Posted by
michael
on from the things-THEY-don't-want-you-to-know dept.
redbaron7 writes "The BBC is
reporting that NASA has cancelled plans for a book to challenge the Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theory, due to criticism. No doubt the cancellation of this book will be listed as further "evidence" that the landings were fake."
Perception is reality.
by
nege
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
NASA is darned if they do and darned if they dont where those conspiracies are concerned. If people *want* to believe something, nothing they say or do can prove otherwise.
Re:Perception is reality.
by
Daniel+Dvorkin
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Um, I don't think you read my post very carefully.
---
You: People who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think NASA faked the Moon landings.
Me: No, people who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think the Soviet space agency was lying when it denied that its personnel were getting killed.
You: That proves my point!
---
You may not understand the context here. NASA has a lot of flaws, but lying about its missions isn't one of them; every time there's a failure (whether or not loss of life is involved) it's dissected in gory detail, in public. OTOH, the Soviet space program was under no more obligation than the rest of the Soviet government to reveal its fuckups, and (as we now know) they did suffer a number of rather horrific accidents that make the Challenger disaster look like small potatoes. This was something that everyone kind of suspected all along, but we had to wait until the end of the Cold War for our suspicions to be confirmed. The Soviets didn't help their own case at all with pre-emptive press releases that said, in essence, "That big boom at Baikonur that your satellites picked up, that was just, um... a problem with a test of a new engine, that's right! No dead cosmonauts and ground crew here, nosirree. Nothing to see, move along, move along..."
So the point is (in case you still haven't gotten it) that Microsoft has a history of lying too. They lie about their intentions, they lie about standards compliance, they lie about openness. They try to control every new technology that comes along, and if they can't control it, they try to crush it. This behavior is a matter of public record. So when people who pay attention to this history express some suspicion of Palladium, we're being entirely reasonable -- just as those who expressed suspicion about the safety record of the Soviet space program were being entirely reasonable. Those who believe NASA faked the Moon landings, OTOH, have no reasonable grounds for their suspicions.
Do you get it now? Jesus, I can't believe I wasted that much time in explaining this to someone who probably isn't going to get it anyway...
-- The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My point being...
by
MacAndrew
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...there is absolutely NO chance of winning with the conspiracy crowd. They have everything to lose by conceding. (And I was pretending to be one of them. I'm not! Really!)
However, a book aimed at the general public might make sense -- there is a lot of bad science out there in general acceptance. A book targeting these problems, and not framed as a response to the conspiracy theorists, might make a lot of sense.
For all the fun folks make of conspiracy theorists, the term itself is a condemnation of skeptics run amok. I like the undercurrent of skepticism, of criticizing the accepted wisdom, but not with the disregard of the facts and, worse, dishonest hidden agenda of getting rich or getting on TV.
Which is the more complex and unlikely scenario: the Apollo program occured as "conventional wisdom" says it does, or the whole thing was faked with thousands upon thousnads of people involved, fake unmanned space craft travelling from Earth orbit to lunar orbit replying to radio chatter from Earth, fake moon rocks good enough to fool the best geologists around the world etc. etc.
Given the technology of the day it would be HARDER to fake the landings then to do it for real, not to mention the huge numbers of people involved staying quiet.
True skeptics don't automaticaly beleive everything they are told, but they are also able to logicaly analyze the evidence before them. No skeptic would beleive that the moon landings were faked.
Favorite piece of evidence
by
fleshapple
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The moon landing is a great example of separate intersecting lines of evidence converging on the conclusion that we did indeed land on the moon. For the conspiracy theorists, no amount of evidence is going to convince them so we might as well be speaking another language. Still, I think interesting things can come out of the discussion. My favorite piece of evidence of the landing is the storage bag from the Apollo 15 mission. NASA astronauts threw it out, it ended up at auction, someone bought it and realized that it was saturated with moon dust (you can tell the dust is from the moon by comparing the ratios of certain isotopes). The isotopic ratios of certain elements in moon rocks is different than that of any rocks found on earth. The collector has since been selling sections at an enormous profit.
see this link
Now, I suppose they could have gone to the moon with an unmanned mission which landed, blasted off, returned with a bunch of rocks and dust which was subsequently distributed. At that point, why not just go there. Occam's Razor would say manned missions is a much more likely solution given the other evidence.
Re:From someone who used to think it was real...
by
Yunzil
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· Score: 5, Insightful
For me, the most convincing "evidence" supportng the conspiracy theory is the radiation belt, and NASA's inability (even at present IIRC) to send any living thing through it without receiving a lethal dose
The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA is darned if they do and darned if they dont where those conspiracies are concerned. If people *want* to believe something, nothing they say or do can prove otherwise.
...there is absolutely NO chance of winning with the conspiracy crowd. They have everything to lose by conceding. (And I was pretending to be one of them. I'm not! Really!)
However, a book aimed at the general public might make sense -- there is a lot of bad science out there in general acceptance. A book targeting these problems, and not framed as a response to the conspiracy theorists, might make a lot of sense.
For all the fun folks make of conspiracy theorists, the term itself is a condemnation of skeptics run amok. I like the undercurrent of skepticism, of criticizing the accepted wisdom, but not with the disregard of the facts and, worse, dishonest hidden agenda of getting rich or getting on TV.
The moon landing is a great example of separate intersecting lines of evidence converging on the conclusion that we did indeed land on the moon. For the conspiracy theorists, no amount of evidence is going to convince them so we might as well be speaking another language. Still, I think interesting things can come out of the discussion. My favorite piece of evidence of the landing is the storage bag from the Apollo 15 mission. NASA astronauts threw it out, it ended up at auction, someone bought it and realized that it was saturated with moon dust (you can tell the dust is from the moon by comparing the ratios of certain isotopes). The isotopic ratios of certain elements in moon rocks is different than that of any rocks found on earth. The collector has since been selling sections at an enormous profit. see this link Now, I suppose they could have gone to the moon with an unmanned mission which landed, blasted off, returned with a bunch of rocks and dust which was subsequently distributed. At that point, why not just go there. Occam's Razor would say manned missions is a much more likely solution given the other evidence.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
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