Consider the following scenario. A man who believes that the 1969 moon landing was faked tries to contact NASA and other space-related organizations and challenges them to debate with him on the issue. NASA and most of the other organizations don’t respond, but one sends him a letter saying - in a nutshell - “We don’t have time for such nonsense”. Annoyed, the moon-hoaxer says that the space agencies ignored him because they know that the moon landing was faked and they’re just too frightened of being exposed. He goes around telling people this, and when people point to pictures and video footage, the man says that they all could have been faked and asks them, “If NASA was telling the truth, they’d have nothing to fear and they wouldn’t have refused to debate me!”
Now, I know that most people would also ignore this man, but if you HAD to respond to this scenario - like, say, for a college course - how would you refute this man’s claims? :dubious:
the internet has bred a lot of people who feel so important they think just because they challenge something you gotta debate them (a lot of them are on this forum. 'I ASKED YOU A QUESTION.")
My stance on the moon landing is that if you really want to get down to it, it can be hoaxed. mythbusters did a sort of counter productive ep where they recreated all the hoaxer’s debates to reverse prove that yup it could be how nasa said it was. only in the process they totally recreated the moon landing pix and whatnot. so in essence they proved you COULD fake it were you so inclined.
the point’s not if you CAN do it, it’s if we DID do it. it makes me think of faking a murder. just because i have video of a guy being shot and you can recreate the video with various special effects–that doesn’t make the dude any less dead.
i think there are failproof ways to prove we’ve been to the moon, one of which are reflectors left there that you can hit with a laser. i know there is other proof as well.
I would tell him that, since he is predisposed to dismissing all evidence as faked, he can take a long walk off a short pier.
That’s not how I remembered it going down on that Mythbusters episode.
Yes, you could fake a video or film of the event; Hollywood does that sort of spoofing regularly.
But the official footage isn’t the only thing. Don’t forget the people who worked on the project, reported on it, observed it around the world, tracked the space vehicles, received the signals, listened to the conversations, including enemies who would have liked nothing better than to reveal a hoax. Yet all of those tens of thousands have kept silent. The only ones screaming “fake!” are those who never had any involvement at all and came onto the subject decades later. Doesn’t that tell you something about human nature?
Do moon hoaxers generally believe there were never even unmanned missions to the moon? Because otherwise, I would imagine that would be their out on that one. (Not that they’re terribly logical in general…)
i found it in my blood pressure’s best interest to avoid talking with many kooks, but i did talk to a few before i learned my lesson.
there’s two camps: one group thinks we’re capable and have since probably gone to the moon but that the first landing was a hoax because we wanted to beat russia and weren’t quite ready.
the other camp is just out and out crazies who span the gammut of thinking everything the gubrment says is a lie to believing the earth is actually flat (serious, go visit the flat earth society’s page. there’s a bit on the moon landing and how it was actually a studio in NM. i rolled my eyes so hard i nearly fainted).
i mean, yeah–they set out to prove the hoaxers are wrong and i think conclusively did so. but in the process they re-created the photos and film. all i’m saying is they replicated stuff (like the rock shadows) to disprove the hoax theory but the byproduct was proving they just recreated it in a studio setting.
that’s my point: it’s not if we CAN replicate it, it’s if we faked it to begin with. which i think clearly we didn’t.
It would be with a NASA style nutshell letter, as described.
Now, if I was free to respond in any manner I liked, I’m sure I’d guffaw at some point and would not be stingy with my mockery.
If you shoot a laser at one of these reflectors, can you see a flash on the surface of the moon with the naked eye? (I really don’t know.) If not, then suppose you take a hoaxer to the laser beam shooting station and what happens? Probably something like you shoot the laser at the moon and then a little while later some equipment says “reflection received.” The hoaxer says “Prove that beam went all the way to the moon. You probably shot it at some satellite” or even “Aw come on, you expect me to believe you didn’t set up some fake equipment that says ‘reflection received’ every time you push the button?”
Probably the only thing that would work would be to set up a huge array of red, white, and blue sun reflectors covering the entire visible surface of the moon with the letters “USA.” Even then, I’m sure someone would claim that it was being faked by using an array of satellites.
I think you would have to demand that before you agree to the debate, the scoffer specify what he or she would consider convincing evidence. If said evidence is impossible or unlikely to be available (for example, that we spend billions to personally take him to the Moon and visit the landing site and lunar vehicles) then we simply tell him to forget it, since there is no point in debating. If the level of evidence required by the scoffer can reasonably be produced, then present it to him.
The article states soooo naïvely:
“The presence of reflectors on the Moon has been used to rebut claims that the Apollo landings were faked. For example, the APOLLO Collaboration photon pulse return graph, shown here, has a pattern consistent with a retroreflector array near a known landing site.”
Poor scientists! Do they really believe a faked-landing believer would be at all impressed by the graph or the other pictures in that Wikipedia article?
He would say that the graph proves nothing but while he is here, he would like to see those alien corpses that were autopsied and that the “gummint” is keeping in deep-freeze.
i was on a paranormalist forum for a while until it started chunking away at my life expectancy. those people are just so impossible. totally immune to logic.
first of all, one guy thought he was god. i cannot over emphasize how abysmal god’s grammar was–and that’s coming from a dude who won’t stretch his little finger over to capitalize shit.
second, the smartest guy there defaulted to any paranormal explanation before, you know, a logical one. they found this pic on the nasa site of the sun with these “large black objects that must be tens to hundreds of times larger than a planet” in front of it.
then the pic goes down off the site, and holy shit. CONSPIRACY. these must be giant crafts and LOOK! PROOF! nasa has taken the pics down.
i’m not exaggerating here, it took me 11 seconds to find another photo of the sun and pointed out the black blobs are in every sun photo. it took another 3 minutes to learn that most sun photos are infrared, so they record heat, not images. so the black spots are just cooler areas, and the blobs of black are known phenomenon–plasma bursts that are cooler than the sun’s surface. it took another 9 seconds to hit up the nasa site to read at the top that “this portion contains photos that will cycle through every few days. photos will be logged into the archive for further viewing.” so there’s why the pic came down.
in less than 4 minutes, i logic’d the whole thing.
so i asked them why they defaulted to the extraordinary before even bothering to look into it.
no foolin, they said “because. it’s more interesting.”
that’s when i gracefully bowed out of that world…
Maybe in the future we’ll put something on the Moon that can be seen from Earth via telescope and that’ll finally force Moon-hoax nutjobs to move onto different conspiracy theories.
More interesting?!?!
:sigh:
Glad to see you left that world, but those who are left behind really have my pity. With all that time they waste pondering on endeavors that have produced nothing after more than 50 years, why it is that many pseudo scientists out there ignore what they can do with their time helping the really interesting citizen science efforts out there?
Heck, one can even go look for a whole new world from one’s computer!
Sad really to see all that time wasted in useless conspiracies and not on very useful science endeavors that they can be part of.
Ah, I see you have a a NASA-style “nutshell letter” at your disposal.
Yes. It annoys nutcases. It is written in 1920s style stress raise.
Of course the moon “landings” were faked-the James Bond movie (“Diamonds Are Forever”) tells you how!
What you do is tell the conspiracy theorist to build his own laser reflector detector. Explain to him how to do it or direct him to some web site that describes it. If he’s honest (not likely) and capable, he will do it and get the reflection. If he’s not - not. In either case, who cares?