All right, my impatience is showing. (Well put, Ogre, and thanks for the civility of the tongue-lashing. I’ll come back to that.)
BickByro, you’re absolutely right, the blowjob example was a poor one. So let me offer a different one: the secret of the atomic bomb. Huge, huge, major national secret. Theories dating to the 1930’s, then engineering and experimentation really gets rolling in 1942. The first true a-bomb is detonated in July 1945, and Fat Man and Little Boy drop on Japan the following month.
The Russians infiltrated the project immediately. They were already working on their own bomb project, but it’s generally accepted that their success depended on information stolen from the U.S. At any rate, the USSR exploded its first nuclear weapon in August 1949, four years and one month after the USA’s.
It beggars belief to think that the Soviets were able to penetrate and exploit what was up to that point the United States’s most critically confidential national-security effort (a weapons program, no less) within four years, but that in thirty years there hasn’t been anything resembling a security leak among the thousands of people who would have to be involved in covering up a false moon landing.
Ogre:
You’re right, to a degree. I’ve carefully rethought my reaction to this debate. To some extent, I was flying off the handle, and letting emotion get in the way of cool, rational discourse. (Though if you want to see me really flying off the handle, click here.)
If you’re right, if BickByro is really trying to get a total, complete understanding of the subject, and thoroughly understand the evidence that demonstrates that we did, in fact, go to the moon, then yes, it’s admirable and laudable. He said, at one point, something to the effect of, “What if somebody asks me to prove it?” which was, for me, the first indication of an honorable motive.
However, I can’t support the specific methodology of his quest. Detailed objections have been raised to each of the hoax-theorists’ points, many involving mathematics that is frankly beyond me. Careful frame-by-frame analyses of gravitationally-determined drop rates have been provided. One poster’s father actually worked on an Apollo mission, for crying out loud.
And yet, for each explanation, he manages to find tiny nitpicks, which are, one after another, quickly shot down. Rover’s wheels kick up dust that doesn’t form into clouds? Maybe it was slow-motion. Rover moving too fast to have actually functioned at the non-slowed-down real-life speed at which they would have had to film the scene? Control wires, special effects, who knows.
Yes, to some extent, I am satisfied by what you deem an “appeal to authority.” This isn’t a simple, “My Dad said it,” though: I know, in detail, how scientific inquiries work. My grandfather is a respected geologist; I spent many months with him in the field, evaluating surface features of glaciation, looking at the huge floodplain of Eastern Washington, and so on. I’d wager to say my grasp of geology is superior to that of the average layperson, and to BickByro’s. I’m hardly an expert, but I know enough to recognize that his assertions about finding some deeply-buried rock that could pass for a lunar sample are absurd on their face.
Furthermore, my wife is an epidemiologist, my father-in-law is faculty emeritus in paleontology at the University of Chicago, my grandfather-in-law pioneered substance abuse medicine in the U.S. – I come from a rational, scientific family. I’m not just “appealing to authority” by pointing to Science as some large, abstract, inviolate repository of the world’s wisdom; I am appealing to many, many, many authorities, in the form of the scientific method as applied by thousands and thousands of individual experts, none of whom has seen fit to raise the objections to which BickByro is desperately clinging.
I don’t deny that scientists have frequently gone astray or simply been wrong. The best modern example of a lone scientist facing down the entire body of accepted opinion is probably Alfred Wegener, whose theories of global plate tectonics didn’t begin to receive mainstream scientific acceptance until twenty years after his death. His life is fascinating but truly unfortunate, and like I said it’s probably the single best example of one scientist being right and everybody else being wrong.
However, that particular example doesn’t hold in this case, because the specific knowledge needed to buttress Wegener’s theories was impossible to gather at the time. Wegener had meteorology and limited geology on his side, which wasn’t nearly enough; it wasn’t until the 1950’s that the study of geomagnetics had progressed to the point that Wegener’s hypothesis actually acquired some solid evidence. Deep-sea exploration in the early 1960’s uncovered seafloor spreading, at which point the scientific mainstream really sat up and took notice. After enough real, inarguable information became available, the scientific establishment basically picked up its skirts and moved over to the new-found theory en masse.
Unlike plate tectonics, which had to wait until observational and evidentiary techniques caught up with the theories, we have all the information we need to understand traveling to the moon. The physics, engineering, lunar geology (lunology?), all of it is sufficiently advanced to make theoretical debates unnecessary. This is simply evidence vs. evidence, and as far as I’m concerned, the evidence for a hoax is sadly lacking.
And I would seriously question your assertion that he isn’t trying to prove a harebrained conspiracy. Look at BickByro’s language – it’s a dead giveaway. Over and over, when confronted with a bit of evidence, he says, in effect, “Hmmm. Let me think about how I’m going to disprove that.” Further, about two-thirds of the way through the GD thread, he said something like, “After all of this, I’m becoming more convinced the moon landing was faked.” (Let me know if you want me to go get exact quotations.) This is not the mindset of someone who is examining the question coolly and impartially. This is a far better example of ear-finger-sticking “la-la-la”-ism than my vaguely annoyed rant above.
So, again, detailed examination of something that most of us take for granted is worthwhile. (A mathematician once told me that his instructor threatened to make the final exam a single question: “Prove 2+2=4.”) If BickByro had said, at the outset, something like this: “I’d like to spend some time examining this issue in some detail. Let’s make a game out of it; I’ll propose means by which the landing could have been faked, and you all disprove them, and we’ll see how long we can go” – well, in short, this Pit thread wouldn’t exist.
But again, his methodology is suspect. Other than the observation of language noted above, consider, in the GD thread, his refusal to accept detailed calculations and citations regarding the danger of the Van Allen belt. Quotes from high-energy physicists, cosmologists, medical doctors, physiologists, and so on were provided. He brushed them aside. He apparently did try to read them, but he doesn’t have the specialized knowledge required to understand what he was reading, as evidenced by some of his follow-up questions regarding the technical material. As far as I know, this still lurks as an unresolved issue for him.
So that’s why I said what I did, and which I repeat here: “However, it seems that you will not be satisfied until you yourself have actually earned the degrees in mathematics, high-energy particle physics, geology, orbital mechanics, and everything else that allow you to fully, totally understand the behavior of light, the nature of alpha radiation, the triangulation of radio signals, and everything else. If that’s what it’ll take to convince you, then more power to you. Report back in ten years.”
Whew. That’s enough for now. But thanks again, Ogre, for the civility with which you called me on the carpet. It forced me to think carefully about this from top to bottom, which is always a good thing, even if I still arrived back at the same conclusion. 
