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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.
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"?
Because of the Paypal link in the video description.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Why - From memory, the 1970's movie "Capricorn One" was the first time I heard the meme, now get off my fake alien lawn..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
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.
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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
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.
Funny how they don't claim the US military faked a bunch of wars too seeing as how NASA's funding is around 40 times less.
Really, cause I heard quite a few people complaining about fake weapons of mass destruction..
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