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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.
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.
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"?
when your opponent (Soviet Union) agrees, then you did it.
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
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?
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?
Buzz never punched anybody! The tape was faked! You can see that the shadows are all wrong!
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.