I subscribe to a few science threads on Facebook. I also tend to read NASA and space-related stories in the media.
Whenever there’s a discussion about the moon landings, without a doubt, within 10 posts someone will deny that the moon landings were real.
I honestly don’t get it. Some basic research, like one hour maximum, will tell you all you need to know about the Apollo missions.
400,000 people working directly or indirectly for NASA would to have remained silent to this day. Other technologically advanced nations: UK, Soviet Union, Canada, Australia, etc. would have to have been in on it. In fact some of the transmissions were routed through Australia’s Parkes Observatory radio telescope when the moon was facing the southern hemisphere.
Why? What do these uneducated, ill-informed people get out of denying what is probably the most significant technological achievement of mankind?
In other words: how fucking stupid do you need to be to dismiss this achievement?
Whats the end game? What do they theorize is the motivation behind the “faking” of the moom landing? It makes about as much sense to me as Flat Earthers. Lets just say they are right. Then what? Whats the fucking point?
I think it’s fairly likely that the majority of moon landing deniers on the internet … are just playing/trolling.
As for “Lets just say they are right. Then what? Whats the fucking point?”, I think the answer is that it would demonstrate a large-scale, top-level mass-disinformation conspiracy. And that would immediately lend credence to a whole host of other similar conspiracy theories.
Two words: Flat Earthers…OK, I would it’s some stupidity (“behavior that shows a lack of good sense or judgment”), some ignorance (“lack of knowledge”), a good dose of conspiratorial thought and a dangerous amount of contrariness, i.e., some people are going to scream X when Y has been proven over and over again simply to disagree loudly…and if you’ve ever worked in a large corporation or organization, you’ve seen the type…:rolleyes:…at every other meeting…
I put it in the same category as the “Flat Earth” believers, there are far more issues to worry about or waste time on, people ain’t gonna learn what they don’t want to know…
I feel your pain. One of my BILs is a Flat Earther, he’s a great guy, actually intelligent and well-spoken, he posts videos and has a following on YouTube, but he’ll never bring it up to me as he knows the discussion will not end well for him…we’re convinced he’s got a little need to be followed and adored, and that’s why he does it…because there is no other logical explanation we can come up with and ‘deranged’ doesn’t fit him…
Exactly, Smudge777, it is a way to continue to sow distrust of official or “established” sources. Being relentless at this even on such matters is yet more repetition of how any information that comes from government, institutional science/academia, or the mainstream press, must be under suspicion; especially if it’s something you cannot “get” at a “gut level”.
What i mean is, how do they legitimize these notions of large-scale conspiracies? I know what the point is as far as what it does for the conspiracy theorists themselves. But seemingly at least they want to appear to have a valid story explaining their conspiracy that legitimizes their nuttery. So why/what reason is behind the mass scale conspiracy for these things? Why is the government doing it? What is the reason these buffoons are giving for these conspiracies? If they want credence for their conspiracy they must have a (at least to them) plausible story explaining why such secret goverment plots exist, in addition to just asserting that they do in fact exist at all.
I think this is it exactly. They may have shit jobs, but they know more than the sheeple who believe the evil government and the evil scientists.
The scientists who get all that money for basically nothing, and so will lie to keep the fat paychecks rolling in.
Why did the government send troops to Vietnam, try to kill Castro with an exploding cigar, or withhold treatment from syphilis patients? Kennedy set the challenge of landing a man on the moon[sup]*[/sup], and later governments certainly played up the prestige of having done so. I can see that some officials would want to brag about an achievement like that, even if they had to fake it.
But it does bring up a weakness that I rarely hear mentioned about conspiracy theories. Most such conspiracies are described much like the plot of a movie; all the conspirators have to do is take one small action to kick things off and the whole chain of events plays out just how they want. Real life isn’t like that. What if Oswald got stopped on his way to the book depository? What if he couldn’t get away from his co-workers when the motorcade was due? What if someone found his rifle? What if he got arrested and told everything about who put him up to it? The conspiracy always tries to explain what did happen, but a real-life conspiracy would have to be ready for all the things that could have happened. Or conspirers are the luckiest people on Earth; all the random, chaotic events always happen just right for the conspiracy to succeed.
And returning him safely to the Earth. Good bit of foresight on Kennedy’s part, that.
What I’ve pieced together, though I’m no expert, is that the government after promising to land a man on the moon found out that radiation belts made it impossible, and so it had to be faked so the government people wouldn’t lose face and authority.
The conspiracy had to get more complicated to explain all the later moon shots - never quite understood why they think the government didn’t stop after
Apollo XI.
Same reason for all conspiracy theorists: they like to think they are smarter than everyone else. The CIA killed Kennedy & 9/11 was an inside job :rolleyes:
I KNEW IT! Our lab manager and I attended a conference in Dallas several years ago that was held just a few blocks away from Dealey Plaza. Being a history freak and having read several books on the JFK assassination, we did the whole Dealey Plaza walk around (including having my picture taken on the third ‘X’ - gotta wait for the light to be red). We also did the “The Man on the Sixth Floor” museum - at the end of the taped tour is a whole discussion of the conspiracy which ends with the director talking about how, before he became director, he had some concerns, but after going through all the evidence and living it, he had no doubt: Ostwald acted alone…
Sorry for the hijack, please resume the fake moon landing discussion…
All these responses (other than voyager’s and robot arm’s) are ignoring the “why” of the conspiracy, from the perspective of the supposed perpetrators (usually the goverment). That is the confusing unanawered question. I think Robot Arm came the closest to anything that made any sort of sense.
I agree with this. People want to feel smart. Being smart in the normal sense takes a lot of work; you have to spend years learning things and even when you’re done, you’re always going to be encountering people who know more than you do.
Being a conspiracy theorist bypasses all this. You can “learn” something by just reading a single book. Or even watching a video if you’re too lazy to read a book. And the best part is that once you know the conspiracy theory, you’re ahead of everyone who doesn’t know the theory.
You encounter some guy who’s spend thirty years studying 20th century history and obviously knows the subject better than you do? No problem. You just dismiss everything he knows as part of a cover story and tell him you know the real history of what happened: “Oh, you think World War II was about economic competition and population demographics? That’s just what they want you to think. Wake up. It was all a plot by the reptilians who are secretly running the world.”
They usually have some kind of explanation for the government’s motivation, but that really is almost secondary, and they don’t focus on that so much. The things that really appeal to them are: one, the movie-like narrative, as Robert Arm points out; and two, the self-appointed superiority of knowing something that the sheeple don’t know, as GoodOmens describes.
They’re both forms of gratification, (that have nothing to do with wanting to learn the truth.) And it’s not just over-the-top conspiracy theorist that are fueled by gratification, instead of a desire to learn. Right-wing talk radio in general appeals to the gratification of self-righteous recreational outrage, so it really is entertaining people, rather than informing them. Alex Jones is just the most extreme (though logical) result of this industry of gratification mongering.
CTs seem to fixate on denial evidence and ignore the rest of it. They’ll say “If that one picture is faked then all of them could be faked”. They don’t even need proof that one picture is fake to dismiss the whole lot either, they magnify the significance of any perceived anomaly to disqualify any amount of proof. With that reasoning it becomes impossible for them to ever accept that anyone ever landed on the moon, that it wasn’t a conspiracy.
And if you are in any discipline that requires a degree or two, or at least critical thinking and the ability to learn concrete scientific concepts, you not only wonder if you will encounter people smarter and more knowledgeable than you, you expect it…
As I alluded to earlier about my BIL the Flat Earther, one of the reasons he never mentions it to me as I answered a FB post he put up on the subject, posted a couple of pictures I took over the Pacific on a flight to Asia where the curvature of the Earth was apparent, addressed their issues with gravity only to be bombarded by a poster saying, and I’m paraphrasing, “Oh, so you believe all that complicated NASA math that NO ONE understands, you are a FOOL if you buy that mumbo-jumbo”, I said, “It’s Physics 101…have you every taken a college level physics course? Maybe two? How about three? Just because you’ve never taken the time to understand it doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible.”…and I got crickets…
Actually, I think I could have written my post a lot better. Two points:
The government has done all kinds of things that seem to make little or no sense. That some fictional thing they’re alleged to have done seems pointless doesn’t really make it any more or less credible. (Although I am reminded of something I heard once, that fiction is harder to write than non-fiction because fiction has to make sense.)
There have been real benefits to having put men on the moon. The U.S. has been a scientific and technological leader for the last few decades, and has reaped the economic benefits. I think some of that can be traced back to the space program. Students were inspired to study science. They graduated and went on to start companies that produced microchips, software, digital electronics, and a host of other things. And we’ve attracted brilliant, talented people from all over the world to come and contribute to that. Now, I don’t think the people who (allegedly) faked the moon landing could have even imagined such things would result from their hoax, but it would have been a brilliant reason to do it.
Our lab manager and I attended a conference in Dallas several years ago that was held just a few blocks away from Dealey Plaza. Being a history freak and having read several books on the JFK assassination, we did the whole Dealey Plaza walk around (including having my picture taken on the third ‘X’ - gotta wait for the light to be red). We also did the “The Man on the Sixth Floor” museum - at the end of the taped tour is a whole discussion of the conspiracy which ends with the director talking about how, before he became director, he had some concerns, but after going through all the evidence and living it, he had no doubt: Ostwald acted alone…