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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."

9 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Well, that's how they faked them to begin with by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.'"
  2. pfft. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. Not gonna matter by linuxgurugamer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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".

  5. Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws by saloomy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. A I recall by jetkust · · Score: 5, Funny

    The conspiracy pretty much ended when Buzz Aldrin punched Bart Sibrel in the face on camera.

  7. Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws by Jason+Levine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  8. Re:ya'll a bunch of lazy slobs! by spire3661 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    “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
  9. Re:ya'll a bunch of lazy slobs! by Citizen+of+Earth · · Score: 5, Funny

    Buzz never punched anybody! The tape was faked! You can see that the shadows are all wrong!