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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."
nVidia technology fell into the past through a wormhole.
Luckily it was properly static-bagged, because it actually went back to 1912 and had to be stored until a computer could be developed to interface to it
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That Nvidia is in on the hoax!!!1!!one!!!!
as any TRUE audiophile will tell you, the highest-quality fake historic events from the 1960s were done with vacuum tube technology.
high-end graphics card swill lacks the warmth and nuance of a true conspiracy.
Conspiracy theorists won't care. They will always believe that there is a conspiracy. Debunk one, and they will merely find another. For this, even if you were to fly them up there, they would find some way to disbelieve it.
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Unfortunately, each one that gets knocked down on its face means it's statistically more likely that the debunkers are right and the theorists wrong. We can go to infinity, but after ten or even 5 assertions wiped out with only basic experimentation, the chances of you having been right in the first place go beyond minuscule.
Scientific principle starts with "here's a hypothesis, does it fit the facts?" and goes BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD whenever any element of it is wrong. Conspiracy theorists just keep on pounding ignoring all their previous incorrect assertions until people get bored dealing with them and then "Ah ha! They won't answer!".
If you were wrong about the shadows, and the film, and the radioactivity, and this, that and the other? Chances are you're wrong about all the other minor crap too. And to prove otherwise requires more than just "it's obvious" or flaws are "too numerous to list".
You can point a strong telescope at the moon and see the tracks, footprints, and leftover hardware. It would have been more expensive at the time to send machines to false-place those articles of evidence on the surface. See for yourself, they are on the earth-facing side. Something NASA colt have saved money on if it was a conspiracy by claiming the landing was on the far side.
A-ha!
The nVidia rendering surely didn't take the reflection of these mirrors into account when rendering this "proof"!
It is a hoax! q.e.d.
People such as moon landing hoaxers, 9/11 truthers etc. are so far gone that you could methodically tear down each and every one of their assertions, employing evidence, science, logic to beat it to a pulp and they'd still start right up with the first one again.
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Exactly. It's essentially whack-a-mole but with paranoid and stupid people.
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.
The conspiracy pretty much ended when Buzz Aldrin punched Bart Sibrel in the face on camera.
Unfortunately moving the goal posts is not unusual for the conspiracists. One of the evidence that counters the hoaxers' claims is that the lunar sites and equipment still exist on the moon and can be seen with probes and telescopes and a laser. To which the hoaxers then claim unmanned spacecraft could have placed them there. So therefore hoaxers claim that NASA created a massive conspiracy in faking manned missions but also maintained a secret side project to place objects using unmanned spacecraft. Of course when confronted with basic logistical quandaries like how NASA would have to build craft massive enough to place a lunar rover as well as place tracks, they have no real answers. To every answer they come up with any possible but unlikely scenario. Occam's Razor does not seem to be a favorite of this group.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
uh... no you couldn't, the angular resolution of even the largest telescopes coupled with elementary physics would prove that.
The best you could ever hope for is catching a shadow on the terminator straight across the centreline of a pixel.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I've almost given up on debunking conspiracy theories. Those who believe in them, BELIEVE in them. It's like trying to debunk somebody's religion.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The idea that you can topple the prima causa by attacking the conclusions is naive. The premise is all that's about it. The Moon landings have to be fake. Everything else is just a corollary.
Myself, I don't believe that WWII ever happened. I mean seriously, I'm supposed to believe radar, jet aircraft, computers, encryption, proximity fuzes, voice encryption and nuclear bombs were all invented in less than a decade?
when your opponent (Soviet Union) agrees, then you did it.
yep, you could do it with a college HeNe laser and a laptop. (worn that t-shirt, even had the idiot start screaming that I was about to blow up the moon when I fired the laser! (yeah, that bit on TBBT when Penny's BF expressed concern about the safety of the planet and the wisdom of firing a great green laser at the Moon, that shit happens, man)).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
uh... no you couldn't, the angular resolution of even the largest telescopes coupled with elementary physics would prove that.
And even if we could, say via a flyby with a satellite or some futuristic hubble 2.0... the only people who could afford such a 'telescope' would clearly be in on the hoax, so you can't trust them.
The only solution is to take the hoaxers and send them to the moon to see it first hand with their own eyes. Something I am entirely in favor of.
If that doesn't convince them, fine, this wasn't really for them, it was for me. And I was satisfied the minute they were out of earths orbit and don't see any reason why we should bring them back.
Actually Neil Armstrong never punched anybody he was always known to be a real gentleman and always seemed to live to a very high standard.
Buzz Aldrin is the one that punched the idiot Lunar Loon.
Frankly I am really torn over who, out of the two I admire most.
BTW Adam Curry should never been seen or heard from again in the tech community IMHO.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Armstrong was so cool that he had people to punch other people for him! His best pal Buzz, for example. :-D
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm just wondering if when a society has conspiracy theorists speaking out freely, the 'tin hat' crowd, is that the sign of a healthy society or not.
It's bad I suppose when conspiracy theorists are flat out wrong, but would a repressive government try to silence them or do repressive governments only bother suppressing people who are telling the Truth?
Does it do harm in that when somebody really finds something bad going on people will tend to disbelieve them because of all the flakos (sort of like crying wolf too many times)?
Is there some sort of bell shaped curve of attitude towards what the establishment tells us in that a few people on one end of the curve will believe everything and bury their heads in the sand over any problem (like maybe global warming), and a few on the other end of the curve will leap at anything as a plot, while most people are somewhere in the middle? If there is such a curve, maybe it's characteristics (skew, standard deviation, etc) are what determine the 'health' of the society.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
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.
To me, the real lede is buried pretty deeply in the article. The light on that particular photo IS anomalous. It sounds as if the conspiracy theorists were right about that, and that's kind of astute.
What's interesting is the resolution of the anomaly: it's light reflected off Neil Armstrong himself. Or rather, his large, bright-white suit. The NVidia guys showed that it reflects enough light to account for the lighting in the picture. If you don't include it, the lighting is off. I think that's pretty cool.
This doesn't, of course, settle anything for the conspiracy nuts, and I fully expect this to prove only that the NASA guys were wily bastards. And that sucks, because it sounds as if the brain power they're applying might well have turned up something more interesting if it weren't fixated on achieving a delusional result.
An animated GIF?
Oh, they've got that covered as well.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Pretty much all the lighting aspects can explained by someone who has a background in photography. Some of them are just basic sense. For example, you can't see stars in the photos because of light exposure. It's why you can't see stars in the daylight here on Earth. It's why visible light telescopes are located away from cities. Other aspects can be explained away with someone with knowledge about the subject.
Hoaxers also seem to disregards factors like budget and logistics and like to twist things. Today NASA will not recreate the technology that was used in the 1960s. Now the important words there are "will not" not "cannot". NASA has a much smaller budget than in the 60s to achieve the same goal. Since NASA has not done a manned lunar mission since then it is easier for NASA to do it from scratch than to recreate things.
For example, to launch such a vehicle NASA will need a big rocket on par with the Saturn V. Why not simply use a Saturn V? There are no working ones available (there are museum pieces) and the manufacturing facilities were decommissioned decades ago. NASA could recreate the facilities and the rockets but that what would be the point? That would be using technology from 50 years ago instead of using newer technology.
That would be like if someone decided to resurrect the Studebaker automotive company. Would you expect the new company to use plans from the 1960s to make new cars. Barring the fact that regulations have changed, car technology has changed. The engine would be fuel injected not a carburetor system. Anti-lock braking, electronic control, entertainment centers are much different than 50 years.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I see conspiracy theorists as an example of believing in a very unlikely scenario to boost your ego.
Suppose for a second that the Moon landing was faked. The level of conspiracy needed to do this and fool most of the people (including the Russians who would have called us out on it had we obviously been filming on a sound stage) would have been massive. You'd need engineers, scientists, government workers, astronauts, etc. All of them dedicated to pretending that we went to the Moon when we didn't. This would have to be a VERY well organized conspiracy. (Which alone should debunk this theory. Government is too inept to pull something like this off.)
Now, your normal person buys into the "faked Moon landing", but you are special. You are more intelligent and perceptive than they are. You see through the conspiracy and spot the flaws. In fact, you are so brilliant that the flaws seem stupidly obvious to you - which only elevates you more above the sheeple who buy the official story.
Of course, this also makes it nearly impossible to have a conspiracy theorist admit that he's been debunked. To admit this, the conspiracy theorist must lower his mental image of himself from "stands tall above all those stupid masses" to "actually a bit below those masses." This is unacceptable so any proof that the conspiracy theorist is wrong is rationalized away as being a) planted by the conspiracy to trick the foolish, b) irrelevant enough to ignore completely, or c) not proof debunking $MOVED_GOAL_POST.
You could load the conspiracy theorists into a rocket, send them to the moon, and they would still claim it was all faked just to preserve their mental image of themselves.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.” Neil Armstrong
Good-bye
Look, all you have to do is look at the stills from the recent lunar orbters when taken over several orbits in differing light. You can *clearly* see the remains of the sound stage rigging they left there when they lifted off. None of that stuff was necessary for the landing - they just shot the video with faked effects right there and came back leaving all the video gear. You can't argue with that.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you're talking about the Moon landing conspiracy theorists, it doesn't do much harm. Other conspiracy theorists, though can cause harm. For example, the "vaccines cause autism" folks have convinces a lot of people to skip vaccinations for fear of giving their child autism. Enough people are skipping the vaccinations that herd immunity is breaking down and we're seeing outbreaks of disease. These diseases are hurting and even killing people.* So, yes, some conspiracy theorists are harmless but others (especially in large enough numbers) CAN cause harm.
* My son actually has autism (diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome / High Functioning Autism). Even if, despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, vaccines gave him autism, I'd rather he be autistic and alive than non-autistic and dead of measles/whooping cough/etc.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Moon landing take 2: Ok Neil, but this time you need to say, "One step for A man... one giant leap for mankind." Don't flub your line or "One small step fur man" will be in the history books.
911 Conspiracy take 2: The first take was Ok but we need to swap out the Saudis and Egyptian hijackers. You guys are supposed to be our allies. Can we get at least one Iranian, Iraqi or Afghani hijackers? How the heck are we gonna start a war? How about a North Korean?
My brother-in-law is a Apollo hoax believer. He challenged me once to debate the arguments for and against. I replied (quoted someone) 'You can't have a rational argument with an irrational person".
By the way, he's also into water divining... but that doesn't always work, for some reason. Now, there's a thing...
(Americans - the moon landings were among your finest achievements. In my opinion, history and the human race in general owes you a debt).
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Exactly. It's essentially whack-a-mole but with paranoid and stupid people.
Absolutely! It's obvious that we went to the moon because that is where we met Aliens for the first time!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Buzz never punched anybody! The tape was faked! You can see that the shadows are all wrong!
There's a subtle distinction here that gets lost in our modern society (mainly by the media) which tends to look only at results while ignoring the process to get those results.
Skepticism is healthy. If you're skeptical that NASA landed on the moon, then by all means you should be free to ask questions, do tests and experiments to determine the truth of the matter to your satisfaction. Implicit in this is keeping an open mind that your skepticism may be wrong.
Where it crosses the line into conspiracy theory is when you assume a certain conclusion, and only accept supporting evidence, while ignoring evidence to the contrary, That's unhealthy.
Unfortunately, pure skepticism is impractical and an evolutionary dead-end. If you were skeptical about everything, you wouldn't be able to function. You'd second-guess every decision you made, every thing you thought you saw, anything you were told. Is the news really broadcasting the Presidential debate, or are they slyly editing it to make their preferred candidate sound better? Is it really safe to change lanes, or did you miss a car in the other lane somehow? Did you read what I just wrote accurately, or did you misread and so you should go back and re-read it to make sure? At some point you have to make the leap from 90%-99% certainty to assuming it's 100% just so you can make a decision and choose an action. That's why engineers tend to be more religious than scientists - engineers are forced to make design decisions in the face of incomplete data all the time, while scientists by the nature of their work are expressly forbidden from doing so. So engineers are more comfortable making that "leap of faith." But as long as you understand you're making that "leap of faith" for the purpose of making a timely decision, you're not into conspiracy theory territory yet. You only cross that line when you refuse to revisit your conclusion in the face of contrary evidence.
And no, conspiracy theorists are not always wrong. They were right about global warming. I'd estimate that probably a third to half the people who believe in global warming do so because they want it to be true for environmental protection reasons. The data had nothing to do with it aside from affirming a conclusion that they'd already reached and were going to stick to no matter what the data said. i.e. They are conspiracy theorists. In that respect I don't consider many global warming proponents to be any different from global warming deniers. The time just happened to match up with the hands of their broken clock. If it had turned out that the Earth was cooling and we needed to pump industrial quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere to forestall another ice age, they would've been the deniers, not the other way around.
tl;dr - Skepticism is better, but you need some conspiracy theory-like tendencies in order to function.
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.
So, your assertion is that either:
1) A retro-reflector naturally formed, is perfectly aligned, and we stumbled on it without having been there and have been able to use it for decades in experiments
2) Aliens placed it on the moon, and we've somehow discovered it's there (again, without having been there), and that it's properly aligned, and have been using it for lunar ranging experiments for the last 45 years or so
You're either good at humor, or terrible at science.
Because the ONLY way there is a retro-reflector on the moon, that we know about, and that is aligned properly, and which has been used in lunar laser ranging experiments for decades ... is that we put it there.
Unfortunately, joke or not, to the people who believe it was a hoax ... no amount of facts or evidence will do. Because they're always going to believe this bit of stupidity.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.