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'Pluto Truthers' Are Pretty Sure That the NASA New Horizons Mission Was Faked
MarkWhittington writes: Forget about Apollo moon landing hoax theories. That is so 20th Century. Gizmodo reported that the "Pluto Truthers" have followed the astonishing images being sent back by NASA's New Horizons probe and have come to the conclusion that they are faked. After all, if the space agency could fake the entire moon landing, it would be child's play to fake a robotic probe to the edge of the Solar System.
Maybe they should just go full solipsism and be done with it.
But but.... WHY??
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you look around you'll find wackos of every kind. Unless there's a lot of these attention-desperate people, why should we be interested in this?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"Truther" conspiracy nuts don't believe in *anything* they can't see, feel, hear, or touch themselves. They probably think the very *existence* of Pluto is a lie.
You can make people go to school, but you can't force them to become educated. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
At what point did Americans substitute the word "truther" for "crackpot"?
Nope. See, the way it was done was by employing ~19,000 to go forward with the mission, but at some point, a small team running maintenance on the mission mid-transit realized the mission failed when the probe was popped 2/3rds of the way through its flight. A plan was hatched with the NSA to use existing test code from the development effort to emulate signals from the probes at all the telescopes capable of listening to it. The NSA's role would simply be to install the interception equipment at the telescopes to man-in-the-middle the responses from the telescopes to the relevant computers in such a way that the expected test data would be injected. Therefore, you only had a small team of maybe ~50 which was involved in covering up the failure of the operation, including a few graphic designers who could create astounding mockups of Pluto and Charon extrapolated from a combination of the Hubble 2010 image with artistic direction guided by existing photos of Triton, a body very similar to Pluto. Introduce a scary software glitch mid-flight because nothing ever goes 100% right. As far as the ~19,000 knew, the mission succeeded.
OR, the glitch a weekish before the rendezvous was the point where the graphic design and emulation teams would have to be brought in. THAT's what happened! It's just that the probe was unrecoverable from a software glitch!
Or, you know, it actually went as fucking planned.
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The video criticizes the lack of definition in a high res shot taken of Pluto from 9 million miles away on July 3. Seriously, let's see how much detail we could get of our moon using a small telescope from that kind of distance.
Presumably the same "area 51" nutters?
Worse than that. A few hundred of the more extreme 'truthers' even deny that Pluto is a planet.
Really? Perhaps you didn't know it, but dwarf planets make a "whoosh"ing sound.
How would you fake a radio signal going behind the moon and coming back ?
Uh...how about you put it in a rocket going around the Moon?
One thing I've never really heard from the Moon landing conspiracy theorists is what missions were faked? There were plenty of missions to the Moon, both manned and unmanned. The Apollo program did some manned missions in Earth orbit (Apollo 7 and 9, I believe). Were those faked? Apollo 8 and 10 actually went to the Moon. Were those faked? What about the Surveyor missions, which landed probes on the Moon?
Assuming we could actually get rockets to the Moon, it would be fairly simple to have a rocket which took the transmissions on one channel coming from Earth and rebroadcast them back on another channel. So fake astronauts on Earth could appear to be broadcasting from the craft in orbit around the Moon.
As an aside, what to me is entertaining about this whole thing is not whether the Moon landings were faked--they weren't--but how could you fake it?
Of course it's arbitrary, it's a definition, all definitions are arbitrary. No one really wants to memorize dozens of names of mostly tiny objects when they're in science class learning about the solar system, especially when a bunch of them don't even have decent names, but some alphanumeric designation. So we limit the list to the ones that are large enough to be of real interest. Before, we thought it was sufficient to make the cutoff line be whether they had enough gravity to become mostly spherical. Now we find out that there's a bunch of bodies that meet that definition. So we change the definition to exclude those, and call those merely "dwarf planets". But Pluto isn't big enough to make the cut, so it gets grouped in with the other dwarfs.
So take your pick, do you want 8 "planets" and a bunch of "dwarf planets", or do you want dozens of "planets" to memorize the names of, most of them being little more than big asteroids?
And stop complaining about it being arbitrary. If you defined "planet" to be anything that orbits the Sun, there's countless objects that do that, including who knows how many in the asteroid belt, plus far more in the Kuiper Belt. So the previous definition was arbitrary too, because no one wanted to group Saturn, Jupiter, or even Earth in with a bunch of asteroids just because of their orbits.
I agree, but the problem with arguing against conspiracy theory is that "a vast conspiracy is hiding all the truth so no one can find it" is inherently unfalsifiable, which makes scientific argument (i.e. presenting evidence that falsifies the proposition) pretty useless.
[TMB]
Too bad there isn't a mod for "didn't get the joke."
Slashdot is barely a blip on anyone's radar these days.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I've been considering that what may be the only way to convince a die-hard moon hoaxer of the possibility of getting to the moon is to take them there personally... and if (or when) they start insist on saying that what they think they are experiencing is some sort of induced hallucination brought about by drugs or some such thing, just shove them out the airlock without a spacesuit. They'd probably last no more than a few seconds, but I sincerely think it would be enough for most of them to consciously accept the reality of the experience at least before they died. Of course, even if they don't... it's still not a total loss, because at least they won't continue to be around try and convince other people of their tripe.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Except for the fact that it's not. The definition changed, it lost planetary status.
Even so, Pluto is still a planet.
It cannot be unplaneted.
"And yet it planets." - Galileo
"Madness? This! Is! Planet!" - Leonidas I
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why would anyone give this any attention. They best deserve to be ignored and forgotten.
There are, and always have been, only seven planets: Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These are the Wanderers, known from the times before astronomy, before science, before even written history. Redefining "planet" in any other way is a corruption of the original concept: that some visible celestial bodies wander through the sky in predictable ways.
Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus did not make the cut: they are invisible without telescopes. Earth didn't make the cut either, since this one is unique for other reasons. Moon comes before Sun since its effects are much greater: look at the tides.
And that's the truth. Blpphlt.
Will
The size of Pluto has been continuously revised downwards since it was discovered and considered the same size as Mercury (it's bright for its size). Just like Ceres lost its planet designation when it was better measured and it was realized it was one of many objects orbiting in the asteroid belt, so has Pluto.
I really don't understand why it matters, Pluto is still Pluto and lots of things we learned in school turned out to be different then we were taught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The best jokes are the one that are true... Relevant link from CGP Grey: "Is Pluto a planet?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
For thousands of years mass and weight were considered the same thing. In common English they are still conflated... in fact weight is more commonly used to describe mass than mass is ! Think of weight loss programs... visiting orbit is the most effective weight loss program we have. But scientists have different definitions. The common English mistake originated because on earth weight and mass is directly correlated but that's only because we defined the early units of mass by measuring weight on earth.
In the end though mass is the amount of matter an object contains and weight is the gravitational force it exerts on the planet earth. The latter correlates with the former up close but because of the inverse square law that correlation dissappears very fast as you travel. At low earth orbit weight is as close to zero as makes no difference... but mass is unchanged.
The point is thst in science definition is actually extremely important. In fact science can be said to consist of nothing but changing definitions that get more acurate over time. We have a special process for doing so but definition is the end product of science because that's how we communicate knowledge most effectively. And if definitions cannot change then science would be not science.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I suspect that you have missed the point entirely: silentcoder made the correct distinction between "mass" (an inherent property that depends on the number of atoms etc. in an object and that is independent of where the object is) and its "weight", which in physics terms means the force exerted by that object on something, which is the mass times the local acceleration.
Thus a person with a mass of 80kg standing on the Earth exerts a force due to gravity pulling them down onto the surface, i.e. 80 kg x 9.8 m/s2 = 784 Newtons. But for all sorts of obvious reasons, we just use the shorthand version to say that the person "weighs" 80 kg.
On the Moon, their mass would be the same, because they'd have the same number of atoms in their body. But they'd exert much less force on the surface, because the gravity on the Moon is only 1/6th of that on the Earth. So, they would weigh less. It's at that point that the shorthand way of talking about weight becomes useless.
Take the person and stick them infinitely far from any gravitating body and there would be no acceleration and thus no force, so the person would be weightless, but not massless (same number of atoms still).
Of course, in low Earth orbit, you're right in pointing out that the Earth's gravitational acceleration has not diminished much. However, while you're falling freely towards the surface of the Earth under that acceleration, the spacecraft you're in is falling out from underneath you at the same rate, so you don't exert a net force on it. Thus you're effectively weightless.
(If you're both falling freely towards the Earth, why don't you hit it at some point? Because you're flying sideways at such a high speed that the Earth's surface curves away from underneath you at just the same speed as you're falling towards it, so you never hit.)
But here's another thing. Under general relativity, gravity is much better thought of as a curvature of spacetime and it turns out that the motion of even massless objects (photons) is affected by that curvature (think Einstein, Eddington, etc.). Indeed, given a very strong gravitational field / very high spacetime curvature, e.g. around a black hole, photons can go into orbit. This is because while they don't have any mass, they do have energy.
So, in a more correct general relativistic setting, even your basic assertion that "to be able to orbit, you must have weight/mass" is wrong.
Jupiter. Everything else is "assorted debris that didn't quite make it.".
Here is the thing, other than your dog and perhaps your cat and some farm animals, not a goddamn thing in this universe CARES what people call it.
If you have a mythical being known as "significant other" he or she may care what they are called.
But that's it. What humans call Pluto and whether we consider it a planet, a mini Planet or a bowl of yogurt are of no consequence whatsoever to that world. It. Doesn't. Fucking. Care.
So if IT doesn't care, don't you go getting your panties (purchased for research purposes of course) in a wad.
Sig for hire.
This is the correct answer. Since we can "define" whatever the fuck we want, we could have simply let Pluto stay defined as one of the 9 "original" or "classical" planets and been done with it.
I think it's really a classical rock planet...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It's complete bullshit that Pluto got to be a planet for so long while Ceres (which is in the inner solar system and has an orbit that matches the other planets) was denied. I was saying this years before the dwarf planet debacle happened. "Why the hell is this not a planet? It looks like a planet. It's round. It's right next door. And why does Pluto get to be planet, when it's nearly as tiny and is at the edge of the solar system and has this weird orbit that doesn't match the other planets?"
The status quo may be arbitrary and kinda dumb, but it's not nearly as dumb as it was before. You can mock the process all you want, but this at least showed kids that things change and that many of our scientific classifications are just convenient shorthands, not eternal truths.
Truth: Uranus is (sometimes) visible with the naked eye.
Source: http://www.space.com/22983-see-planet-uranus-night-sky.html
Yes, I've read that it's sometimes visible. However, few people will admit to staring at Uranus.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Only, it's a 3d-printed model of the dwarf planet, screenshotted in the Oculus Rift and saved as a lowly jpg for sharing on Facebook, which explains the jpeg plumes. Oh, so yeah, it was faked.
No it doesn't.
Just because energy is on one side of the equation and mass on the other, that doesn't mean they are the same thing. There is an equivalence between them in the same that a certain amount of mass can be converted into a certain amount of energy (and vice versa), but it doesn't mean that they are the same.
And this equation is specific to the situation where the object with mass isn't moving (which is why E in this case is called the "rest mass energy"). More generally in special relativity, for an object that is moving and has a momentum p, the equation becomes:
E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2