
From the article, apparently some moron confronted Old Buzz Aldrin about the issue. "The controversy recently emerged from cyberspace in the person of Bart Sibrel, who has made a film questioning the Apollo Moon missions and who confronted astronaut Buzz Aldrin at a Beverly Hills hotel on Sept. 9 and demanded that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he had in fact walked on the moon. The 72-year-old Aldrin, the second man ever to touch the lunar surface, punched the 37-year-old Sibrel in the face. Sibrel asked that assault charges be filed, but Los Angeles County prosecutors declined. A videotape of the incident showed Sibrel following Aldrin on the street with a Bible and calling him a "thief, liar and coward," one prosecutor said." GO BUZZ!
You are the one like the Holocaust-deniers.
No, we can't. There is not telescope in the world that can "zoom in" close enough to see anythung that we have left behind on the moon. Even the mighty Hubble can only see things no smaller than 90 metres across on the moon.
And it wouldn't matter if we could. The doubters wouls simply claim that the images in the telescopes were fakes, or that unmanned rockets dropped all that junk on the moon.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The nut cases that don't believe we actually went to the moon are going to take ufo debunker James Oberg's write up of proof as further evidence that we never went their. All NASA's $15.000 is going to buy is more fuel on the fire for these whackos to burn. Whenever there is a strange object caught on NASA cameras NASA turns to Oberg to debunk (explain away with extreme predjudice) and the people who hear his crap take it as more of the cover-up, so NASAis truley wasting cash here. Its disgusting if you ask me.
Creationists (including the "intelligent design" crowd) belong in exactly the same camp as the "moon landing was a hoax" people, Holocaust-deniers, flat-Earthers, etc.
Umm, I wouldn't put the holocaust-deniers in that list. Creationists and flat-earthers are merely idiots, but the holocaust-deniers are a pack of nazis who are trying to get another chance at genocide. Treat the nuts with derision, but if you get a crack at a holocaust-denier, kick his ass, but good.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Now, 20 years later, important new studies are establishing that marijuana and even heroin are nothing like as harmful as were thought and may even have major benefits.
What?!? Links please!!
Actually I beleive the moon landing actually happened AND I believe in the Creation. Just because you are an asshole and don't believe in it doesn't mean it didn't happen. God didn't have to let evolution create us. He did it himself. It's as simple as that.
I'd much rather have the money spent on getting evolution out of the school systems and if neither theory (evolution or creation) gets put back in then so be it. At least that would be the fairest thing to do, IF you must say that there is a separation of church and state in the first place (if there is it only applies to new laws like the amendment says).
I think evolutionists like yourself are bigoted, faithless, hopeless souls who have no idea what's in store for them when they finally figure out they were wrong. Evolution is too stupid to figure out how to make a complex human being from scratch and keep the human growing effortlessly throughout its lifetime.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
before they bring those "moon" rocks to show and tell, they had better remember to irradiate them since the moon doesn't have the shielding that earth does.
I don't think you'd want to point Hubble at the Moon to "prove" to some bozo that there's space junk there. I'm no Hubble expert, but I do know a few things:
* The Hubble doesn't just sit there unused. Every minute -- every second -- of its time is reserved months in advance for research purposes.
* Even if the project were deemed worthy, it would probably cost more than $15k to make the project happen.
* The Hubble is designed to look at very, very, very faint objects. Close yourself in a dark room, look at the light bulbs, then flip the switch to turn them on. Ouch! Now, imagine if your pupils couldn't contract... and your retina was worth several hundred million bucks. Double ouch!
* If you believe in the Hubble telescope's images, there's a very, very strong chance that you believe that man has landed on the Moon already. Conversely, if you don't believe in the moon landing, why would you believe in the Hubble?
And as for aerial images... it was big news when spy satellites could spot an object as large as a car from orbit. Compare these numbers:
* Distance to Space Shuttle (Low Earth Orbit): 400 km
* Distance to Geosynchronous (med-high) Orbit: 27,000 km
* Distance to Moon: 384,000 km!
If the CIA/KGB can barely make out an object the size of a car from Earth orbit, how likely is it to see an even smaller object from 10 times as far?
*whew* A great intellectual exercise... too bad the target of NASA's informative pamphlet don't work that muscle.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
it's not "just as much" a theory. You are thinking, perhaps, that something is either a theory or it's not.... no, all knowledge is a theory, and they can be compared on whichever basis you care to define. Define one in which evolution is not more well founded as a theory.
-pyrrho
while we are laughing at the nuts saying it didn't happen, imagine the looks on everyones face if some day it was indeed proven that no one ever landed on the moon. For that matter, if the moon really is made of cheese then I suppose the tortilla chip industry would be the big thing!
NASA spends $15,000 to convince people that it's worth spending $15,000 to convince people that the moon landings weren't faked.
Cmon, get off their backs, $15,000 is a drop in the bucket for something this important. It would be worth a news item if the sum were 15 million, but this tiny sum isn't worth worrying about.
But it's NOT based on faith. If the "Creation Scientists" would just stop making scientific arguments against evolution, you'd be right. But they don't. They try to substitute their (horribly flawed) "science" for REAL science. They can't have it both ways. If it's purely a matter of faith, they should quit trying to make scientific claims. That justifies a scientific refutation.
Also, theory != "not a fact." Evolution, like gravity, is a theory and a fact. The evidence for both is so overwhelming that, while not proven in the mathematical sense, they're supported to the point that rejecting them is absurd. Not that that stops anyone.
From a social point of view, having a science institution educate the regular citizen about this sort of conspiracy theories is again worth much more money than what they are spending.
And last but not least, the nutters will always have a case. If you answer, they'll say "See, they know we are right, so they had to answer". And if you don't answer, they'll say: "They don't answer to our charges because they can't, they know we are right". So really, I don't see where the problem is.
BTW, this article is about US scientific policies/issues, and as such it should probably go in "US", not in "Space" as a topic.
I'm torn whether I believe it or not. I certainly wouldn't put it past the American Government. Nor would I put it past people who don't like the U.S. to try to debunk it. At the same time, I draw attention to $15,000 be a waste of money - that would buy a bolt for the space station.
The fun part about a majority of those against creationism is that they typically base their arguments on a lack of evidence. This is a rather self-defeating point, as the evidence for evolution doesn't seem to be up to snuff either. (*grain of salt not included)
Then again, one of the reasons I prefer creationism (and the beliefs one can have with faith in God) is that evolution doesn't offer me much comfort in the face of depression, loss, hurt, uncertainty, death, etc. I just might be a bit biased as a result, here.
Worth a look!
They tried this one. Chairface Chippendale once tried to write his name on the moon, but he only got the first 3 letters before running out of room.
And then The Tick kicked his ass...
And then the Man Eating Cow showed up... but that was after the Ninjas....
Or something...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Your argument has no merit. I could say the same thing about Creationist. The Bible says it took God six days to create the "World/Universe". Is a day to God 24 hours? Or a billion years? That is up to theologins in the Vatican to ponder. And whatever Dogma comes forth, you'll happily lick up I'm sure.
The Creationists are the same ones who tried to silence Gallileo/Capernicus regarding the Earth not being the center of the universe 350 years ago. Gallileo was jailed for a few years for publishing a book about it. 350 years later, we KNOW the Earth is not the center of the universe, Dogma aside. So who is right and who is wrong...time will tell.
I'd much rather have the money spent on getting evolution out of the school systems
I'd rather spend my money getting fundamentalist ideals out of the school system all together, that includes creationism.
You reason like the Taliban do. Zeolot.
P.S. I actually read the Bible and forgo church.
We all know the Russians sent a bot to the moon that got there a few hours before the humans so stop your sorry whining you Americans and long live the Soviet Union. Oh shit the thing never worked and it crash landed on the moon! Uh well fuck the Soviets they are only good at making weapons and gases to begin with.Long live the Red Chinese. There are so many of them they can freaking climb on top oneanother and can get to the moon that way. I call the top position!
Oops! Point taken. My bad.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Aaah, but why haven't they? I think the answer is pretty clear... :)
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
When I was 4 yeras old I watched on TV as Neil armstrong uttered those famous words. This even more than any other changed my life. I have since been obsessed with all things space, and have never doubted for a second that we went to the Moon with Apollo.
HOWEVER, I have seen the evidence that the moon landing skeptics have provided and some of it is damn compelling and yet to be answered by NASA. Some of the evidence is so compelling even I doubted it for a bit.
$15,000 is a small price to pay if thet actually answer convincingly the questions and compelling "wholes" presented by the moon hoax crowd.
www.enthea.org
The issue isn't science. We could get to the moon in less than five years. If we had the money. We know how to build teh rockets to get there. What we lack is the cold, hard, cash.
We were willing to spend those billions and billions of dollars in the 1960's because we were in a race with the Soviets. A race that set the Soviet Union on a one-way trip to bankruptcy. After we won the race we simply couldn't afford to keep up the pace.
We didn't go for science. We didn't go for commerce. We didn't go for any reason other than to beat the Soviets. Once we did, there was no reason to go back.
We will get back to the moon, if we don't let George W. start WWIII. But we won't go back until it can be done at a cost worth paying.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
If someone's that stupid, then i guess (s)he deserves whatever his/hers own hallucinations might produce. Just let them belive whatever shit they believe.
To quote from the web site, located here (full article not reproduced here, due to the many links contained therein):
In 1995, the American Historical Association, in an attempt to stifle revisionist scholarship, marked the 50th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism with a resolution calling on scholars to "initiate plans now to study the significance of the Holocaust." This, however, was not enough of a blow to free academic discourse for the enemies of truth. The president of the AHA, William Leuchtenburg, was asked why the resolution did not go so far as to explicitly recognize the Holocaust as a fact of history. He answered that for a group of historians to say that there had been a Holocaust was tantamount to "an organization of astronomers saying there is a moon."
While, on the surface, this appears as nothing more than a shameless attempt to trivialize and thereby discredit the work of revisionists, it nonetheless got me to thinking: why did this historian single out the moon? Why would a scholar, so familiar with academic standards of evidence, use such language to imply that the existence of the moon, unlike any other issue, was a given and not subject to proof? What, in other words, was he trying to hide?
It was then that I embarked on my research, which has led me to this day when I can confidently make the following assertion: The Moon does not exist. As I realize this revelation may appear shocking to the average reader, allow me to repeat it:
The Moon does not exist!
This is no lie. Until recently, I, too, believed in the traditional, establishment view of the moon. But any thinking person, untainted by the biases imposed on us by the controlled media, will have no choice but to reach the conclusion I did once faced with the facts described in this account.
[..]
A cash reward of $100,000 has been offered to anyone who can send us, by e-mail, conclusive physical evidence of the existence of the moon. This reward remains unclaimed.
Can you prove that the moon exists? Write to us at: madrev@reptiles.org
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
creationism is not testable. by its very definition creationism cannot be tested or verified.
creationism is not applicable. you cannot apply creationism to solve any problem.
creationism does not make any verifiable predictions.
therefore, creationism is not a theory.
the theorem (theory) of pythagoras is a theory. the theory of evolution is a theory.
creationism is NOT a theory. to claim it is otherwise is either ignorant or fraudulent.
For a book deal?
That's nothing. He's practically doing it pro-bono.
The trip to the moon was totally faked... in 1902! This French dude did it! George Méliès was his name, and he ripped off Jules Verne in the process!
;-P
Here is proof!
Some might remember the Smashing Pumpkins bravely revealed the moon landing hoax in 1995 with the video for their song "Tonight, Tonight" from their album "Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness."
Shocking lack of imagination for NASA to rip these artists off. Call the DMCA! Call the RIAA! These conspiracy theorists are on to something here... a lack of imagination!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"And it's unfortunate that the nutters will see this as validation of their ridiculous claims ('if our charges weren't true, NASA wouldn't bother answering them' they'll snivel.)"
They're doing it because those "nutters" have a nasty habit of voting and are probably demanding their congresscritters to investigate. They may not listen to reason, they may not have two braincells to rub together, but they have a habit of making a whole lot of noise.
After doing some research, I realized that I suffered a huge brain-fart. The textbook said they took off from the far side of the Earth, not landed on the far side of the moon.
(Oh, and that's the far side of the Earth from the moon's point of view.)
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" - Vroomfondel, H2G2
you fucking americans will and do, do anything to look better than the next, I'd bet my life on nasa never have landing on the moon.. some of the simple things like radiation.. and lack of protection prove you faked the whole thing to start with.. god damn bo-ho americans, do everyone a favour and fucking die.
moo
If our charges weren't true, NASA wouldn't bother answering them!
So there!
including steven hawkings? in his book he pointed out that no one can guess what happened before the big bang, and he put it down to God,
Er, no he didn't. In fact, he thinks the universe may be self-contained, without a beginning or end; which would eliminate the "need" for a creator.
God knows the school systems aren't! It's not a matter of sniveling, it's a matter of teaching people about science. Many people are easily swayed (especially by something they saw on TV). I saw that Fox special, too. I thought it was a hoot. I laughed my ass off. I'm rather found of conspiracy theories when it comes right down to it. But then, I discovered that people were taking it seriously. I was rather dismayed, since many of the arguments they were using was stuff they should have learned in grade school earth science! I've said it once, and I'll say it again, "God damn, kids are stupid now-a-days!"
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
The report is not the issue it is a symptom of a problem of this organization own creating, if everything was open in the first place and people trusted the organization this type of question would have been resolved long ago
NASA is a government agency created to serving the people and paid for by the American people (admitted we Brits have virtually no space exploration effort to speak of by comparison, more a case of scale that interest but still have views on the topic) yet finds it necessary to vet and censor TV, radio, pictures and other data presented to the public. This is how it got into this problem in the first place.
Regardless of what is said if you hide something people start asking why do you need to hide it, this creates a us and them culture. A built in confrontational system resulting in the have's against the have-nots (information in this case). So now instead of having an easily verifiable public program each step the organization takes will be queried. Being a large committee run organization NASA may not do what is in the best interests of all, but any organization that can not or will not answer questions presented to it by its pay master (in this case the public and that every one, no matter how 'stupid' or 'incorrect' the question), will at some stage have to justify its existence. This is the price of doing business with secrets.
Yup, that seems to be one of the biggest problems in these type of discussions.
It really personally bothers me when people latch on to the word 'theory' and base their claims on this (but it's only a theory, just like the cow flying over the moon! So they should both be treated equally, right?).
I just wanted to add that the fact that germs cause disease is actually also 'only' a theory: http://www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon/biol2 007.htm
As is the 'magic' that powers the computers we are all typing in (electron theory, or electron movement theory) http://www.qsl.net/4f5aww/module5a.htm
I guess it's just unfortunate that the 'lay definition' of theory (it's just something that I dreamt up) is so different from the meaning given to the word in science.
PS sorry, don't know how to make urls clickable. Although, all I did was a quick google search, so there's nothing special about those links.
... thing!
"It is within God's power to cease to be omnipotent. You got a problem with that, friend?"
This is like convincing the genie/troll (I forget) that he should show off his power by being really small then putting him in a jar.
graspee
I mean these people just don't want to listen to scientific evidence, it doesn't help because no amout of evidence will be sufficent. It's like the story with the paranoid.
You can not prove to a paranoid person that nobody is actually out to get him, because he will assume that it's all an elaborate trick to make him believe that. If people appear to be ignoring him it's just a trick while observing him in secret, and if they're not doing anything suspicious at the moment they're just waiting for the right opportunity.
Weather a theory is scientific is not a matter of how much evidence speaks for it, but rather under which conditions it is false. Formulated by Popper, it is not a method to separate true from false, but to separate scientific from non-scientific statements.
And on an off-topic note, just a pet peeve of mine:
Evolution would be false if completely new species kept suddenly appearing with no relations to other species.
Creationism would be false if...? If all species had no evolution, no connection? No, that would be God having made them exactly as they are. If completely new species appeared? No, that would be a miracle, and that would have to be Gods work.
I have no problem with Creation as faith. Be it by God creating big bang, or God creating the world in 4004 BC exactly by the words of the bible, or yesterday, giving me the memory of the life I believe to have lived. But it is not, and will never be, scientific. And I truly hate people trying to sell it as such.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'd much rather have the money spent on getting evolution out of the school systems
...
You don't want our kids taught good science then? Pity.
and if neither theory (evolution or creation)
Evolution is a theory. Creationism is not. For something to be a theory it has to be supported by objective evidence, make testable predictions, and be falsifiable. Creationism is none of these.
And since we've *seen* evolution (change in allele frequencies) happen, we're not arguing about *if* it happens. The only real debate these days is the *mechanism* by which it happens.
I think evolutionists like yourself are bigoted, faithless, hopeless souls who have no idea what's in store for them when they finally figure out they were wrong.
How dare you call me black, Mr. Pot!
Evolution is too stupid to figure out how to make a complex human being from scratch and keep the human growing effortlessly throughout its lifetime.
Evolution doesn't have to do that. Evolution only has to make humans from a species that's sort of like humans. And make *that* species from one a little less like humans. And make *THAT* species from
including steven hawkings? in his book he pointed out that no one can guess what happened before the big bang, and he put it down to God, god created the universe before the big bang. since god is infalable he set the big bang up *exactlly* how he wanted it and we are here reading slashdot, by his design.
personally i'm not a christian, but i liked his reasoning.
Well I am, and Creationists piss me off. Why? Because Stephen Hawking's explanation isn't good enough for them. Because they think that they know exactly how God created the universe, and that it had to be some 7-periods-of-24-hours affair. They don't think it's possible that God could have used the Big Bang, evolution, and the forces of nature to perform His will. In effect, they are placing limits on the God that they'll spend as long as you care to listen telling you is omnipotent!
As a result they want to teach kids a literal interpretation of a book absolutely laden with symbolic language, parable, and metaphor -- with the reason explicitly stated that the truth is more complex -- that these fools decided must be the only way it could have been.
And the part that pisses me off -- because they're such morons, smart non-religious types end up thinking all religous types must be morons as well, and I have to deal with it. Thanks, guys.
The enemies of Democracy are
Why not just point all the disbelievers to the goatse people. That would be a lot more fun, and a lot more cost effective.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
How can you go to someplace that is not really there?
"Creationists ... belong in exactly the same camp as the ... Holocaust-deniers.".
You seem to be more Nazi than the Nazi, putting people into places without any explanation needed. Why should everyone that believes life on earth is not 100% coincidence in all aspects have to be aligned with Holocaust-deniers?
Holocaust-non-deniers are also having their little Holocaust at palestitians, which they also deny.
Now, I do not know if the first moon landing was true. I have 90% confidence it was true, though I cannot completely rule out that it was a fake. I will act as if it's true because there's not enough evidence to not believe it.
Whatever you or I believe or think we have proven will not change facts. What happened was and no amount of "your proving" is change that.
You actually start believing in cospiracy tales only after you have access to certain sources in the grand scheme of things. I know this myself, though I would admit 90% of the conspiracy theories are complete BS, there is significat amount of them that are not.
unfinished: (adj.)
Does anyone know if Buzz is left handed? From the video (http://www.csicop.org/articles/20021018-aldrin/bu zz-aldrin-punch-video.mpg) its clear that he punches him w/ his left hand. If he's actually right-handed that just makes him even cooler, and that other guy more of a fcuking pussy : )
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Too bad the evidence for evolution as we know it isn't enough to bring it out of the 'theory' stage. Never mind the fact that a growing majority of schools teach the concept as fact.
Grumble. Nothing in science ever gets beyond the 'theory' stage. We still have the Germ Theory of disease and the General Theory of relativity don't we?
Theories are science's attempt to explain facts.
Fact: Things are attracted to other things.
Theory: Mass distorts spacetime and objects follow the shortest path in curved space.
Fact: Species change over time.
Theory: Traits are inherited from parents with occasional mutations. Environmental pressures cause certain traits to be more successful than others.
one of the reasons I prefer creationism (and the beliefs one can have with faith in God) is that evolution doesn't offer me much comfort in the face of depression, loss, hurt, uncertainty, death, etc.
What does evolution have to do with any of that? The truth of evolution doesn't preclude the existence of God.
Look people... there is a parabolic mirror array that observatories use to measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon... if this isn't proof that we went to the moon, I don't know what is (and yes it would be beyond the capabilites of current technology to deliver such a mirror to the surface of the moon with robotics). Joe
It is all too easy to deride the doubters. I think that misses the point. What they are doubting is not so much the why and wherefore of the moon landing. What they are doubting is the credibility of the US government as well as that of scientists (and teachers) in government employ. Note that the $15K is being spent to create teaching materials, at least in part. Now what does that tell you? It tells me that there is a lot of doubt, all the way down.
People will beleive all kinds of crap. But mostly they are eager to beleive that which supports their prior opinion, not that which challenges it. Right now, after the Florida elections and Enron and the like, after years of Nixon and Ray Gun and Bush I and Bush II and Bubba, after all that, the opinion is that the government and it's sycophants are greedy, stupid and shallow. That there are only lies, damned lies and press releases. That the lie is King and it was the lie that went to the moon, not men. I don't buy that myself, but *someone* is buying it.
Maybe it's just been a long time since anything stupendously groovy happened at the hand of humans. A lot of crappy things have happened since Apollo 11, that's for sure. Where are the new heros, men and women, who will make people believe in themselves and us all again?
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
First, if NASA has previously spent time and energy answering doubters individually, then putting together a set of material to address the issue may represent a good savings. Now they'll have a resource and a procedure for disposing of inquiries quickly.
Second, how humiliating is it to get your clock cleaned in public by a 72 year old man? That's fantastic! Reminds me of when a rookie Robin Ventura rushed the mound on Nolan Ryan, and Nolan, twice the rookie's age, beat him like a cheap rug. Let's hear it for old guys who still crack heads! Hooray for Buzz Aldrin!
In a related article somewhere I read that this is the official line taught in Cuba, Angola and a few other places. Now that's pretty sad.
Linux doesn't even recognise my mouse, so I guess it's safe from it causing any harm... :(
It's a theory with a whole hell of a lot of supporting evidence. Just because its called a "theory" does not mean that it has only as much validity as anything else people call a "theory". Hell, do you even know what the scientific definition of a "theory" is ?
Remember that relativity is "just" a theory. Our understanding of gravity is just a "theory". By your reasoning, my "theory" that gravity is caused by invisible bungee cords has just as much validity as the current Theory of Gravity. Which is, of course, bull.
When we return to the moon in a few years, the first thing we'll do is point our cameras at the remnants of the Eagle on the lunar surface.
And then we'll proceed to make billions from harvesting energy on the lunar surface and sending it back to Earth.
Mike
It is correct that Hubbles resolution on the moon is on the order of 100's of meters. Obviously it can not resolve an American flag. However, the Clementine probe captured some imagesof what appear to be a the launch crater from a lunar module. Of course, this brings the United States Navy into the conspiracy if you choose not to believe it...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Remember that relativity is "just" a theory. Our understanding of gravity is just a "theory". By your reasoning, my "theory" that gravity is caused by invisible bungee cords has just as much validity as the current Theory of Gravity. Which is, of course, bull. Isn't that basically what string theory boils down to?...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There have already been tens of thousands of dollars spent on adjudicating the argument between religious dogma and scientific theory.
The Scopes "Monkey Trial" happened in the early 1920s, with John Scopes fighting to teach evolution in the state of Tennessee. Scopes's lawyer, Darrow, lost.
Refusing to admit crucial evidence, the presiding judge, John T. Raulston, gloried in frustrating the defense and upholding Christian orthodoxy.
These are the kind of people you're up against. Evidence and proof mean nothing. Reality? What's that? You can spend all the money you want, but you'll never convince superstitious zealots that what they believe is wrong.
blog
What's 15K for NASA, really? For that matter,
what's 15K for such a gov't agency? Another
bathroom stall?
Considered harmful.
NASA provides valuable services. Knowledge, they drive a lot of advanced aerospace research, several technologies from the space program have made there way back to earth. And if the population doesn't level off and level off soon, the research of the US, Russia, and other nations space programs will be critical to getting the excess population a new home.
Also, ask a mountain climber why he or she climbs. Very likely you will get the answer "Because it is there". That alone is reason to struggle for a goal.
NASA to survive must fight back against claims like the moon hoax. If they don't, more people may buy the claims and the resultant drop in public support will decrease their funding to dangerously low levels.
I don't want to be the President whos told by his NASA head that "Sir, if you had signed that bill giving us more money two years ago, we would have noticed that planet killer asteroid in time to stop it. Unfortunately, our only hope now is Bruce Willis."
Fact: Species change over time.
Theory: Traits are inherited from parents with occasional mutations. Environmental pressures cause certain traits to be more successful than others.
Traits are inherited from parents? That's a theory? And that's your excuse for creationism? Okay...
Synergy is your friend
Of course, it's especially charming when you get creationism and holocaust denial in the same religion.
...
Oh, and they don't beleieve in the moon landings either
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
Wouldn't it be possible to look through a !really! powerful telescope and see the rover, and the base units of the landers? Those are some pretty big pieces of machinery that they left behind.
That's like asking "can God add 1 and 1 and get 3".
What is wrong with that?... 1+1 can equal 3 for sufficiently high values of 1. That is a fundamental cornerstone of groveling for partial credit..
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
you gave all the morons that want so badly to believe that we never really went to the moon some rocks and clubs and let them live in caves on an island somewhere. Since they can't seem to accept that technology, by it's very nature, evolves then maybe they aren't ready for anything more advanced than stone age tech.
One more thing, a bit off topic... I really loved it when Aldrin popped that guy in the face!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
There are endless amounts of cranks out there who believe in things like "Creation Science." Their arguments should be collected and brutally refuted, using logic, and, more importantly, using evidence of experiments, with actual citations to real paper documents. By now, a lot of people "get" that any crackpot can put up a webpage, cheaply - what is true? Paper still costs, and is frequently peer-reviewed if it is a science journal, thus making entry for people who aren't willing to think difficult.
Similar efforts need to be made for things like special relativity. SR has a special place in the hearts of crackpots who really want Star Trek and warp drives. Despite the fact that time dilation, Lorentz contraction, etc., have all been seen, time and again, on the beamline, these people use arguments based on highly convoluted logic because many of them are ignorant of the fact that real evidence exists for these phenomena. Often, their arguments are simply too long to dissect - reality is a much better refutation.
Most of your crackpots and Usenet kooks have "logical arguments" which tend to fall into very specific categories. The Creation Science types like to haul out some quotes about 1950's science and show how wrong it is (such as having stars older than the Universe - a common tactic). The standard arguments, if properly cataloged, could be neatly dissected.
I know most of you don't buy into this, but there are a lot of people driving around with little Truth fish on the backs of their cars eating Darwin fish-with-feet. A good chunk of the public doesn't believe in evolution at all, thanks to radically out of date textbooks and, well, Oklahoma's assault on science in general in the late 90's.
The sooner information like this is disseminated to the public, the faster we can get back to sanity and progress.
Not specifically related to the moon landing, but don't you think it is healthy the have a certain percentage of the population play devils advocate?
I think it is healthy to have a certain percentage of natural born sceptics because it helps to keep those in charge honest.
Just think about the consequences of the entire population totally believing every single word that came out of the government...
As for the moon, I can't really pass judgement because A) I havn't been to the moon and seen it myself and B) They have tried to fake big events before, and admittedly, got caught.
Someone has a sig here that pretty much sums it up. I can't remember the exact words but something along the line of..
Everyone thinks that government cover-ups fail because you never hear about the ones that succeed.
I'd rather see the tax dollars go to explaining the difference between a theory and a philosophical doctrine, and examining the evidence without assumption or prejudice.
Would it confirm evolution? Or would it confirm creationism? Probably neither.
Would it disprove one or both? Possibly.
But don't make the mistake for a minute of calling the doctrines of creation/evolution a science.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I mention this in a comment above: the video-frame is reversed. Who knows why, but it is. Take a look at the building number above Buzz's head to confirm.
--mistersquid
This sig has been faked
Precisely.
It ain't a theory.
Like Freuds 'Every dream is a neurotic symptom'
or Newtons 'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction'
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
One has to wonder if they are willfully or unconciously lying to themselves and others about this. It certainly doesn't say much for their faith or their thought processes that they'd rather live in a woo-woo land of lies and self-denial than confront reality.
it. It is a fact, deal with it.On the other hand, evolution has a 150 year mountain of evidence to prove
If you believe otherwise, read TalkOrigins.org and explain why they're wrong.
I've always felt that these "mini medias" like Art Bell, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, etc., are more harmful than people acknowledge. I like the idea that there can be alternative news sources, but so few seem to question the credibility of these sources. It's sad when I see my suspicions about this come to fruition. Love the mainstream media or not, they have one thing above all these "alternatives." They have credibility by virtue of their work and philosophy--not by numbers or the volume of their message.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
I recall it being well over a decade ago when Weekly World News published the moon hoax theory to the public. I still didn't believe that scientists were going to blow up the moon,
but I believed the moon landing was fake for awhile, too, as their article was actually very well written and raised some good points.
This was back when I was obsessed with shows like Sightings and read everything about the unexplained, the paranormal, and conspiracies as I could, even before the X-Files were around to make it cool.
When I first got an email address, I emailed NASA, and a Dr. Edwin Bell actually sent back a well-written reply to my questions. Thanks to Fox, they're probably flooded nowadays.
Eat at Subway.
Please, first, excuse my ignorance, which is huge regarding telemetry and rocket science. Now that we have that out of the way . . .
A movie (based on true events) which came out in 2000 titled The Dish is about the satellite dish that the US requisitioned (not the right word, but you get the idea) to track Apollo 11 while the Eastern Hemisphere faced the moon. In 1969, that dish was one of the few powerful enough to use as a relay for Apollo 11. But apparently the size of Apollo 11 also meant it wasn't easy to track if you didn't have its recent co-ordinates and velocity.
So, my question comes down to whether it would have been so easy to track Apollo 11 if you were the Soviets. (Did they have information about Apollo's progress?)
blog
I know ppl that don't believe the landing happened because 'they look so fake. I can do better stuff like that on my computer' Well Hello McFly, this was filmed in the late 1960's, on 1960's video equipment, where there no computers, no internet, no microwaves, no VCR's, no cell phones, no cable TV, no CD's or casettes,8-tracks weren't even invented yet, no digital cameras, and these images were broadcast over 180000 miles away. Of course they will look like shit!
Traits are inherited from parents? That's a theory?
:)
You cut the rest of my sentence, but in any case...
No, that traits are inherited from parent is a _fact_. The _theory_ in this particular case is that the traits are encoded in the organism's DNA.
But that's only one part of the various theories of evolution.
And that's your excuse for creationism?
No, there's no excuse for creationism.
Fortunately science works from evidence. In the absence of any evidence to support the notion of a god and no way to observe or detect a god (or giant incorporeal space hippos), there is no need to require or suppose one.
...where did these people think it was going?
Vatican has been lying to people for hundreds of years. The concept of God as the sole creator was invented to enforce morality in society through fear !!!! Universe has been in existence from infinite amount of time in the past and will exist for infinite amount of time. We have 6 substances present - (1) Soul (2) Matter, made up of basic elementary unit (science has yet to discover it, quantum physics is working on it). Matter includes everything that your senses can perceive including your own body. (3) Time (4) Medium of rest (that facilitates the resting state of 2 substances - matter and soul (5)Medium of motion (that facilitates the motion of 2 substances - matter and soul (6) Universe (comprised of universe where above 5 type of substances exist. This is of finite but huge dimensions and universe beyond where none of above 5 substances exist. In the absence of medium of rest and medium of motion/rest in this part of universe, soul and matter can't travel to and it is infinite in dimensions.
NO ONE CREATED THE UNIVERSE. IT HAS BEEN EVER PRESENT. ONLY MATTER CHANGES ITS FORMS.
THIS IS THE ETERNAL TRUTH AND THEY HAD BEEN LYING TO YOU ABOUT GOD AS A CREATOR FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS.
THERE IS NO GOD JUDGING ZILLIONS OF THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS OF ALL THE LIVING BEINGS PRESENT IN THE UNIVERSE AND MAKING A DECISION ON THE BASIS OF THAT. Search the web if you really want to know the real truth. Remember, your senses have only been designed to perceive Matter and part of the universe and are very limited. You have to open your mind and argue with lies told by church. Do your own research.
oh well I guess no one will believe that either. The sad thing is I didn't know it because we barely studied the 60's/70's in any of my history classes throughout high school and college. I guess since the teachers/professors felt since they knew it we knew it, there was no reason to teach about Vietnam, Moon Landings, Presidential Scandal's, Terrorist Hijackings/Acts (yes they happened in the past too).
Oh well I guess learning is really up to the student more than the teacher.
Vatican has been lying to people for hundreds of years. The concept of God as the sole creator was invented to enforce morality in society through fear !!!! Universe has been in existence from infinite amount of time in the past and will exist for infinite amount of time. Nothing created universe. We have 6 substances present - (1) Soul (2) Matter, made up of basic elementary unit (science has yet to discover it, quantum physics is working on it). Matter includes everything that your senses can perceive including your own body. (3) Time (4) Medium of rest (that facilitates the resting state of 2 substances - matter and soul (5)Medium of motion (that facilitates the motion of 2 substances - matter and soul (6) Universe (comprised of universe where above 5 type of substances exist. This is of finite but huge dimensions and universe beyond where none of above 5 substances exist. In the absence of medium of rest and medium of motion/rest in this part of universe, soul and matter can't travel to and it is infinite in dimensions.
NO ONE CREATED THE UNIVERSE. IT HAS BEEN EVER PRESENT. ONLY MATTER CHANGES ITS FORMS.
THIS IS THE ETERNAL TRUTH AND THEY HAD BEEN LYING TO YOU ABOUT GOD AS A CREATOR FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS.
THERE IS NO GOD JUDGING ZILLIONS OF THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS OF ALL THE LIVING BEINGS PRESENT IN THE UNIVERSE AND MAKING A DECISION ON THE BASIS OF THAT. Search the web if you really want to know the real truth. Remember, your senses have only been designed to perceive Matter and part of the universe and are very limited. You have to open your mind and argue with lies told by church. Do your own research.
It is too bad one of the astronauts did not trudge a gigantic NASA WAS HERE into the moon dust so that the image could be seen from a large telescope. That should silence the idiots.
They put plates with reflective material in place. Scientists on Earth shoot lasers on the plates, and get reflections back. The measurements have been used to establish the distance to the moon with extraordinary precision, also that the moon is moving away a couple of inches per year (or was it moving closer... I forgot).
Tor
Good non-answer.
You said you preferred creationism because evolution doesn't offer much "comfort".
The theories of evolution (there are several) aren't *supposed* to offer comfort. They are scientific theories, not religion. Do you reject General Relativity because it doesn't provide comfort? Do you reject the germ theory of disease because it doesn't provide hope? How about the heliocentric theory of the solar system?
Why do you single out evolution from all of science? If you reject evolution because you feel it conflicts with your faith, you don't have to worry. You can accept evolution and still believe in God. Maybe God is guiding the forces of natural selection? Maybe She's running a big experiment to see what She can make? Such questions are outside the realm of science, so feel free to put God in charge if you want.
It can teach you insights into:
- What 'scientific proof' really means (it's not a good idea to say something is something with 100% certainty) and how hard it is to dislocate it from human psychology.
- How dangerous it can be to blindly believe so-called 'experts' (what about that guy at Bell Labs who falsified his work, they had to pull 6 patents!)
- How to describe things without defining their 'reality' for clearer thinking.
It's always good to have a disbeliever around. It can be frustrating sometimes (Darwinists are sick of Creationists like Jack Chick) but it keeps you on your toes and makes you question things you believe to be true.Remember: Belief gets in the way of learning. The philosophy of science is something I believe that everyone should learn about, and scientists unwilling to study it should not call themselves scientists.
See Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Trigger" series (esp. Cosmic Trigger III) for a really interesting read about this. (He's one of the guys who wrote Illuminatus, so you can trust him! Fnord!)
It all started back when "they" said the world was round. That's crazy. I tell you it's a conspiracy by mathematicians. Yes mathematicians!! They just wanted to make a job for themselves by making navigation more mathematically difficult. I've never seen the other side of the world. Who says this slashdot thingy is even in America. For that matter who say America even exists. I bet it's a Melbourne mathematician. They never liked Sydney anyway.
Any way I have proof. If they call Australia "down under", why don't I fall off. The world can't be round, or half the people would fall off. QED
Read what he writes, he's just "some guy" like you and me.
g
:)
And for all his talk, he still doesn't explain 2 very obvious things about this picture:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/as11-40-5874.jp
1) I understand why the flag appears to be waving, but he has no explanation as to why neither the flag nor the flagpole cast any sort of shadow whatsoever.
I could buy that because the flagpole is so thin that its shadow gets lost, but as you can see- the flag itself is BRIGHTLY illuminated.
This means that you should very easily see a shadow for it.
2) The non-parallel shadows- he explains this in another picture as a low camera angle combined with the perspective of the camera- and you can plainly see that in the other pic it's a valid explanation.
There's a lot of distance between the 2 objects.
But in this pic, the 3 visible shadows (the lander, the rock, and the astronaut) are *very* close together, and the shadow angles vary *greatly*.
You can imagine that the light source would have to be *very* close to make that much of an angle difference between those 3 things.
I dunno- I consider myself fairly sane and rational, and I know the government has done things *far* beyond covering up moon landings- but like someone else said- whether or not the US landed on the moon doesn't change any desicions *I* am going to make- so fuck it
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
Isn't the moon already a giant reflector ;)
But I think healthy scepticism is good, too. If you think about it: how do you actually know what you know? What sources of information do you have? How can you verify their accuracy? Is a bunch of television pictures enough? Is reading papers on moon rocks in Nature and Science good enough?
So, again, I think for the moon landing, on balance, I believe it. But I think it's not unreasonable to ask, and it's not unreasonable for a big public institution with a big budget to explain themselves in terms that the public can understand.
My dad thinks that this whole thing started when this movie was released.
Certainly makes sense to me...
(No, I don't think it was faked.)
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
"What does evolution have to do with any of that? The truth of evolution doesn't preclude the existence of God."
Yeah, but if you're a Christian and believe in the Old Testament it does. Of course you have the middle ground where people say "Oh, God created the universe and then just let it go" but to me that's just someone who can't come to grips with the fact that they only have X more years and then they're done for good.
No sig for you.
Why not announce a meeting at a NASA autorium for
all the skeptics... then, when they all show up
on the date, lock the doors and send in all the
30 mile high club members in to kick their asses.
This would be relatively low cost and the "media"
could be easily controled.
Hm, if such people are proven wrong they may give up and go home, then who'll be left to post on Slashdot?
Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered
-Stephen Jay Gould
Linux. Because a 386 is a terrible thing to waste.
Now, I believe very strongly in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. What I am doing here is not an act of hatred; I am sure that if we knew each other in real life, we would get along really nicely. Putting you on this list does not mean that I don't disrespect you as a person. It just means that I feel that you post some inappropriate things which make Christians look foolish to anyone in the scientific community.
I don't waste my time debating creation/evolution. I simply killfile the creationists so I don't get needlessly upset.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
The moon mission was a political one, not a scientific one. When the americans realised they'd never beat the Russians, they faked it to save face. I saw a documentary on it a while ago. Very interesting. It included facts like:
- The americans didn't realise that there was so much radiation in space that if they had actually attempted to get to the moon they would have been fried a million times over. They still haven't been able to deal fully with the radiation problem.
- The guy in charge of analysing the moon rocks went on a holiday to the south pole to collect meteors just prior to the moon mission's completion.
- The Russians were FAR ahead of the americans and many Russian scientists have stated that they never understood where the incredible jump in technology came from that allowed them to overtake Russian space technology so much.
There were a lot of other attacks on the US moon mission hoax. I can't remember all of them now, but it was an impressive list - in its size and accuracy.
the FLAG was on TEH move!!!?!?! EVAL MONAR VIND!
Let's do this real simple.
People who think the moon landing was a hoax: fucking idiots.
People who believe in Christianity: fucking idiots
The point isn't that Creationists, Apollo deniers, and Holocaust deniers, Flat-earthers, etc. are all on the same moral level. The idea here is that all of these groups use distortions, half-truths, mistakes, non-sequiturs, and other "evidence" to "prove" their theories.
Cute. They're quoting David Irving as some kind of authoritative source.
Didn't that little NAZI puke just get his ass handed to him by a British court a little while ago?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...aren't cheap, and i'm pretty sure the vast majority of americans believe in the lunar landings - would any congressman in his right mind want to have to stand up next campaign cycle and publically admit to spearheading a congressional investigation of valididity of the moon landings? ...i know i sure wouldn't.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
There certainly have been moon landings, but not before 1982, when NASA finally invented the technologies to get past the radiation belt. The world was fooled over a decade before into believing that Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. All the images and whatnot from the various Apollo missions were fakes. I have bulletproof evidence to support this claim: Two different people, who do not know each other, have separately told me that they doubt the moon landings took place.
I waste hours of my time at work proving things to people rather than getting more productive things done. It sucks, and that's the way it is.
Actually, that's not a fundamental logical fallacy anymore than the question "can God write a book longer than he can read in one hour".
Since _I_ could do such a thing, it obviously isn't a fundamental logical fallacy.
Too bad the evidence for evolution as we know it isn't enough to bring it out of the 'theory' stage. Never mind the fact that a growing majority of schools teach the concept as fact.
You are falling for a common misconception (and unfortunately, a common creationist argument) that the term "theory" means "hypothesis."
Science never "gets out" of the theory stage: theories either get stronger or weaker, or may fail completely, given the results of scientific study. To date, the theory of evolution has a lot of support -- and thus is a widely accepted theory in the scientific community (and that is why it is taught in schools).
However, this is not to say that the theory is perfect; even good theories, by their nature, can always be improved (e.g. general relativity).
And concerning your faith: isn't it possible that evolution is part of God's grand design? I have friends who find comfort in this thought because it allows them to reconcile their faith with the beauty of scientific method.
On the US side, we now know that the Explorer satellite series was a cover story for the Corona spy satellites. And there was a fair amount of disinformation about the SR-71. Covering up a large supersonic aircraft making sonic booms over the US was a tough bit of spin control. On at least two occasions, there were low-altitude engine failure restarts over populated areas. One toppled a factory chimney, and the other was over downtown Salt Lake City.
Other cool stuff we know now:
My Dad was a set decorator for the moon landings. They stayed up all night burning books to make enough ash to be the moon dust.
The real challenge of the moon production was to get Walter Cronkite to drink the LSD Kool-Aid. America believed anything that guy said. As soon as he was high as a kite, it was in the bag.
The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.
Pity; Irving actually did some useful history at one stage, eg he wrote the first primary source-based account of the German atom bomb project back in the 1960s.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
silly of them , in hindsight to even try to go to the moon using '286 era' technology. they really should have waited for fast processors, dont you think. actually what was the race all about? what was the point ? ten years from today a very fast rocket will be launched and it will overtake the older slower rockets en route to pluto launced three years from now.good night.
YES! Front Row! (nt)
Bull! You hit a target how big? How far away?
Aiming with your hand?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Should we just accept everything the news media feeds us? So naive...
Whether or not the landings were faked, the point is that when news of the landing spread in 1969, most of the world blindly accepted what they were seeing on telly without a moments hesitation.
At least these articles that cast doubt over the plausibility of the moon landings (never mind the nutters who say "It definitely was a hoax) encourage people to think for themselves before believing everything they read.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Near Earth exploration has stagnated, lost the publics imagination, and worst of all given no major technical inovation for more then a decade. It is time to return to the moon. It's time to send a man to mars. Most of all it time to focus this county's and the worlds efforts on something more productive then blowing each other to bits.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
"What does evolution have to do with any of that? The truth of evolution doesn't preclude the existence of God."
"Yeah, but if you're a Christian and believe in the Old Testament it does."
Um, creationism (to my knowledge) does not say that evolution doesn't occur. All it describes is the state of the universe at its beginning, it does not say that that state cannot change over time.
Since an American lunar lander touched down first on the moon....do we have exclusive rights to the planet or just within 12 nautical miles within the flags' radius? This is going to be an interesting copyright issue; especially since the RIAA does not have logistical control of songs beamed into space; or do they?
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
And I don't understand the chip on the shoulder of anti-Creationists. Maybe they just want somebody to call "profoundly stupid and ignorant." Religious faith isn't a scientific matter, it's a metaphysical matter.
It would be stupid for a serious biological scientist to be a strict Creationist, and use Creationist methods to analyze the history of, say, frogs. However, for 99.98% of the population, Creationism v. Evolutionism is irrelevant to their daily lives, purely a philosophical conceit used to refute ancient ideals. Don't know if I'd agree, but I think a claim could be made that the last century and a half demonstrates that a society based on these new philosophical ideals is flawed.
Or, why the rabid proselytising? Are people that passionate about the subject of biology?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Using the infinite power of God to illustrate the infinite weakness of God isn't exactly a solid foundation for any argument, especially when diving into concepts you don't understand in the first place.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They had it on tv so it has to be real and now all the posters at slashdot say its real so it has to be.
And if we could do it in the 60's we should really be able to kick ass and do it better and faster in the 2000's or the 1990's or the 1980's
Damnitt! Why the hell havent we gone back ?
must be no scientific info to be gotten from the moon anymore I guess we got it all.
Plus its of absolutely no military importants at all.
I mean how could anyone use the moon to their advantage if the USA cannot.
The other claim that sticks out in my head is "Why haven't we gone back if it's so easy?" Which frankly is a stupid way to make an argument. But it does seem that if we haven't gone back by this point, either there is some major technical hurdle we're not prepared to overcome, or more likely, the human race is simply regressing to focus its attention on petty political sqabbles rather than scientific achievement. It's fair to say "we're busy working on a bazillion dollar space station," or "why spend all that money to go pick up some more rocks," but either way, it would be interesting to put together a report showing what our modern technology could do towards doing a manned mission to the moon more safely, more cheaply, and with more beneficial results.
All of the "it was filmed on a soundstage" discussion is rather comical in this day and age of movie wizardry though.
...fact about that entire saga is not a technical but a psychological one.
Remember, it was a "race into space" with the Russians leading some time along the way. They had the first device in orbit (Sputnik) and they certainly can be credited for having a high-tech state of the art space control center back then.
If something was faked along the way to the moon landing (i.e. no rocket leaving earth, the radio waves of transmission not really originating from the moon, etc.) do you think they would have kept their traps shut about this hoax? If someone had the tech and the expertise to really establish if something moved from earth to moon and transmitted a load of radio waves from there, it was them. They have not spoken up, and that in an era where almost every mistake from either side was used as ammunition to discredit the other. They didn't. Proof enough. QED.
+++ath0
1) Personally I would love to read a point-by-point explanation of how every flaw in the Apollo evidence is invalid, coz it doesn't make sense to me.
2) Didn't CBS pay the guy in that movie The Insider $12,000 in the early '90s to consult on translating two scientific documents into laymans terms for a news story on housefires? By that standard $15,000 for a _book_ about the _moon landing_ is chickenfeed.
People who deny the moon landing, evolution, or the Nazi generated holocaust are asserting an opinion in an effort to save a personal belief, and are not engaging in meaningful dialog.
But movies and photos are relatively easy to fake. It is a matter of trusting people more so than using "science" per se. If you truely believe there is a mass Jewish conspiracy, then spending a few billion to fake holocost movies, mess with war victim bodies, and fake passports is child's play.
You can't remove people issues from this equation. Physical evidence is too subject to tampering, and very wealthy people can make very good fakes if they really wanted to.
IOW, it is not irrational to distrust physical evidence if heavy-handed political forces are there to interfere/tamper. The "irrational" part is more related to relating to certain people or groups. Every time a Jewish banker goes to jail for fraud, it will reinforce anti-semitism groupthink because it supplies "evidence" that backs anti-semitic conspiracy and/or paranoia viewpoints. Political Correctness pushing the viewpoint that stereotypes are 100 percent false also will feed distrust. IOW, excess PC backfires in many cases.
Solving these kinds of issues often involves complex phychology and social issues, and not mere "scientific debunking".
It is nearly impossible to prove a photo or movie is *not* a fake. You have to believe that nobody had sufficient motivation to pull it off. IOW, trust people.
Table-ized A.I.
For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!
Of course, Wil Wheaton can attest to the moon program being real.. He's been to the neutral zone and back!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
You know, for that one post alone, one out of every seven words or so was "fuck" or some variant thereof. What I can't figure out is, why the use of the abbreviation in the last sentence? Worried about offending someone with that extra "fuck?" :-)
They that would sacrifice their
Title says it all. Impossible!
I love this website...I always have seen it as an oasis of free thought amongst the barren desert of conformity which forms the basis for the vast majority of internet, entertainment, and social content. What has happened to you people? Can't you consider an alternative viewpoint for a second?...think outside of the box? I thought this is what hacker culture is/was/and shall be all about...
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Look at what's happening all around us...doesn't any of it seem a bit strange to you? a little bit too coincidental? Do you see anything past the "mainstream" media's talking heads?
listen to all of you, smug and arrogant in your ridicule of those who choose to explore patterns of thought which are the essence of our art...hypocrites....
I think you will soon find that many of these "conspiracy theories", including the Apollo hoax theories, contain a certain amount of truth....some of these truths may forever change our lives or the way we look at life on this planet...
The truth of the matter is that I would like to believe that our mixedcorporatemediagovernment is still of the people, by the people, for the people...but it seems to me more and more that it has taken on a life of its own....
Have you ever heard of Operation Northwoods? Or how about the Gulf of Tonkin? Or how about the admission by our government that they had full knowledge of the imminent attacks on Pearl Harbor and still chose to withhold the key pieces of intelligence? Or how about the sham which was the Warren Commission Report? What words would you use to describe these events in our history? Lies? Acts of heroism? Protecting the herd? How about Conspiracy Theories? But are they all just theories? Or are some of them Conspiracy Fact? Why don't you see for yourself? I am sure a simple google search using some of the terms above could provide hours of interesting, and perhaps insightful reading.
And if after actually doing some research into all of this "loony" stuff, you still think Uncle Sam is just protecting his little nieces and nephews from this weeks new bad guy,and would never lie....have a look see at this here hyperlink:
http://www.angelfire.com/or/mctrl/policestatemi
wake up people...
Wow! Well said. Thanks for that link!!
You have indeed given me something to think about. especially after reading that stuff about operation northwoods.
Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction
The moon landings were real. The Mars Face told me personally.
Table-ized A.I.
And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered
Don't be sloppy. That isn't a fact. The facts -- the data, as you say -- are that we have found fossils that resemble to varying degrees apes and humans, with older ones more closely resembling apes than more recent ones. It's pretty obvious that what those fossils mean is that we evolved from apes, but that isn't a "fact".
Of course then a Creationist then uses that to put their literal interpretation of Genesis on equal footing as evolution... But that's no reason to call something a fact that isn't.
The enemies of Democracy are
This pic is pretty interesting (to me, anyway). It looks like the module is superimposed over one of the crosshairs. Can anyone help me out and explain this one to me?
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
As we all know from writing code, comments such as "Wet Paint" or "This needs to be fixed" cease to be true long before they are removed from the code. I was just hacking some code today, and reading my commented precondition, and finding out in a painful way that the documentation no longer reflected the true precondition.
In a phrase, "Comments lie." This works both in code and in the Real World.
Someday I'll understand Slashdot's logic.. I submitted this story 4 days ago, and it was rejected.
* 2002-11-01 04:51:41 NASA commissions book to prove moon landing really (articles,news) (rejected)
Not to be pissy about it, but if it's news worthy, and they're going to post the exact same story, why do they reject it? 4 days after I post the same thing, it gets posted by someone else.
Maybe my Karma:Good isn't good enough around here or something.. Maybe I haven't bought a banner or whatever.. {sigh} whatever.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Check out the US had plans for a Military Moonbase in 1959. The hardware featured is earlier designs; very Von Braun in fact!
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(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
>> I'd much rather have the money spent on getting evolution out of the school systems and if neither theory (evolution or creation) gets put back in then so be it. At least that would be the fairest thing to do
Except that there are lots of kids who want to learn about biology, and just might eventually become biologists themselves. The best place for them to begin their study is in public schools.
You see, the study of biology and the study of evolution go hand in hand. In fact, you could almost say they are the same subject.
Evolutionary biology is science. It is here to stay; it won't go away until biology in its entirety does.
The best site for the moon landing conspiracy has to be this one. Slashdotted soon, I guess - sorry to the owner...
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They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
More information on the Clangers here.
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They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
They mentioned the US moon landings about a decade after they occured whilst trumpeting about the landers that sent back a couple of grams of moon rock. US astronauts were bringing the stuff back by the kilogram. The Soviets were ashamed to admit that their space program had been totally eclipsed (ahem). Now, Western media had no trouble with reporting on Gagarin's flight. Which in fact some people doubt ever occured, not because the world is flat and the angels fly around at 80 km, but because there were a series of inconsistencies and occurances that raise doubts whether he was the actual pilot of the first manned flight (and not some nameless other cosmonaut who was supposedly killed in an accident).
Over the years the many conspiracy shows etc. have pointed to things like flags blowing in a 'breeze' on the moon, shadows not appearing to originate from the sun among many similar anomalies. Although I don't think this means they were hoaxed, it would be good to hear NASA come up with a response other than "Thats ridiculous" and actually supply some source of definitive proof that man has been to the moon.
And that pretty much sums it up.
As for being passionate about biology, I'm not that either. But I am passionate when I hear creationist groups trying to pressure schools to accept their unscientific twaddle. I am passionate when some fundamentalist group tries to force its world view on my children. If someone wants their own kids to believe in God, then fine take them to church each sunday. But religion should stay out of school and biology class until such time as there is a scientific evidence to justify it. Evolution has such evidence in spades.
Ancient Hebrews believed that the world was a hemisphere carved out of the surrounding chaos, or turbulent waters. When God wanted it to rain, he literally opened the windows in the sky and the waters of the universe poured through. That's pretty wacky, but I don't blame them for thinking so. It's not true, of course, but that doesn't have any bearing on the human spiritual condition.
Same thing with creationism. It's a nice story, sure, and I don't grudge the Ancient Hebrews for believing it was fact. It is, however, just a story, and that has absolutely nothing to do with humankind's very special need for meaning, comfort, guidance, and a belief in universal justice.
"Chariots for Apollo" by Charles Pellegrino - you can't make this stuff up.
"How To Think About Weird Things" by Lewis Vaughn - see how most goofy thinking goes wrong. This book comes highly recommended by James Randi.
Fox could put on a special that would have half the population believing they have no nose.
And if it were faked, there'd be no where near the number of excruciating details available. The bigger the lie, the fewer details you can afford to let out.
Sounds like they need some sense knocked into them. Where's a vagabond Saturn V third stage when you need one?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
NASA is more concerned with getting budget money than getting good science.
Didn't one of the moon landings occur durring a solar flare burst?
If we go to MARS then the astronauts will die becuase of solar flare burst.
NASA doesn't want you to know these things.
They waste a large part of their budget on propaganda and self-promotion.
If there had been a solar maximum during a moon landing (and rumors are there was) the astronauts would have been irradiated and DIED on the moon (so I have heard).
I don't know if we went there or not, but I wouldn't put it past NASA to have faked it.
And the shadows on the antenna are wrong.
Yes, these kinds of seemingly phony shots really make me doubt the validity of NASA information.
The book isn't going to be a tit for tat denoucement of various conspiracy theories. The book is going to talk about how conspiracy theories come about and become a part of popular culture. Anyway, $15,000 isn't a lot for NASA to spend. They've spent more when confusing Metric and American units of measure.
Ham radio operators don't always use beacons to bounce radio signals off the Moon -- we bounce the signals off the Moon itself.
It's not easy. It requires high-gain, low-noise systems, tracking antenna mounts, and full legal power (1.5 kW at the transmitter, plus antenna gain). And it requires a lot of patience to hear the returned signal.
The problem with this is that you are trying to argue against the nuts. That is backwards. Is it plausible that NASA could have faked the landings, and kept it a secret. Sure, there is a very very remote chance that it is possible. But that doesn't mean that they did! That is the problem with nuts, they don't listen. They make statements that cannot be disproved. Prove to me there have never been aliens on this planet. What about this bigfoot photo? It looks real, it must be real. See that shimmering light in the sky? If you don't know what it is, it MUST be an alien spacecraft. Goddamn loonies, all of them.
One thing I haven't seen people mention is the Space Shuttle program. Is that faked? Is it that much harder to land someone on the moon as it is to send them into space and have them return on the same craft, and re-use that craft over and over? What, is it all based on smoke and mirrors? I would suspect that the arguement would be "sure, that is now, but back then we didn't have the technology". Well what technology is the Space Shuttle based on then? Think it just came out of a moment of clarity?
The space program used to be a thing of wonder for the whole world, now it is just another thing. Doesn't anyone else read the news about the Space Shuttle and think "Wow! That is amazing! I still can't really grasp how incredible that is". They have provided so much footage on their website, it really is something of wonder. And what about Hubble, and some of the probes that have been out there for years sending back data. All faked. F*ck off, all you loonies.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
...is that NASA spends millions converting english to metric, or forgetting to do so.
Some of those "conspiracy theories" could use a good explanation...
ascii art
You need an impersonal, unanswerable, uncommunicative, intagible, inexplicable, mysterious God to give you comfort? How about your friends? God does not hand out answers and solutions to your problems. You have to do it on your own. This is true, irrespective of whether God exists or not.
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
...small but important distinction...
PLEASE HELP ME! I'm trying to find a hilarious site that I think I saw on Slashdot within the past few months. It was a standard set of "moon hoax" photos, but as you progressed through the site they turned increasingly bogus, with picnic tables and obvious stuff like that. Anybody know where it is?
Evil is the money of root.
The Discover Channel has an articleabout a commercial venture to the moon which will confirm the moon shot. "We're also looking to verify Apollo and other landing sites," said TransOrbital President Dennis Laurie.
Operation Lune (Google cache), a french documentary with interviews with Christiane Kubrick (Stanley Kubricks' widow), Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and many more. See it if you can - which is somewhat unlikely in the US.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Is the UFO behind the comet still on schedule? I haven't been receiving the monthly newsletter lately.
Yeah, but if you're a Christian and believe in the Old Testament it does.
No, it doesn't. Genesis only says "God created...". It doesn't say HOW He created. He could have used (and still be using) evolution to do the creating.
Scholasticus, the church I know plainly states religion is about faith. It can't be proved wrong or right. Some folks may think they have proved god exist or not, but it's 100% clear it's an act of will to believe.
But athists are very happy thinking that because it can't be proved, and since they won't believe anything not to have been proved right, then they are wrong.
God exists or does not. It doesn't what we believe so it's perfectly feasible for atheists to be blatantly wrong, and ignoring what God mandates.
So why do you blame people that don't believe the apollo mission was faked? They haven't PROVED it, and they refuse to believe in that.
SO I'd say you are in the same boat that creationists are. You just believe it, and nobody has proved you wrong (and even that is irrelevant if you don't agree with the "evidence").
unfinished: (adj.)
Scientific AmericanE C-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF&catID=2
July 2002 issue
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4F
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy.
>> Well, believing in socialism is easy. You just have to believe you can force everyone else to work extra hard to make up for your laziness.
That's the nice thing about straw-man arguments. You can be lazy while appearing to put an effort into your argument.
There's obviously more to it than that. Schoolbooks are full of lies - the idea that Mexican & Hawaiian Natives thought Europeans were Gods, Newtonian Physics, Marconi inventing the Radio. Or, while I'm at it, the black moth/white moth observations, or Mendels & Darwin's genetic experiments, where historians agree that the data was manipulated (although future experiments verified the ideas).
Nobody's making a big stink one way or the other about those lies. So obviously evolution v. creationism has much deeper roots than a simple matter of wanting NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH in American schoolyards FOR OUR CHILDREN, DAMMIT.
I agree that creationism as science is bunk. However that doesn't necessarily negate it (is pure science the ultimate path?) and I'm interested to hear reactions that aren't knee-jerk. Yes, I realize it's silly to expect such as think in slashdot.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
What I'd like to see is some evidence that even one conspiracy theorist has a brain. I have actually heard one of them say, of one claim that it was true, but he couldn't get any evidence of it because the conspiracy was too good, and the conspiracy theorist's , far from seeing through him, were even more convinced.
So my answer is yes we did go to the moon, if there was even the slightest doubt, all the conspiracy theorist's, would drop this conspiracy theory like a hot potato, (imagine how enbrassed they'd be to actually support a crediable conspiracy theory ).
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Dude, I think your tinfoil helmet isnt strapped on tightly enough...
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I downloaded a video of an astronaut jumping at
.63 seconds, a dropped object would fall D=0.5*a*t^2. The moon's gravity is 1/6g, or 1.63 f/s^2. So this gives 0.32 feet, or 3.88 inches.
Nasa's Archive.
The frames are 0.03 seconds each. Assuming that it is full speed, which is reasonable since the audio matches the actions of the astronauts, watch the astronaut jump and salute.
How high did he get?
I counted the frames from his apex to his landing: 21 frames.
At 0.03 sec/frame, this is 0.63 seconds.
Correct my math here, but in
The guy was much higher than that! I estimated that from boot to pack he was about 70 inches high. On the video it was 130 pixels, giving 0.53 inches per pixel. By my count, he jumped 32 pixels or about 17 inches.
How far does one fall on earth in 0.63 seconds?
D=1/2*9.8*0.63^2 = 1.94 feet, or 23 inches.
Now, it seems to me either the video is at the wrong speed, or this guy was raised by a cable and then lowered.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but I even think I see, on two frames when he nears the apex of the first jump, a blip of a line of four white pixels above the exact middle of his pack for a second, as if I could actually get a glimpse of the cable!
Is anybody willing to do similar measurements and discuss? This guy was definitely higher than 4 inches from the ground, so how did it only take him 0.63 seconds to reach the ground?
And if he feels like he only weighs 40 pounds, why does he absorb his 17 inch jump with so much knee recoil? That isn't scientific, but it does point out another fact that corroborates that his jump was performed under a full 1g.
I WANNA BELIEVE! PLEASE HELP!
"Creationists (including the "intelligent design" crowd) belong in exactly the same camp as the "moon landing was a hoax" people, Holocaust-deniers, flat-Earthers, etc."
We can demonstrate people have landed on the moon. There are footprints and LEMs and laser experiments and flags and all that good stuff. And, while people where there, we had radio communications coming to us from the moon.
We can demonstrate that the Holocaust happened. We have all sorts of corpses and the instruments that would seem to have made those people dead.
We can demonstrate the Earth is not flat. Try line-of-sight communications with someone over the horizon. Try walking in one direction and seeing if you end up in the same place.
But you simply cannot disprove (or prove) the "intelligent design" hypothesis. The only way you can prove intelligent design is to find something that is not of intelligent design and comparing the two (like "We know this rock was made into a tool because it's so different from what the rock looks like naturally.")
However, if you can't find anything that fits into the "other" category, you're left with two conclusions:
1.) There is no intelligent design
2.) Everything is of intelligent design.
Anybody who believes in one more than the other is exercising a leap of faith and nothing more. This is true whether you call yourself a creationist or an atheist.
A true scientist would say that both conclusions are true until an outside observer resolves one of them away (Schroedinger's Cat and all). And that will never happen because an observer cannot be external to the universe by definition.
But creationism says the world (and universe) began at, I think, 4004 B.C. Evolution says the universe began a few years earlier IIRC.
No sig for you.
"But creationism says the world (and universe) began at, I think, 4004 B.C. Evolution says the universe began a few years earlier IIRC."
Evolution does not state when the universe began, that's physics. Evolution describes how species evolve. It's 2 very different things.
And yes, creationism (being part of a literal interpretation of the Bible) says that the world was created some 5-10 thousand years ago, depending on who you ask. Personally I don't know what it was created, nor do I care, I believe in God though, so whenever He felt like making it was when it was made.
Space.com has an update on the progress of the book. Apparenly NASA has stopped the funding and Jim is looking for commercial sponsorship.
http://www.space.com/news/astronotes-1.html
What I meant was evolution is supposed to take MILLIONS- not thousands- of years. So it would be impossible to believe in a strict interpretation of the Old Testament and in an unaltered theory of evolution.
No sig for you.
"What I meant was evolution is supposed to take MILLIONS- not thousands- of years."
My understanding of evolution, is that it is simply a change in the frequency of particular traits within a species (or subset of the species), carried of course in the dna of the creature. These traits could be created by random mutation or have existed for quite some time, but never necessary (or useful) for survival before. An example of this is in bacteria. Penicilin (sp?) was great, it got rid of many bacterial infections very well. That is until some bacteria that happened to be unaffected by it became more common. In this case the evolution of anti-biotic resistant bacteria was forced, however it can be seen occuring over similar short periods of time in virii (sp?) such as the flu, which generally changes every year so that previous vaccinations are no longer effective.
"My understanding of evolution, is that it is simply a change in the frequency of particular traits within a species (or subset of the species), carried of course in the dna of the creature."
That ignores the big changes, like moving from single cell organisms to complex organisms (like us). While small changes can occur in the form of an organism there are no major changes that occur on a timescale as short as a few thousand years. (And when I say major changes I mean MAJOR, not just the enhancement of a feature or something, I mean moving from the ocean to land, or single celled organism to multicelled organism etc.)
No sig for you.
1) According to my Bible, animals were created in a day.
2) Evolution implies a far longer period of time necessary for said animals to have 'evolved' from a far simpler set of chemicals in a proto-plasmic ooze.
3) If I were to choose one, I could not believe the other.*
4) Given that these two statements are in conflict, I chose creationism.
By accepting creationism, I accept my Father's Word. And as such, I can also embrace the other teachings of the Bible without conflict. I have no clue how creationism actually happened; I take it on faith.
For the record, I do reject any teaching of man that doesn't line-up with the Bible. I would rather place my beliefs on a set of stable principals, rather than shifting ideologies that have yet to offer me what my Father can already provide.
* "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot server God and mammon." Matthew 6:1
) According to my Bible, animals were created in a day.
What is a "day" to God? That's where your argument falls apart. For all we know 'day' in Genesis might mean a billion years.
For the record, I do reject any teaching of man that doesn't line-up with the Bible.
So we should teach that rabbits chew the cud, bats are birds, and grasshoppers have four legs? (Leviticus)
We should not teach that the Earth is round, becuase the Bible implies that it is flat? (four corners of the world)
Genesis 1 says the the order of creation was birds and fish, then land animals, then man. Genesis 2 says man, then animals and birds. Which one should we teach? Either way we have a contradiction.
I would rather place my beliefs on a set of stable principals, rather than shifting ideologies that have yet to offer me what my Father can already provide.
This is too far off topic, and it's getting old, so this is my last post. But what you are saying is that you would essentially live in a fantasy world that reality. You don't KNOW that your Father can provide anything because you don't KNOW that He even exists. Is that a stable principal? It sounds more like building your dream house on quicksand. Those "shifting ideologies" gave you the computer you are posting your messages with, and yet you reject it. Those shifting ideologies gave us vaccines and cars and electricity and radio, and yet you reject it. That's a shame.
Pick apart my words all you please. I remain firm in my beliefs, and I see that you are as well. I cannot change what is in your heart.
When what the works of man has to offer actually solves the problems of this world without creating new ones, please let me know.
The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do
what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with
them while they do it.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
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