More like lientists, am I right? You’re free to believe the official narrative but I’m just keeping an open mind and asking questions.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to their own facts.
And also, some opinions are so bad that ridicule is the best response.
So what remaining questions do you have? As far as I can tell, your questions related to the lack of[airplane debris, and the “unusual” way the towers collapsed straight down. Both of which have been addressed in this thread. What other questions do you have about what happened?
To any of the few who took him at face value and thought he just wanted some simple answers and is seriously going to take a look at those answers and/or the answers linked to, know that if he actually does that instead of just asking those questions (and others) again, the next time you are in Portland the beer is on me.
From the Flight 93 Memorial:
The first responders described the crater as about 15 feet deep and about 30 feet across. It was irregularly shaped. The wreckage around and inside the crater consisted of largely unrecognizable pieces of twisted metal, pieces of the landing gear of the plane, a tire, the frames of some of the seats, bits of charred paper, and remnants of luggage and clothing. Most of the pieces of wreckage were quite small, the size of a notebook or smaller. Many more pieces of wreckage, also quite small, were recovered during the investigation when the crater was excavated. Extensive searches through the wooded area south of the crash site, and even arborists in the tree tops found more debris from the crash. A pond about 900 feet southwest of the crater was partially drained to recover debris. Debris was collected from the yards of nearby homes, farmer’s fields, and from around a nearby residential lake. The largest and heaviest pieces recovered were parts of the plane’s two engines and a piece of fuselage with several window openings. This fuselage piece measured about six feet by seven feet and was found near the woods south of the crater. Lightweight paper items were found as far away as New Baltimore, eight miles away.
As far as digging until they got to the wreckage:
Both of the plane’s recorders, the so-called “black boxes” (which actually are orange), were found in the crash site crater. The flight data recorder was recovered on Thursday, September 13 at 4:20 pm at a depth of 15 feet. On September 14, at 8:30 pm, the cockpit voice recorder was found at a depth of 25 feet. Both were turned over to the National Transportation Safety Board for analysis.
This is from the FBI regarding the investigation. It includes scenes from the actual recovery effort where you can see people finding and removing debris.
The recovery effort eventually dug down 40 feet to recover objects. The airplane was estimated to be traveling around 600 mph when it hit the ground. Even the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder - normally considered indestructible - suffered significant damage and required special handling to recover the information.
You see, in a “normal” plane crash the people on board are trying not to crash - they try to slow the airplane’s momentum. On 9/11 people on board were deliberately crashing, increasing the speed. Force equals mass times velocity so more speed means more energy which means more damage. None of the crashes on 9/11 were “normal” crashes because the intent was to do as much damage as possible. The debris and human remains were more shredded than typical. Lots of wreckage was found in Pennsylvania, it’s just that it was in small pieces and some of it wound up underground due to the force of impact.
For fuck’s sake you could have done a simple search on a historical event to find out if there was any prior history on this site.
Let me help you: Here is a partial list of 9/11 related threads on the Straight Dope I compiled in 2011.
I’m inclined to agree, but at this point I’m really speaking more to any impressionable youngsters that might come across this thread to impress upon them the true facts of that day.
That’s also a possibility…
Um… yeah, actually we DO have that right here in the Pit.
To be fair to @Biffster, he didn’t start this thread. His post was removed from another post and made the OP of this thread by the mods.
Well, that’s progress on your knowledge of the world and history.
Thanks for pointing this out
Yes, I realized that a bit after I posted. I understand they didn’t start this thread. And I have sympathy for a poster who finds their post from the middle of one thread suddenly transmogrified into the OP of a new thread in the Pit.
Much appreciated.
But - again - the other thread was also in the Pit.
That’s EXACTLY what it means.
You are a disgrace to the message board rooted in a project whose very purpose is to fight ignorance.
It’s a common situation — there’s a complicated set of circumstances, or series of events, which is challenging to wrap one’s mind around, and for which there seems to be a consensus explanation, despite there being unusual aspects of the thing that defy intuitive understanding.
In this case, as has come up repeatedly in the thread, that generalization holds true. The lack of large and recognizable airplane wreckage seems to defy the intuitive expectation of what’s left over after a crash. The vertical collapse of a compromised skyscraper seems to defy the intuitive perception that things tip over when they fall on their own. And so on.
The key difference between a smart person and a stupid person is how one responds to the confusion one feels when one’s intuition is challenged.
A smart person says, “This thing I’m looking at doesn’t behave the way I would intuitively expect. And yet, there are established experts whose explanations are respected, and many many people who accept those explanations. Therefore, my intuition is probably somehow flawed. I must temporarily set aside my instinctive conclusion until I have educated myself. Oh, I see, an airplane is actually quite fragile, and disintegrates more thoroughly in a high speed impact than I previously understood. Oh, I see, a skyscraper is a vertical gravity-resistance system, and when that system fails, the structure will collapse straight down. I understand now how my intuition led me astray. I have learned something in this experience.”
A stupid person says, “This thing I’m looking at doesn’t behave the way I would intuitively expect. And yet there are established experts whose explanations are respected, and many many people who accept those explanations. I will trust my intuition. I will start with the assumptions that those experts could be wrong or lying and that the generally accepted explanation should be disregarded, at least temporarily, as I continue to investigate the situation.”
This is the basic, basic dividing line between being a successful critical thinker and being an idiot who is susceptible to fabricated realities and self-deception.
Yes, very occasionally, an intuitive belief may turn out to be well-founded, like Alfred Wegener looking at a globe and leaping to the conclusion that because the continental edges fit together, the land masses must be mobile somehow. He was laughed at in his day, but he turned out to be right … much later when actual physical evidence accumulated to support his intuition. This is the thing the stupid person doesn’t understand when holding up examples like the Wegener hypothesis in support of their own flights of fancy: Even though Wegener wound up being correct in the end, it was not wrong for the mainstream to reject him — they were right to do so, at the time, because the claim was extraordinary and had nothing but intuition backing it.
And this, in my view, is why the thread’s guest of honor is getting such a raft of shit. It’s not really about this, in particular, being a tired topic, or about how he’s poorly informed about the specific details surrounding the historical event. It’s about how his approach to the topic betrays a general lack of critical thinking ability, which is anethema to the board’s culture.
Hence, the raft of shit is well deserved and well earned.
The general idea here is right, but just a small nitpick that mass times velocity is a measure of momentum, not force. Force is mass times acceleration. But these things are all closely related. As an object’s velocity increases, its kinetic energy increases as the square of velocity. When the object in question is a big plane with a mass of hundreds of tons and it hits a solid object at high speed, the negative acceleration from hundreds of miles per hour to zero in a matter of maybe a second produces incredible force and releases incredible amounts of energy, with results that are completely beyond normal human intuition about everyday events. Add in the explosive combustion of thousands of gallons of jet fuel. and you have an event that is completely beyond normal comprehension.
Sorry for the small nitpick. You did an excellent job of patiently explaining the facts.
I meant to say something else here, but forgot, and it’s too late to edit.
There has been a strong negative reaction to the “I’m just asking questions” rationalization, including dismissive description of this behavior as “JAQing off.”
But the thing is, it’s perfectly okay to ask questions, as long as one is asking the right questions.
Good question: "I look at the video of the building collapsing, and it looks like a controlled demolition to me, not a catastrophic failure resulting from structural damage. What am I missing?"
Bad question: "I look at the video of the building collapsing, and it looks like a controlled demolition to me, not a catastrophic failure resulting from structural damage. Are we really sure the building just collapsed on its own and wasn’t brought down on purpose?"
The former is asking a question. The latter is JAQing off.
Learn the difference.
In the preceding post I mentioned how the dynamics of a large airliner crashing into a skyscraper produces results that are completely outside of normal intuition. Another counter-intuitive example here is that when the buildings collapsed, they basically came straight down, which is something we’ve seen in controlled demolitions of big buildings. But again, our intuition is misleading us. We tend to think of tall buildings hit by a massive object in terms of a tower of child’s blocks, or a dog nudging an umbrella stand which then falls over.
But this is not how massive skyscrapers behave. Specifically, AIUI, the enormous super-hot fires weakened the support structures causing the upper stories to collapse, that impact then propagating the tremendous force down through all the lower stories. A few nitwits who thought the WTC towers should have acted otherwise based on their intuition of how these things “should” work, and who had seen YouTube videos of controlled demolitions, and who probably already believed that the earth is flat and the moon landings were faked, naturally launched their usual conspiracy theories.
Exactly. Hence my longer previous post, and the distinction between a smart person having their intuition challenged and a stupid person in the same situation.
(To be fair, it does take some education and especially some discipline to be able to let go of one’s intuitive conclusions and proceed with a truly open mind. The people who can do this consistently are a comparative minority; everyone else ranges from being pretty bad to being truly awful at it. So maybe “stupid” isn’t a completely fair label. But this is the Pit, so fuck it.)
So, would a tower on the edge of a flat Earth hit by an airliner tip and fall over the edge or still collapse straight down? If it falls over the edge, where does it fall to? Just asking questions.
It falls on the moon, where it would encounter no evidence that humans have ever landed there.
To some of them, one of whom I encountered on the IMDb boards, it’s impossible for an airplane to crash into a building in the first place!
But the moon is a hologram projected into the sky by ancient alien technology. It’s not actually there. That’s why we couldn’t land on it.
That’s just what they want you to think. You only believe that because of the chemtrails.