here’s a link from the bottom of the Moon Fakers page: http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/VanAllen.html
It gives the conspiratorialist side of the radiation argument, though I can plainly see there are some distortions of statistics involved. For example, 50% of solar flares should occur on the side of the sun facing away from the astronauts. Nevertheless, if the guy’s math is right that still works out to almost 200 rems per day. Just thought somebody might want to take a look at it…
Because you are completely unable to understand that there are several significant light sources at work. Because, effectively speaking, on the moon, the moon and the sun can be up at the same time, while the rest of the sky is dark; and even better, you’re standing on one of them.
But you haven’t addressed it at all–specifically, the overwhelming concensus of the scientific community that the lunar samples, that are still being studied today, formed in the absence of water and oxygen, two things that you’ll notice are in abundance here. That’s why they are kept in sealed cases and bathed in continuously flowing nitrogen. They’re full of compunds that, if exposed to oxygen and water for the first time, would begin to rapidly oxidize, destroying the samples. Now where, on the Earth, could one find or manufacture such amazing rocks? Nowhere. Period.
Although I can’t figure a couple things out here: Are you saying that we really do have moon rocks and they happen to be identical? If so, you have to admit that we’ve been to the moon.
Are you saying the lunar samples are faked, and are just plain old Earth rocks? If so, you have to explain the above re: oxidation, and you have to account for the fact that unmanned Soviet vehicles visited the moon and returned samples as well.
Also, why do you believe the overwhelming concensus of the scientific community regarding the origin of the moon, but not regarding the fact that we walked on it?
Maybe you should, you know, look it up.
I wonder if you would have the courage to walk up to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan, Harry Schmitt, Alan Bean, Pete Conrad, Alan Sheppard, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, John Young, and Charles Duke and call them liars to their faces.
AtomicDog:
“You won’t accept photographs.”
They are what has been in question since I started debating here, so obviously no, not on face value.
“You won’t accept radio or television transmissions.”
NASA sent us the radio and television feed, so that one’s pretty clear cut. If we’re talking about civilians/other countries independently monitoring the actual signals from the moon, I suppose it’s possible, but I haven’t seen the evidence yet.
“You won’t accept Moonrocks.”
More below.
“You won’t accept the word of the astronauts that made the trip”
Do you understand what is implied by the word “conspiracy”?
“You won’t accept the word of the people that sent them.”
You mean NASA? Isn’t this one obvious? It’s not about accepting someone’s word for it, it’s about accepting EVIDENCE which can disprove the conspiracy theory.
I think I’ve been far more reasonable in accepting and dismissing data than your average conspiracy theorist. I stand by my objections to the data I have reviewed.
Cervaise: Very cute, but you screwed up the first sentence: “I recognize that in giving credence to the conspiracy/hoax position, I am rejecting more than three decades of mainstream science.” The moon mission may have been a big deal, but it has hardly been the central preoccupation of mainstream science for the past 30 years. Other than the moon rocks, there just isn’t a whole lot of moon-mission-related stuff for scientists to study. What, you think that for 30 years photographic expert scientists have been poring over the moon photos to determine whether the surface reflectivity is sufficient to illuminate an object posotioned within the shadow? I’m “rejecting” (I prefer the term “calling into question”) not 30 years of science but rather only a few years of information provided directly by NASA and largely unconfirmable by any outside source.
Nimune: I’ll have to look around for a cite, but I’m almost 100% positive I read about this theory’s general acceptance in a recent (within the past year) issue of Scientific American–hardly a comic book. The theory is that a Mars-sized object collided with the earth shortly after its formation (I think 4 billion years ago is the number they gave). The collision caused a large portion of the earth to eject and take up orbit, and thus was born the moon. I think it would have started as rings around the earth and then condensed into a sphere.
As for the moon rocks being formed in the absence of air and water, there was no air or water on earth at the time of the collision (again, to the best of my memory until I find a cite). Needless to say, there were no fossils either. You may doubt we have such old rocks on earth, but again, I am almost positive we do.
“‘They know this because they compared moon rocks to rocks from the beginning of earth’s history and found they were compositionally identical.’ Surely, even YOU can see that this argument makes no logical sense.”
Not at all. Explain how? The geologists DO think the moon was originally part of the earth, and the moon rocks are the evidence that pointed them to that conclusion. Not at all inconsistent with the conspiracy theory.
Umm . . . why the fuck should anyone need to disprove the conspiracy theory? The moon landings are commonly accepted facts–it’s the conspiracy morons who are required to prove their claims, and they have manifestly, through an utter misunderstanding of physics, failed to do so? It’s not like NASA just revealed these moon landings in the face of 32 years of skepticism. The conspiracy theory is the new claim, and the burden of proof is on it.
You have a really skewed version of who has the burden of proof with claims like these.
(1) Yes, the brightness would decrease as the height decreases. However, it varies very little (less than I expected). At 10 cm, the ratio is still 48%, and at 90 meters it is 61%.
(2) The results had little to do with the ratio of height to radius of shadow. in fact it was the natural log of the ratio of the square root of height to radius. Log doesn’t change very fast. At a radius of 4 meters, the ratio is still 47%.
(3) That’s right. I missed that. Yes, an object would obstruct a portion of the surface, and the brightness varies with that. If half the surface were obstructed, the ratio is 33% at 1 meter height/1 meter radius. It doesn’t vary much from that.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by BickByro *
**AtomicDog:
“You won’t accept photographs.”
They are what has been in question since I started debating here, so obviously no, not on face value.
“You won’t accept radio or television transmissions.”
NASA sent us the radio and television feed, so that one’s pretty clear cut. If we’re talking about civilians/other countries independently monitoring the actual signals from the moon, I suppose it’s possible, but I haven’t seen the evidence yet.
“You won’t accept Moonrocks.”
More below.
“You won’t accept the word of the astronauts that made the trip”
Do you understand what is implied by the word “conspiracy”?
“You won’t accept the word of the people that sent them.”
You mean NASA? Isn’t this one obvious? It’s not about accepting someone’s word for it, it’s about accepting EVIDENCE which can disprove the conspiracy theory.
I think I’ve been far more reasonable in accepting and dismissing data than your average conspiracy theorist. I stand by my objections to the data I have reviewed.
I asked you a direct question, “Is there ANY evidence that you WILL accept that humans have been to the Moon?” Instead, you restated the evidence that you will NOT accept.
Therefore, I have to assume that there IS no evidence that you will accept. Since you will not show how your mind can be changed, I have to assume that you are indeed a Troll.
I think it’s worth mentioning that NASA wouldn’t just have had to cover up one mission. There were three manned missions around the moon (Apollos 8, 10, 13) and six landings over four years. One of the supposed “hoaxes” (Apollo 13) entailed an embarassing accident that nearly killed three men and tarnished the reputation of NASA and the United States. NASA also received a firestorm of criticism for inserting the article “a” into Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” soundbite after he flubbed the line.
Thirty years after the fact, no astronaut/actors, no scriptwriters, no directors, no lighting specialists, no special effects artists have come forward to confess. None of the 500,000 people who worked directly or indirectly on the project ever defected to the Soviet Union and revealed the “hoax.” The extremely minor and in most cases easily explainable anomalies in the production are heavily outweighed by the hundreds of space hours put into the project, every minute of which was documented on film, audiotape, and mission status printout.
In short, I don’t have to prove that we went to the moon. Instead, these idiots have to go wade through enough documentation to take up several lifetimes of research and come up with one conclusive piece of evidence which proves that we didn’t. Keep looking, folks. It’s nice to have a hobby, and it keeps you out of traffic.
no, they are in on the conspiracy too! all the scientists are. The Russians are too. You see, with as hoaky as the photos and film is, and the obvious fact that we couldnt make it through the van allen belt,(not to mention the signals comming from the moon) the russian moon landing program was faked too. But it was during the cold war right? so why did they work together, because the COLD WAR WAS FAKED TOO!! Yes, Its all comming clear to me.
If an object is visible, it’s because it IS illuminated. If it is NOT illuminated, it will NOT be visible. Even indirect lighting counts as illumination.
The other day, I was reading a newspaper. I was wearing a red t-shirt. Sunlight came in through the window, hit my shirt and reflected onto the newspaper, which was in shadow. Result: The newspaper was now pale red.
Do you see now how an object in shadow can be illuminated by reflected light? Good grief, man, have you never seen indirect lighting?
For everyone: Remember that we are debating photographs. No photograph has ever exactly reproduced colors and lighting the way they are seen by the human eye. Go outdoors in bright sunlight and take photos of an object without using flash and then compare the photos to the actual object. I guarantee you there will be differences between the colors in the photos and the actual colors.
And the shadows in the pictures will be darker than they originally appeared to your eye. (It’s why photographers often use flash even at high noon, to illuminate the shadows so they won’t appear too dark. It’s why Hollywood filmmakers often use lights and/or reflectors even when filming in daylight.)
Guess what? The astronauts’ cameras didn’t have flash. That’s why the shadows in the photos appear so dark, but they would not have appeared so to the eyes of the astronauts because the human eye is sensitive to a very wide range of intensity. IOW, we can see things in very bright light and when it’s very dark (but not completely dark.) Photographic film can’t do that. Film designed for bright light is not recommended for use in dim light and vice versa. (It also depends upon the lens and shutter.) So, the film the astronauts brought was the kind designed for very bright light to handle the intense direct and indirect sunlight, but that meant the shadows would appear very dark.
It also means the cameras would not record the stars. They aren’t bright enough.
(Actually, they COULD have photographed the stars, but it would have required a long exposure. And the surface of the moon could not have been visible in the photo; it would have been SERIOUSLY over-exposed.)
I don’t have a lot of time now, so let me be brief. If you people want to flame me, start a Pit thread. There are posters who have actually been participating in logical thought with me (emarkp, bobort, I’m looking in your general direction) and have served to demonstrate that (1) there IS evidence I will accept and (2) there can be value (maybe even a little insight) in the questions of a layman.
I suspect pldennison speaks for a lot of you out there when he asks, “why the fuck should anyone need to disprove the conspiracy theory?” Well, because it’s allegedly so fucking easy to prove any moron could figure it out. It’s not supposed to even be a challenge if you have a high school education, right? These are the epithets constantly thrown around by debunkers, and I think anyone who’s paying attention here is learning that (even IF we went to the moon) demonstrating this particular “scientific fact” is a bit more difficult than, say, proving the earth revolves around the sun. Isn’t it, at the very least, an interesting exercise to know exactly WHY the conspiratorialists’ claims are scientifically inaccurate?
It is to me. Those who agree, I heartily encourage to continue discourse with me. Those who insist on skipping from point-by-point discussion to wholesale condemnation, please just leave me alone. No one is forcing you to read this thread, and it benefits me nothing to be “convinced” in such a ham-handed fashion.
I’ll get back to the science later…
You’re either alive or dead. Which is it?
I admit it’s clumsy, but with practice, a person can learn to use a camera this way.
Except I believe it’s been proven that to fake a mission to the Moon would cost nearly as much money as doing it for real. Now you’re suggesting NASA spent TWICE as much money as they really did!
When someone sees a “mistake” in a moon photo, the mistake is behind the eyeballs, not in front of them.
WhiteRaven: Nonsense. There’s a much simpler explanation. The “moon” rocks were made by taking a mineral mixture similar to the composition of alleged lunar meteorites that have struck the Earth, melting it down into a magma, and forming about 800 pounds of rocks with it by pouring them into randomly-shaped moulds sitting in a vacuum chamber. Of course, in the process, they had a few less-inspired rockmaking experiments they had to get rid of, too, so they concocted the whole “orange rock” discovery made by Apollo 17 as an excuse to dump them on an unsuspecting public.
Oh, and Neil Armstrong shot JFK from the grassy knoll.
The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that the rocks in question were brought back from the Moon. Perhaps you could directly address that?
Uhhh… you’re misreading because what I said is a completely different statement. I’m amazed.
There is no such photo. Everything in shadow is being illuminated by light reflected from either the Moon itself or the other astronaut, or the LEM, or whatever. (And I guess there’s earthshine, too, but I don’t know how much there would be.)
Let me be blunt: I have yet to see a photo that looks as if there’s an artificial light source off-camera. NONE of the photos look unrealistic to me. Not one. So why don’t you provide objective evidence that the photos are faked? It’s your extraordinary claim, so you back it up. And I don’t mean “they look funny,” I mean EVIDENCE.
Jesus, man, of COURSE it does. It’s called “Reflected light.” The sun’s rays bounce off things.
Are you serious? You don’t think shadows look different depending on what’s casting them, or what other objects are around? Have you ever been outside?
But it’s good to know you’re admitting the missions occurred during the lunar morning/evening, since that can only be true if they really did occur. I admit that I find it quite incredible that hoaxers would remember to always have the Sun in the right place in the sky to simulate lunar morning/evening, but in some shots would accidentally have extra light sources! (And man, some of those sets are HUGE. Like, Superdome-sized.)
And you then answer this very question yourself:
Thnk you. And you have just explained, perfectly, why the amount of reflected light in the photos is exactly what it should be - bright enough to see objects in shadow, but not blinding.
It wouldn’t take that much courage to call Pete Conrad a liar, but it would take some effort to dig him up. The man’s dead.
Let’s also not forget Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, Michael Collins, William Anders, Frank Borman, Rich Gordon, Ron Evans, and others who orbited the Moon, even if they didn’t land there. They seem to have gotten through the Van Allen belts without bursting into flame.
BickByro Said:
You’ve got to be kidding. If you believe this, then it sheds light on part of the problem - you really don’t know much about this subject at all. Lots of people here DO know quite a bit about it, and I think there’s a basic disconnect going on. Things like the reflection of light off of secondary objects are trivial matters to most of us, so perhaps we don’t explain it well enough for you to understand, and you come back from left field and we start all over again. I’m guessing you have a very rudimentary education in science, whereas most of the people you are talking to have degrees in some technical field.
Anyway, there were truckloads of data that came back from the moon, and they’ve generated hundreds of thousands of man-hours of research. Some of it was quite unexpected, and caused us to re-think a lot of issues in space sciences. And of the truckloads of data, NONE of it turned out to be inconsistent with what we have learned since. The notion that NASA could have generated this much fake material with such astounding accuracy, including new data that didn’t even get corroborated until years later, is flatly ridiculous.
That NASA would be able to fake all of this yet screw up a few simple photos and not place shadows where they ‘belonged’ (according to the conspiracy nuts), is inconceivable.
And now, from a more common-sense perspective - does it make sense to you that NASA would have taken this risk? You claim now that the conspiracy held up and no one has talked after 30 years. But would it have been reasonable for NASA to expect that to happen, and to bet the credibility of the United States on it? For that matter, if they faked those moon rocks without actually having seen what real moon rocks looked like, don’t you think they would have worried that the Russians might go there and bring back real ones - which turned out to be completely different?
None of this makes ANY sense. If the moon landing was ‘tried’ in a court of law, the bulk of evidence would be so overwhelming that the judge would throw out the conspiracy claim in a heartbeat.
Try to think critically.
As far as the conflicting shadow directions go, I would like to direct you to these pictures:
As you can see, even though these shots are filmed in bright sunlight, the shadows do not all appear to be running in parallel. One might argue that the varying terrain makes the shadows appear to be diverging, but I submit that Arizona is in fact a hoax propagated by President James Polk, along with the entire Mexican War and Mexico itself.
Well, this is one thing you got right. It actually appeared in Astronomy magazine, dated September 1998 and reprinted at www.britannica.com. It agrees with you.
According to The University of Toronto at Mississauga, the oldest rocks found are 4 billion years old, found in the North West Territories of Canada. (I think NWT has changed its name since this was published.)
BickByro: Okay, you’re right. The moon landings were faked.
Now, would you please go away? :rolleyes:
Ah, one of the few things you can be fairly sure about. OTOH, we have to take somebody else’s word for the total veracity of a trip to the Moon. Absolutism, on either side of an issue, makes the person look like a closed-minded moron. One must remain open to other possibilities.
True, and shooting a gun from the hip can be surprisingly accurate, but then you at least have some immediate feedback about your success: he falls over or he doesn’t and you correct your aim and take another shot. Still photos can be cropped to improve the composition, but their marvelous grainlessness shows they weren’t cropped much. Movies a a little harder to crop, and well-composed and centered subjects would be more an accident than anything else. And were they practicing taking pretty pictures or landing the LEM?
What costs? They had all the “props” already made for the real mission. Ya load 'em on a truck and drive to Nevada. Look, I am not saying that there was no Moon mission. I am just admitting the possibility of some “backup” photos.
**
Another insulting overgeneralization disguised as a flip, “I’m so cool,” aphorism. Okay, I’m a paranoid ex-hippie from the sixties and seventies so you probably have no respect for me or my views, but you are too accepting of what authority tells you. A little skepticism is a sign of intelligence. You should try it.
Did you look at the table of contents? The main purpose of that report was to summarize the results of biological experiments carried out during the Apollo missions. The radiation exposure of the astronauts is only a minor focus, and they didn’t devote much space to it accordingly. So it’s unreasonable to expect it to provide all the data you want. However there is no reason to suspect the data they do provide is wrong.
Nope. Not without knowing the amounts of each type of radiation they were exposed to for each mission.
What a load of drivel. They seem to be basing their argument on the assumption that astronauts are going to be exposed to radiation from major solar flares. Major solar flares tend to do stuff like make the Aurora Borealis visible in Ohio. How often does that happen?
I figured out a simple way to estimate the cosmic radiation dose rate in space. We know what the dose rate from cosmic rays is at sea level (about 28 mrem/year), and I found a source for the same in Denver (about 50 mrem/yr). The difference is due to the greater atmospheric shielding at sea level, so if we can figure out how much less shielding Denver has than the oceans we can extrapolate to the dose rate outside the atmosphere.
A convenient way to do this is to just use the average barometric pressure difference. I found that if the pressure at sea level is 30 in. Hg the pressure in Denver will be about 29.3 in. Hg, or a difference of about 0.7 in. Hg. So at a pressure of 0, we get ~1200 mrem/yr, which is about 0.13 mrem/hour. The quality factor of cosmic radiation in space is probably higher than on earth, and there’s some shielding from the Van Allen belts, etc. I’m going to call it a factor of 10 or so, which leaves us with about 1.5 mrem/hr. That’s very similar to the numbers from NASA. QED, as far as I’m concerned.
By the way, major props to emarkp for that calculation.
