Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia Sinks Moon Landing Hoax Using Virtual Light
schwit1 writes Using its new top-shelf graphics processing unit, Nvidia tackles one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in American history: the veracity of the 1969 to 1972 Apollo moon landings. From the article: "'Global illumination is the hardest task to solve as a game company,' Scott Herkelman, Nvidia's GeForce general manager, said in an interview. 'Virtual point lights don't do a bad job when the environment stays the same, but a game developer has to fake shadows, fake reflections...it's a labor-intensive process.' So when a Nvidia research engineer used the company's new dynamic lighting techniques to show off a side-by-side comparison between an Apollo 11 photo and a GeForce-powered re-creation, the company knew it had a novel demo on its hands. 'We're going to debunk one of the biggest conspiracies in the world,' Herkelman said."
Wow, this old idiocy? Even during the first moon landing when I was only 5 I heard Walter Cronkite explain about the stiff wires holding the flag out.
Dude, you are dumber than a 5 year old.
Go ahead. List them. I guarantee you there is an answer to every single one of them that doesn't involve a worldwide conspiracy.
Conspiracies do happen. But if you want to prove one happened, you need to a) identify all the conspirators, and b) identify their goal. If you just handwave the former as "oh, it was the government" or invent or co-opt some secret society that ran it, you're not doing an investigation, you're creating a cult. If you just handwave the latter as "oh, it was to prove that they had control of the planet" or some other vague goal, your rantings have no more weight than the average paranoid schizophrenics. Specific members. Specific goals. Can you do that?
Conspiracies that actually happened can easily meet those. The Gunpowder Plot? We know every member of the conspiracy, and their goals, while unlikely to be achieved, were realistic and real. Same for dozens, even hundreds of other actual conspiracies, from the Reichstag Burning to everyday criminal plots.
If you agree that those two conditions must be met to even consider a conspiracy theory plausible, I can disprove the Moon Hoax Theories right here, right now. Two words: Soviet Union.
They had the tech to put stuff into space (we're still using it). They launched probe after probe to the Moon. They had the means to monitor our launches and our communications (during Apollo 13, they made a gesture of ordering their people off any frequencies near the NASA ones, to prevent any interference). In short, if it were faked, the Soviets would have known. Why, then, would they have remained silent? Unless they were "in" on the conspiracy, they would not have.
What possible conspiracy could have counted both sides of the Cold War among their conspirators? What possible goal could they have had that would have justified it not just to the Americans, but to their mortal enemies? The purpose of the conspiracy, as most tell it, was to cheat at the space race and win it for America. Why would the USSR go along with it? What did they gain from it that was worth so much of a loss?
I can come up with nothing that can explain Soviet participation in this conspiracy. And so I am forced to conclude that the initial premise was wrong - the moon landings happened, as supported by literal tons of evidence.
Interestingly, if you theorize that Soviets started to spread lies and misinformation that the Apollo landings were faked, to reduce American prestige and regain their own, you can easily meet both the two conditions I had for a plausible conspiracy theory. They had the means - it's simple propaganda, through word-of-mouth. Get it started and the paranoid will parrot it for you. They had the motivation, obviously enough. This isn't proof that it did happen that way, of course, but it's a much more plausible theory than the one you subscribe to.
My answer to these conspiracy idiots, aside from ignoring them, is to look at the numbers. The moon landings required INTERNATIONAL cooperation of thousands of people, if not tens of thousands, from around the world. So what you're saying is that all of these people agreed to tell the same story for five decades, and no documentary evidence has been uncovered in that time that shows this conspiracy being set up. Look at Snowden, the Pentagon Papers, Manning, etc.: governments CANNOT KEEP SECRETS.
Obligatory plug: my wife was the final segment of the 2008 Mythbusters episode that explored that myth, she bounces a laser off the moon shot through a 3.5 meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory. There are five retroreflectors on the moon, three from Apollo and two on Russian Lunokhod rovers, and there's a clear signal difference between hitting a reflector and bouncing off the bare lunar surface. I also did a ten minute video on this program at waynewestphotography dot com.
Of course, this just means that some incredible hackers were able to fool the software that my wife uses to show different results while the laser is shining, depending upon where the laser is pointed. The Apollo laser reflectors were aimed specifically at the Earth, the Russian ones are quasi-random as there was no way to know where the rovers' batteries would fail, so their final orientation is not known and produces a noticeably weaker signal.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
So, the government is too inept to pull off a hoax of this magnitude, but actually performing the real feat was within its scope of capabilities?
They still had to build the giant rocket and land something on the moon in order for the telemetry to work. So they had all the complexity of building Saturn V and the Apollo stack but in addition they had to seamlessly pull off the greatest hoax in history with the greatest concentration of pedantic nerd geniuses in the world watching.
Apollo succeeded in spite of its failures. The Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 explosion. Apollo 12's repeated lightning strikes and then the astronauts destroying their only video camera, etc etc. All with thousands of experts watching over them. Going back to the various cluster-fucks during Mercury and Gemini when they were trying to learn EVAs and later docking; but they could keep trying until they got it right. And once it was done, it was done. It didn't matter if new people came in and went through the archives, didn't matter if people looked at the hardware. There was nothing to hide.
A giant conspiracy to fake the moon landings had to get everything right the first time, with a skeleton crew, and it was not only vulnerable to a single major leak or screw-up at the time, it has continued to be vulnerable for 50 years. The hoaxers can never stop the cover-up.
For example, the LRO imaged the Apollo landing sites, showing tracks and vehicles. Was that faked? A brand new cover-up during the LRO program, adding a whole new conspiracy they had to seamlessly pull of under the noses of the LRO science team, and then keep secret forever.
And each layer of cover-up adds more things to go wrong, more people able to leak now or in the future. With every single person involved, every astronaut and technician, knowing that they are sitting on the greatest secret in history. It just needs one person, diagnosed with terminal cancer, conscience, or greed, to say, "Fuck it..."
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.