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Science

Fox Moon Special Response 398

An anonymous reeader writes "The other day the Fox Network showed an ill-researched program about how the moon landings were hoaxed. Nasa has responded on their front page, here. Since the community here appreciates science, here is a page originally linked to on the NASA site about refuting the illogical arguments of non-believers: badastronomy.com."
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Fox Moon Special Response

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  • Not true, those aren't NEWS sources. Those are hard core entertainment. Even thought it has news in the title, if you read a story in the Weekly World News do you believe it as a news source? Of course not. If the New York Times ran the same story as the Weekly World News, you would probably believe the Times, but not the WWN.

    One of them has achieved journalistic respect from the masses, the other has received entertainment respect.

    --

  • FWIW, I grew up during that moon shot era. I had model Saturn V's, LM's, command modules...all the cool stuff. In 1972, my parents took me to Florida to the opening of Disney World. While in FL, we went to visit some friends we had met the prior year.

    The father was an engineer for NASA and invited us to visit them in Cocoa Beach. He arranged visits for us to see all sorts of things....many were the common "tours" but he managed to get us up close and personal with a Saturn V as well in the Vertical Assembly building. Let me tell you...those things are huge. And, they were quite real. Originally designed to hurl very big nukes at the Russians...

    There was also going to be an Atlas Centaur launch. While I was too young to be in the block house, I was permitted to observe the launch from a location in nearby Cocoa Beach. It was magnificient! My parents and older brother were permitted to view the launch from within a block house. The space program convinced me that I wanted to be a physicist (at least be schooled as one).

    Almost thirty years later, my brother actually asked me about the so called "hoax". He pointed out the fact that there were no stars, that there were multiple shadows, etc.

    He felt a little foolish when I was able to explain away these things with simple explainations (it's damned bright on the moon..washing out background starlight and sunlight reflecting off the lunar structures would cause multiple shadows if near enough.

    But, as somebody else pointed out, our society is to willing to believe that facts don't matter. They all seem to have the desire to rewrite history into their making. Stalin and Lenin thought this was a great idea as did Breznev (remember how Kruzchev was written out of the history books). But, does anyone really think the Russians would let this one go if it weren't true?

    But, those that saw the launches, watched the broadcasts, and participated in the recover (my old navy ship actually helped recover one of the Apollo missions...but before my time).

    We put men, vehicles, golf clubs, and all sorts of things on the moon. But, isn't it strange that almost 30 years later, we have problems landing a probe on Mars...yet can land one on an asteroid. Could it be the the KISS principle is the best way to launch space vehicles?

    So...while national priority has not been focused on NASA, we can all look up in the night sky and, if the orbit is correct, see the ISS whizzing by. Kinda cool...don't you think?

    RD
  • It's not "moral relativism" that causes cynicism, it's being repeatedly lied to again and again. Americans (and most of the rest of the world) have been lied to so often and so thoroughly that they have been trained to believe exactly the opposite of what they are told by mainstream sources.

    Inside every cynic, there's a frustrated idealist.
  • They didn't send people, but they sent a bunch of probes. Anyway, if NASA hadn't, the soviets would probably have done it some time during 1970-71. It's a nice article here [fas.org].
  • by CommanderTaco ( 85921 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @11:38AM (#421533)
    You don't think it's a joke?? Um, some choice selections from the faq:

    5) Does the "middle corner" prove that 5=6?
    Yes.

    11) Does this fit in with the Hollow Earth theory?
    Yes. Beneath the Earth, or hanging off the edges, is a land populated by either green-skinned women or Nazis. All those claiming to have seen this have misinterpreted it to fit in with the spurious and false Spherical Earth theory.

    Sure, it's not a joke...
  • Armstrong claimed that he said "One small step for a man," and that the a was garbled in transmission. (This would certainly make more sense.)

    The conflict is over whether Armstrong's A was swallowed by the radio or he forgot to say it. The tapes have not been edited, they faithfully play back the less sensible version everyone heard and which you quoted accurately.

  • They most certainly did! Not with cosmonauts, no, but they landed several robotic explorers which did collect and bring home Moon samples. Not all Moon rocks were collected by the Americans.
  • No, the flag is held to the pole and also suspended from ANOTHER pole running along the top margin of the flag. No springs.

    Yes, I'm trying the Bruce Perens trick of writing something completely mistaken, getting modded up, and then earning more points for responding to the person who corrects me. ;-)

    I found this paper [nasa.gov] (awarded the Driver Award for the Best Paper Presented to the 26th Meeting of the North American Vexillological Association!) which has more information about the moon flag than anyone could possibly want. It's actually very interesting.

    Bottom line: you're right but the web site is still missing some information. The horizontal rod was not extended properly, wrinkling the flag and causing the appearance of waving. It looked better that way and later crews intentionally did the same thing.

    I still haven't achieved Bruce's specialty of getting a false or heavily unfair story posted and then raking in karma by replying to 25 different flames correcting him. ;-)

  • by anotherone ( 132088 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:41AM (#421546)
    I wonder, which would be simpler:

    To fake a moon landing and cover it up for 30+ years, or
    To actually land on the moon.

    Any thoughts?

    -------

  • "People take on the attitudes and values of the society that surrounds them, and what determines this society's values and world view is the whims of the 'intelligentsia' - in this case us, the eloi. "

    Nope. I don't buy this. People do take on the attitudes of the society surrounding them, but at the same time they help shape those attitudes. It goes both ways. People create and react to society simultaneously.

    Furthermore, I don't think that there's any extra strength or credence given to scientists or other members of the so-called intelligentsia in forming society's views. If anything, they're laughed at and ignored, in favour of the REAL shaper of society: The media.

    (important aside here: If I agree with any part of the 'postmodern' argument, it's this one: Many people don't believe scientists because it's currently unhip to believe us. Regardless, all that does is give us less of a chance to make a difference, not more responsibility to make the RIGHT difference)

    Anyways, the media is the key shaper of minds, mores, and values nowadays. They are the ones who should have some sense of responsibility and care, but instead they're hell-bent on making money at all costs, and the dumber a society is as a whole, the easier it is for them. So what do we do now?

  • Hubble's detectors were designed for long-term integration of faint objects. They would be damaged by being pointed at the sunlit Earth or Moon.

    The NSA does have some Hubble-class telescopes designed for imaging the Earth (some of this technology was borrowed for Hubble itself), but even diffraction limited optics on that scale won't quite do the job. Theoretical resolution at lunar distance is still more than a meter, which is not good enough to tell you anything useful.

  • we can see the "face" on Mars

    Not with telescopes we can't. To see Martian surface features smaller than continents you have to send orbiters.

    That being said, another way to put the issue to rest would be to go back. We've gotten very good at remote controlled probes. (Clementine, alas, wasn't quite good enough to image the landing sites either.) Unfortunately, there's an attitude that the moon isn't going to change much since it's geologically dead, so there's no point in sending orbiters which will basically be echoing information we already gathered in the 60's.

  • Even if it is an entertaiment progrma, it must be advertised throguout the show. Something like:

    Tonight: Humor at Fox:"How we never went to the Moon and why the peanut-butter has no butter". Featuring Bart Simpson, from a not-yet released comedy for MAD-TV.

    But if you got to the show in the middle of it, after the 2-seconds disclaimer broadcast, well, you may well think that it was indeed serious.

    Do you guys remember Orson Wells [filmsound.org] and "The War of the Worlds" [war-of-the-worlds.org] radio broadcast? If they had put commercials and had kept saying after them ("... and after this marvelous commercial of Chicken Soup Inc., let's now continue with the theatrical version of the book The War of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells...") nothing wrong could have happened [waroftheworlds.org].

    Is there any law that prohibits broadcasting dubious information ( = Hoaxes) in a news-informational mode?

    Regards, opkool

  • 1. Genuine coincidence. In the ancient past the moon was closer and appeared bigger and there were no annular solar eclipses; in the distant future it will be further away and there will be no total solar eclipses.

    Coincidences do happen; hang around in a casino long enough and you will see a surprisingly large number of them.

    2. Tides. Even today the Moon is trading Earth's rotational angular momentum for its own momentum of revolution, getting further away as Earth's day slows down. (See #1.) It takes energy to make the sea go up and down with the tides; this is where that energy comes from.

    Since the Moon is smaller than the Earth and had a lot less angular momentum of rotation to lose, its day eventually slowed to become equivalent to its orbital period. This is called "tidal lock."

  • by sharkey ( 16670 )
    The turtle couldn't help us.

    --
  • Also, it could be put forth that Schroedinger argues against the existence of objective fact

    Just a nitpick, but you're probably thinking of Heisenberg, of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Further, this only really applies on the quantum scale. You can be pretty sure of what road you're on, even when you look at the speedometer... ;-)


    --
    "Overrated" is "overfuckingused".
  • 1. The far side isn't "dark," it's "far." The entire moon experiences a 28-day light/dark cycle, but the near side has the Earth hanging in the sky at a relatively fixed point.

    2. We actually can see more than 50% of the moon's surface from the Earth -- IIRC about 58%. This is because the moon wobbles a bit around its lock point. This wobble is called "libration." As the moon retreats, changing the length of the month, the tides tend to keep the moon's rotation synchronized.

  • 2001 Dilbert Desk Calendar

    Sunday, February 11

    Now Scott Adams is not only spying on us at work, he's also reading /. :)
  • by Conrad_Bombora ( 225559 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:46AM (#421564)
    I watched the "moon landing cover up" show last week with some friends and I have to say it was the most asinine underhanded thing ever to be broadcast over the airwaves. The sad thing about this show is that threw clever editing of video and interviews taken out of context it was convincing to people of average intelligence unfamiliar with NASA. So convincing that my friends were buying into this shows conspiracy theory. I was constantly defending NASA threw out the entire program. It made me look like a shell to the government, like I was the crazy one not the guy on the show talking about a giant vacuumless film studio at area 51.
    The 2 things that really pissed me off were
    1. The use of unrelated video footage. Like footage from WW II of dieing Japanese children with radiation poisoning using that to illustrate what happens in the Van Allan belt.
    2. Saying NASA may have deliberately sabotaged Apollo 1 to keep Gus Grissom form blowing the whistle on the moon cover up. The narrator of the show said it was a strange unknown mystery how the fire was started and how it spread so rapidly. That's completely not true there are 1000 of pages documenting how the fire started and spread.

    In summery I now hate fox.
    They owe every one in the world an apology for airing this turd of a program.
    Fuck fox!
  • I thought the exact same thing - I was staggered when I saw that NASA denial! Hell, it even made mem think for a second that perhaps it WAS fake! ;-)

    Unfortunately the other explanation as to why NASA denied it - that they realize 90% of the public are complete idiots - is no doubt the truth.
  • OK, for the record, I DON'T give a toss for credentials--it's just that the only people I've met who use phrases like "The moral relativism and the relativism in all areas that it promotes..." have been second or maybe third year arts/philosophy students. Before that they don't have the total immersion required, and after that, they get some perspective.

    When I said people are stupid, I mean people are stupid. WAY too many people (the large majority) fail to use that grey matter for critical thinking. This doesn't require education, it just requires a willingness to think. Many people don't LIKE to think, and that's stupid behavior.

  • by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:49AM (#421570)
    "Should we tell them the truth about how all the chimps we sent into space came back super-intelligent?"
    "No, I don't think we'll be telling them THAT."

    "What if the alien doesn't show up?"
    "Then we'll fake it, and sell it to the FOX network."
    "Yeah, they'll buy anything!"
    "Now son, they do a lot of quality programming, too."
    --Pregnant pause--
    "Hahahahahahahahahaha!"

    --

  • The Flat Earth Society is meeting here today
    Telling happy little lies.
    and the bright ship humana is sent far away
    with grave determination....
    and no destination, lie, lie, lie

    C'mon, its a Bad Religion song. Sing along...

  • Why hasen't this tidal lock synchronized any of the planets rotation with their revolution about the sun, mercury for example.

    Actually Mercury is in the final stages of becoming tidally locked; it has already lost most of its rotational energy and its day is now synchronized to its year in a 2/3 harmony.

    Solar tides are less powerful than Earth's lunar tides because, while the Sun is a lot bigger than the Moon, it is one hell of a lot further away.

    Most of the moons of the gas giant planets are tidally locked just as Earth's moon is, and for the same reason.

  • by charvolant ( 224858 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @01:16PM (#421574) Homepage
    Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to odd phenomena, had an article by a "photographic expert" on this subject a while back. The usual claims were aired (secondary light source, cross hairs, etc.) The readers responded in force, and with some sarcasm.

    http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html [forteantimes.com] for the responses.

  • by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @01:25PM (#421577)
    People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore.

    There are very, very few examples of societies, regardless of how ancient, that believed the world to be flat. Humans have known the world was round pretty well since they started writing such things down. The idea of people who thought the world was flat was actually circulated during the 19th century, as the result of an ignorant schoolbook publisher.

    You don't have to take my word for it. Go to your library and read Jeffrey B. Russell's "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians" [fatbrain.com]

  • It should be noted that the Trailer Trash demographic also votes, complains to their Congresscritters, and generally questions the U.S.'s spending money on such "extravagances" as Apollo and the space program. NASA has to justify its existence every fiscal year in order to maintain even a skeleton-crew capability for space R&D. They have a terrible time recruiting young talent to work on the GS salary scale, and perhaps the only scientific organization whose credibility has suffered more in the eyes of the public of late is Los Alamos National Laboratory. With a proposed 1.6 trillion dollar tax reduction in the works, I think it is safe to say that scientific agencies in the U.S., including NASA, are in serious jeopardy when next year's budget comes out. Don't just take my word for it--read the Feb. 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal, where it was announced that the Bush Administration plans to chop the science investment to make room for a $1.6 trillion tax cut and rapid deployment of an NMD system.

    Given the impending budgetary crisis, it is hard to imagine a worse time for NASA's integrity to be questioned--doubly so if Fox's re-airing of the show this summer opens with a voice-over: "We have learned from hundreds of viewers of our first showing of this documentary that NASA, when confronted with these allegations of fraud and impropriety, refused to comment. Perhaps what we have to say hits too close to home.... We will let you, the viewer, decide."
  • by John Whitley ( 6067 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @12:04PM (#421591) Homepage
    Her eyes literally glazed over. I was in protracted-rant mode [...]
    Remember: the Rant is the ultimate form of "the medium is the message." That is, the Rant itself overwhelms the message to everyone except the already convinced. The unconvinced listener only hears the rant, and the message itself gets lost in the strident ring of emotion. The convinced listener echoes sympathy, but the effort is wasted (aka "Preaching to the Choir").

    When the urge to rant comes along, step back from it and consider a more relaxed approach. Don't preach, but instead engage your audience. One tactic: ask your audience what he/she/they think of the issue. This buys you a few things. 1) You'll sometimes pique interest where a rant would have quashed it. 2) You can gague whether your audience is at all receptive (and spare them if they aren't). 3) You set the tone for a calmer and more interactive discussion.


  • Man, now I am shattered. Why did you have to spoil it for me? A lifetime of wandering around aimlessly ruined completely by you! All this time I thought it was those pan dimensional beings known as mice running thier quaint little experiment on us mostly harmless hairless apes.

  • um, the simpsons is the reason why Fox doesn't completely suck. That's one of the best tv shows ever.
  • Considering the amount of misinformation about the Soviet moonn landings in reposnse to your post, here's an overview of the Soview moon program from NASA's own web site:

    http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html [nasa.gov]

    Notable points include the Soviets crashing Luna-2 into the moon as early as 1959, their unmanned retrival of lunar rocks from missions such as Luna 16 in 1970, and their series of unmanned lunar rovers ("Lunokhods") starting with the Luna 17 mission in 1970.

  • People watch television to be entertained. Conspiracy theory is like candy to the masses.

    More like soma to the masses.
  • I can't believe this is even up for debate. Fox really showed something claiming it was a hoax? Has the world gone nuts?

    This is several levels lower than any of those "ufo sightings" programs, though not as bad I suppose as claiming the Holocaust didn't happen...
  • Duh it was the Moon aliens!, really look at the angle, it was a camera on anohter leg of the LEM, thats why it looked so bad. It was a small camera stuck to the outside made to take the hard trip down.


    ________

  • Like "Pigeonhole Principle"?
    ----
  • Bring up an old controversy and the uneducated arrive in the masses, ready to absorb your advertisements.

    Yep - we have the 800-odd pounds of lunar rocks which couldn't have been produced on Earth (no water/oxygen) which are being studied. We also have the reflectors put on the moon which lets us measure by laser its distance from us to within a few inches (IIRC).

    Nevermind that the U.S. spent billions on the project and lost the original Apollo 13 crew in that launch test mishap, or the fact that they nearly lost the replacements forever. In any case, we know that we have had the ability to go into orbit - why would it be such a big stretch to believe that we've gone to the moon?

    Perhaps these people don't believe that we go into orbit either. Or maybe we made a clone of Neil Armstrong before he launched himself into tiny chunks to show off the "landing". Gimme a break. There's no conspiracy here.
  • by fence ( 70444 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:28AM (#421627) Homepage
    Seriously, folks--don't you think that if there was any proof that we didn't land on the moon that the Soviets would have brought it up a long time ago?

    The Apollo missions are among the greatest triumphs that mankind has ever achieved.
    Please don't let the conspiracy wackos persuade you otherwise.
    ---
    Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
  • The guy that worked on the cameras as well as the NASA guy on the program said that they crosshairs were etched into the camera so that they would be on every shot in the same place. They were not put on after they were developed. So the crosshairs would HAVE to be in front of any object.

    OK, the cameras weren't standard Hasselblad issue, NASA made some mods. Others have addressed the crosshair thing. It was also probably necessary to change some of the lubricants and mechanical stuff for proper operation in a vacuum.

    BTW you can see the cameras in many of the moon images. They were not custom-designed from the ground up, they look just like the ones used to shoot Vogue.

  • Did you see the show?

    Some of the photos show the Sun in front of the camera (behind the astronaut or LEM or other focal object) meaning that if it is the only source of light, the photos would show dark silhoettes. Instead, they show bright objects inside of shadows like there was a light source illuminating them. Therefore, there MUST be a different light source. The Earth's reflection isn't visible in the photos because it is behind the camera reflecting light onto the objects. The reflection of the Moon's surface is also a source of light.

    But you're right about the multiple shadows if there were more than one light source. I think the different shadow angles is the slope of land like you said.

    There must be multiple sources of light in the photos where the Sun is in the background or when a visible object is deep inside a shadow, but those sources don't have to be strong enough to cast shadows (or maybe the angle of light is straight up so that shadows won't exist from them).

    I don't know the exact details of lighting for photos or reflective power of Earth or anything, but I do know that we went to the Moon and that the show wasn't a very well researched case for a conspiracy.

  • Actually, I _was_ thinking of Schroedinger, and his cat; but then I got sidetracked towards uncertainty.

    And for the record, the uncertainty principle applies equally on all scales. However, the effect of it shrinks as scale increases, and so for more than a few atoms, is pretty much irrelevant. Correct, applicable, but irrelevant.

  • by chazR ( 41002 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @02:32PM (#421636) Homepage
    This URL seems to address all of the stupidities of the 'Apollo Hoax' nutters. Take a look. [demon.co.uk]

    I find it worrying that 4% of the population of the "Last Superpower" don't just believe in UFOs, they beleive they've been abducted by one.

  • People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off.

    You are right that showing people something is a definite proof to them but it is not as easy as that. We are dealing with historical events here.

    I grew up in the UK and got taught the standard UK History syllabus. However, when I was older I visited schools in other countries, including Russia and the Middle East. It suprised me to find that there were differences in what they were taught in history to what we were taught in the UK. My inital reaction was, "Of course, they're commies, what do you expect?" However, I have since come to look at some of our own history as somewhat dubious.

    During the Gulf War I was a member of the R.A.F. In the officers mess we used to get fax bullitins every day about the events in the Gulf. The faxes would state, what actually happenned in the Gulf and what the press were told. The stories weren't always the same. I used to watch the evening new knowing that what was being said was a half truth. Guess which version goes down in the history books?

    I am not saying that the moon landings were a hoax. I am just saying that we shouldn't take everything we read or get taught, for granted. It would have been easy for NASA to exaggerate and distort the happennings.

    It is the people who win the war...that write the history!

  • by Heidi Wall ( 317302 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:30AM (#421640)
    I think that postmodernism is the root cause of many of todays 'lunatic fringe' phenomena.

    The moral relativism and the relativism in all areas that it promotes, where anything will go, is at the root of these various groups alternative synthesises of the Universe, be it UFO freaks or people claiming that the moon landings never occurred.

    'Facts' are no longer believed in, and people think they can come up with all sorts of idiotic ideas. In this case we have the usual conspiracy theorising and reliance on big bad men with lots of power and a desire to hoodwink the public.

    Why have we become like this? Carl Jung postulated that there is a 'Collective Unconscious' which is common to all of us, and when we dream, individually and as a society, we are similar.

    Hence modern UFO sightings, he said, where the ancient 'Mandala' is interpreted by our SF crazy modern public as a UFO. In earlier times it may have been interpreted as an angel, or as the Virgin Mary.

    I think that postmodernism is undermining our belief in objective truth and fact, and is promoting these kind of crazy ideas. We shall have to be wary, and guard against it. There is such a thing as irrefutable fact, and we would do well to leave our ivory towers and preach to the public of its existance, before they are lost to a medieval belief system.
    --
    Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,

  • I didn't see the Fox show. But according to the USAtoday.com article, the conspiracy theorists (CTs) are suggesting Nixon struck a secret deal to sell the Soviets cheap wheat in exchange for their silence. Just as an exercise, let's examine this hypothesis a bit.

    First, there is no evidence for it. That would be enough to stop most people. But since these CTs would rather continue to extend their theory than to admit the far-simpler alternative (that there was no conspiracy), they just assert it.

    Second, the Soviets could (and did) buy grain from plenty of countries, such as Argentina. They were not dependent on American grain.

    Third, the Soviets are a tough people. They lost something like 20 million people defending their land against the Nazis. And the early leadership starved and murdered millions more of their own people, for political purposes. You think they would have given up the chance to shove the greatest humiliation in history into the face of their arch-enemy, just to save some money on wheat?

    Fourth, it would have been far, far, far more cost effective to expose the alleged Apollo conspiracy, and pay whatever the rest of the world wanted in wheat, than to continue their own moon program. In other words, just say "no one can get to the moon, and here's how the Americans faked it!". Boom, you've just saved $10-$20 billion, and 1% of that will buy you plenty of wheat, regardless of current prices. And you've won the Space Race. You were first in space, and the Americans have no firsts. And the American program would surely have collapsed in disgrace.

    Fifth, the Soviet-hush-fund sub-conspiracy now forces the expansion of the conspiracy circle, to include the President and members of his staff. Of course, this expansion will suggest many more potential problems. (Say, did Nixon remember to turn off his taping system for this?)

    Anytime an objection is raised to a conspiracy theory like this, the CTs respond by making the theory much more complicated, to "explain" the conflicting evidence. That, to put it mildly, is not the mark of a scientific theory. It is the mark of an unsound mind.
  • by ca1v1n ( 135902 ) <snook@gu a n otronic.com> on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:32AM (#421644)
    "Has sensational journalism gone too far? Find out at eleven!"
  • "I'm slowly learning to just live [with] stuff like this. ... [T]he best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them... The ignorance will just go away on its own"

    I disagree. The conspiratorial mind can refute any set of facts and explanatory theories, because the conspiratorial mind does not use tools of critical thinking (e.g., Occam's Razor). Rather the reverse; it adds conspiracy on top of conspiracy to patch together a spaghetti-code interpretation of the world.

    Conspiracy theorists did this after Greek geometers offered proofs that the world is round. And I expect they did it for years after Columbus' trips, too. There is no natural law guaranteeing people will eventually choose to be rational. The challenge needs to be met head on with every generation, because there are psychological benefits to believing what you already know, or what seems natural (flat earth), or what seems exciting ("Columbus faked his trips!").

    You cannot beat conspiracy theorists only by presenting the facts! You need to teach people critical thinking skills, logic, and enough background so that they can spot flaws for themselves.

    For example, whenever someone cc's me on an urban legend email, I mail them back (after some research) and try to do a bit of education on why the story is implausible, and point them to a resource like snopes.com. People have told me I've helped them become better at spotting fake stories.

    So when you write that "the ignorance will just go away on its own", my thoughts are:
    1. You're very optimistic, or else you're content with a much longer time scale than I am.
    2. The fact that you've given up means the rest of us have to work harder.

    I agree with you it can be frustrating to deal with these situations. But helping people to think more clearly not only gives them freedom from illogic and the agendas of others, but to the extent that it removes bogus memes from dominating the culture, it gives me more freedom, too. I think it's one of the most important jobs we can do as modern people.
  • I know that you've already claimed otherwise, but you are not questioning things as a skeptic--you're questioning them for the sake of being contrary.

    There are three questions you can ask about any bit of scientific research:

    1) What are the initial conditions and assumptions?
    2) Were the results interpreted correctly?
    3) Are there any other interpretations for the data?

    If the data is interpreted correctly and doesn't have any other possible interpretations, then the conclusion is correct for the initial assumptions, within the limits of the experiment. Anything that refines this process and comes to different conclusions doesn't make the previous experiment wrong, it corrects _incomplete_ initial assumptions or data.

    Also, questioning 1+1=2 is a complete and utter red herring. 1+1=2 is not a fact!!! It is, instead, a definition. Definitions and facts aren't the same thing.

    Science questions the initial assumptions and the interpretation of results. Non-science (conveniently close to nonsense :-) questions the logic of whether those results are really the "right" results. That's just silly.

  • by donglekey ( 124433 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @11:14AM (#421648) Homepage
    Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore

    This seems like a good time to bring up the flat earth society. [flat-earth.org] It turns out there are some very smart people who believe that the earth is flat because it can mathamatically proved, and I don't think that anyone had been able to find flaws in the mathamatical proof. Check it out, I don't think that it is a joke but definitly interesting.
  • by boarder ( 41071 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:32AM (#421649) Homepage
    I flipped to the show a couple times during commercial breaks of another show. All I saw was a bunch of convincing stories and "facts"... to someone who has no clue about real science and photography (let alone the multibillion dollar space industry).

    It was terrible, they made a huge effort to put holes in the pictures shot on the moon and saying there were two light sources (therefore one had to be artificial). All the pictures they showed, though, could be easily explained by the fact that on the moon the Earth is a decent source of light if the Sun is shining on it (which it was in the pictures). They said that NASA didn't send ANY artificial light sources up there; I don't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure they would have had to send SOME up there. They also played on the fact that some of the pictures had similar backgrounds, but totally different foregrounds. This was just ignorant in my opinion because when they superimposed pictures with different foregrounds (ie the LEM at it's landing site, and then one without it) the back ground was still the "same" mountain structure, but shifted or a resized. Can't that be explained be being a different distance away? Yes.

    I also never really saw any interviews with ex-NASA employees or anyone with any real connection to the space program (now or at the time), but just with photographers and conspiracy theorists (not many scientists). I didn't see the entire program, though, so I could be wrong. I just couldn't stand to watch it because it was so awful.

  • Hear Ye! Well put.

    (Yes, this is just a 'me too' post. Oh well!)

  • I meant to say, at what rate is the moon increasing or decreasing its rate of revolution, so that the far side will face us, but now understand you to be saying that it never will???

    Right. Nearside has been facing the Earth for at least a billion years. (There were figures on this in Rare Earth but I don't have them handy.) From now on, as the moon spirals outward and the month gets longer, the tides will tend to slow its rotation down too so nearside continues to face the Earth.

  • by No Such Agency ( 136681 ) <abmackay.gmail@com> on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:33AM (#421659)
    Launching a Saturn V in front of thousands of in-person witnesses is pretty hard to fake. And once you've built and launched a Saturn V (have you seen one of these suckers? They're huge!) you might as well fly to the moon, because you're already halfway there! And NASA launched how many of them? Um, yeah, I thought so. Pretty pointless to fake the moon at that point I think.

    Argument #2: if the moon landings had been faked, the Soviets would have known, just like they knew most of the USA's major secrets at the time (and vice versa of course). You think they would have kept quiet about it? Of course not! The best they did was to land a rover on the moon (which is still nothing to sneeze at) - if the human landing had been a fake they would have loved to let the world know about it.

    I caught a few minutes of this program when it was on and my first thought was "Oh look, a sequel to "Alien Autopsy: Truth or Hoax?". Because that's basically all it was. You can get an "expert" on just about anything to go on camera all bearded and expert-looking and say whatever you want. Too bad the general public doesn't quite get that concept yet... :^(

  • by AstronomyDomine ( 135177 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @12:24PM (#421660)
    wasn't so much the show. I knew the show would be bad. For Fox, par for the course. Though the suggestion that Grissom, White, and Chaffee were murdered was really pretty sick, even for Fox.

    What got me was some of the advertisers. Gateway? Sprint PCS? Would any of these companies even exist without the space program? What hypocrisy!

    Seriously, does anyone have a list of advertisers during the show? I only saw the last 20 minutes or so, but I remember Gateway, Sprint, and Dodge. Perhaps we should write the advertisers and let them know their support for this dreck sucks. Fox dislikes criticism like masochists dislike whipping. They'll probably send a thank you note to NASA and badastronomy.com for the free publicity...

  • Why is moonlight so implausible? The surface of the moon reflects light the same as any other lightly colored object.

    Light reflects off of snow and ice as well as sand on the beach or the desert. Why should the Moon be any different? Is this light somehow disqualified from behaving as a mild source of illumination simply because it doesn't 'make sense' to you?

  • (warning: off-topic)
    I think that postmodernism is the root cause of many of todays 'lunatic fringe' phenomena.

    And I think that the cult of objectivity has been the root cause of thousands of years of human tragedy. The truth is a constant, fluid concept which we constantly redefine -- or do you still think that the "objective truth" of a flat earth is worth hanging to defend?

    Alternatively, have you ever read Aristotle's defense of slavery? Nazi reasoning for the Holocaust? Documents of religious indoctrination? . . . etc: All are based on the assumption of The One True Truth. Hogwash, I say.

    'Facts' are no longer believed in, and people think they can come up with all sorts of idiotic ideas.

    . . . like quantum physics, or relativity (Einstein, not moral), or chaos, or visiting the moon...

    In this case we have the usual conspiracy theorising and reliance on big bad men with lots of power and a desire to hoodwink the public.

    Au contraire: those who are trying to hoodwink the public are those who are promoting their ideas as the 'one true way': fundies, libertarians, tyrants, the politburo... (Yes, that was a troll. Flame away, libbies!) What better way to propogate an ideology than by refusing to admit the existence, let alone validity of alternatives?

    When I'm writing software, it's obvious I can't model the 'Truth.' So I try to pick and choose a decent-enough model to achieve my goals -- but it will never be a True model. It's an approximation, and that's the best we can do, when programming or when thinking. To forget that is to lose touch with reality, and to fall down the slippery slope of dogma. (Or, two release cycles later, really krufty code.)

    There is such a thing as irrefutable fact,

    Au contraire, all facts are refutable. See? Look, I'm refuting you. Nyaaah!

    Further reading:
    • Bertolt Brecht, Galileo
    • James Gleik, Chaos
    • Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    and lots more; those are just what comes to the top of my head. (Zen.. I read recently. Great book, especially for coders/technical folk.)
  • by Jaysyn ( 203771 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:36AM (#421675) Homepage Journal
    It's pretty bad when the most believible show on your network is the Simpsons.

    Jaysyn
  • Umm ... The Apollo 13 crew (Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, Jack Sweigert) returned to Earth, safe and sound. The crew that was lost in the launch test mishap was the Apollo 1 crew (Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee).

    -
  • Are you the real Heidi Wall [stonehenge.com]?
    Cause if you are, you're a total babe.
    Wanna get a cup of coffee some time?
    --Shoeboy
  • by q000921 ( 235076 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @12:28PM (#421680)
    We may laugh this off, but this kind of nonsense has a corrosive effect. Even if I tell you that I'm going to tell you a lie, a false statement I make to you has been shown to influence your thinking and judgement later. Multiply that effect by several hundred million and who knows what happens? How much funding is NASA going to lose because of the false impressions this kind of show creates? The only thing I can see doing about this sort of thing is to express your outrage. If you subscribe to cable, unsubscribe and let them know why. When it comes to the dangers of media, this is the kind of stuff politicians should worry about.
  • by localroger ( 258128 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @06:30PM (#421681) Homepage
    This page [lowell.edu] shows that Pluto and its moon Charon are tidally locked, just like Earth and Luna.

    This page [nasa.gov] shows that Jupiter's moon Amalthea is tidally locked.

    This page [hawaii.edu] discusses the case of Mercury, which as I said isn't yet tidally locked but does have a day tidally related to its year. "Although Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, its rotational period is tidally coupled to its orbital period. Mercury rotates one and a half times during each orbit."

    This page [spacescience.com] states that all four of Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked.

    That took about 5 minutes. Altavista found a total of 499 pages containing the phrase "tidally locked."

  • by DoorFrame ( 22108 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:38AM (#421686) Homepage
    Guh. Just because something is commerically driven does not mean it's void of merit. Of course this particular show, which I didn't see, may be devoid of merit. Here's why:

    Fox News is arguably a news channel. This means that in order for people to watch it as a news channel (and not entertainment) it needs to maintain some level of credibility with the public. Every time it airs a story that is erronious or foolish, people have less respect for thier journalistic integrity and will not watch it as news. You, for example, may think less of it. As their demographic changes from a news wanting audience to an entertainment wanting audience they'll move farther and farther into the trash that you decry. That's what their audience will demand and that's what they'll have to provide.

    Now, channels like CNN want to remain a news based channel and they mostly act accordingly. You respect them for their news and even though they are commerically driven they're fairly respectable.

    It's all just a question of news versus entertainment. It seems that Fox News is heading more down the "A Current Affair" entertainment route. Don't decry it for that.

    --

  • I'm slowly learning to just live stuff like this. The badastronomy.org link has beeen on Slashdot before, so I have checked it out. When I saw a commercial for the Fox special, I went on a 2-minute explanation to my girlfriend about how most of the evidence that we DIDN'T go to the moon is, in fact, better applied to the argument that we DID. Her eyes literally glazed over. I was in protracted-rant mode; clearly hellbent on showing the world how ignorant it really is, incited by things I read on Slashdot.

    I'm sick of making peoples' eyes glaze over. This stuff is definitely News for Nerds. It's definitely Stuff that Matters. But honestly, the world is very fickle about what it chooses to believe. There will always be people who say the landings were faked, as long as it's one person's word against another's.

    People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore. The downside to this process is that nobody really gets the satisfaction of saying "I convinced the world they were wrong." The upside is, the ignorance is eventually conquered.

    I guess what I'm saying is, don't let this, nor the misuse of the word "hacker," or anything else make you feel like we need a grass-roots movement to end the stupidity. The ignorance will just go away on its own, to be replaced by more sophisticated ignorance :)
  • by alienmole ( 15522 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @12:32PM (#421696)
    In every class I teach I tell my students to question the things I tell them. I hope and expect that they will.

    That's good, since judging by your message, you don't have a very good grasp of the issues you're discussing.

    You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests, which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of mathematics.

    You're also seriously confusing facts, interpretation of evidence, hypotheses, theories, and beliefs. Unless you're going to take things to the point of saying "this could all be a dream", all sorts of essentially "irrefutable" facts do exist. When it comes to logical, mathematical and scientific knowledge, we also have the ability in many cases to categorically determine whether a hypothesis is or isn't valid. In other areas, we aren't able to be so definitive, but we can be sure of the accuracy of a successful theory to a degree equal to our ability to test it.

    An example might be Newton vs. Einstein: Einstein's special relativity replaced Newton's theories of motion, and general relativity replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, but in both cases, even though Einstein's theories have enormous conceptual consequences, the quantitative effect was relatively small and only affects extreme situations. While Newton's theories held force, they could be demonstrated to hold true under any circumstance which could be devised to test them. Once testing became more sophisticated, i.e. the evidence available to us changed, it became clear that the theory, while accurate to a point, didn't account for all cases, and more refined theories had to be developed.

    The history of science has been characterized by this process: as we gather more evidence about the world around us, so we are able to develop better theories about how that world works. Galileo came to his understanding about the solar system based on his use of a telescope, a tool not previously available. In the early history of science, there were many cases in which large assumptions were made due to the limitations on the evidence available at the time. Theories about the Earth or the Sun being at the center of the universe were such theories: they were based not so much on evidence as on belief. As such, it's not completely accurate to characterize these beliefs as "science".

    The point of all this is that when it comes to "hard" scientific knowledge, it is possible to assess the facts and theories we rely on as to the degree of "truth" they contain. Rather than talk in black and white terms, it is better to talk about degrees of certainty. On many subjects, we come close enough to 100% certainty to be able to talk about "irrefutable" facts. On other subjects, such as quantum physics, we're acutely aware of the shortcomings in existing theories, and are actively looking for ways to improve or replace those theories.

    This process has been in progress for a few thousand years now - the process of gathering evidence, interpreting it, and developing theories to account for it. On many fronts, we're asymptotically approaching an "irrefutable" position, and the only reason postmodernists don't recognize that is because they haven't spent the time to understand it. It's certainly true that if one believes a theory is false, and refuses to consider the evidence that it is true, it will remain false, for you, even as you fall to your death over a cliff in an arc described by Newton's laws.

    Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that even the physical laws of our universe only apply locally. And as I understand it, quantum physics tells us that nothing is impossible, just very very very unlikely.

    It's silly to talk about such things when you clearly don't understand them. In what way do "the physical laws of our universe only apply locally"? What relativity says is simply that measurements necessarily apply to a reference frame. It's actually one of the most intuitive theories in existence today, and can be derived from first principles on a piece of paper, using simple thought experiments. It certainly doesn't create any uncertainty about the laws of physics throughout the universe. As for quantum mechanics, your understanding doesn't match that of the scientific community. It's true that any individual particle, while undergoing some change or interaction, has the potential to do all sorts of strange things, with some of the stranger ones constrained only by being statistically very unlikely. However, the mathematics of the quantum wave function, which is one of the most well-tested formulae in existence, shows that every interaction which a particle undergoes with its environment reduces the possibilities available to it, so that impossible things remain impossible, and you don't come home to find your sofa hanging three feet above the floor.

    Having said all that, it certainly isn't possible or wise to ignore the social construction issues and linguistic/conceptual constraints which we all, as non-omnipotent beings, face. But that doesn't mean that all beliefs are created equal. I agree with you that skepticism is important, but never more so than when evaluating the application of postmodernist relativism to hard science.

    The softer sciences, of course, are another story entirely, but that's largely because of the issue I've already mentioned: solid evidence is harder to come by, which necessitates much assumption. But we know this, and if we're being honest, we can assign a lesser degree of certainty to our theories about anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.

  • The cameras shown are completely ordinary looking 2 1/4 inch SLR's. They are not 35mm cameras, and as with most 2 1/4 inch cameras the primary viewfinder is a ground glass on top of the viewfinder. This is the normal arrangement for a 2 1/4 inch SLR or TLR. You operate it by holding it at your waist and looking down at the ground glass to aim and focus.

    Pentaprism viewfinders are available for these cameras as external accessories which mount atop the camera body. This gives you a rear viewfinder as found on most 35mm cameras. Naturally, the Apollo astronauts used the top viewfinder, since holding the camera up to your eye is impractical in a space suit.

    And yes, I do know what I am talking about. The main reason I do not own a 'blad myself is that 2 1/4 inch SLR's are very expensive. I do own two Mamiya TLR's in a similar format, and did quite a bit of shopping, pricing, and trying-out back in the 80's when I was into film photography.

  • by Soft ( 266615 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:40AM (#421700)
    Sure enough, that show was crap, Apollo was a success, NASA did send people to the moon.

    But sometimes I think of Apollo as having done more harm than good for the space program, not in the sense of having been expensive and useless (which it wasn't IMO), but of having desensitized the public while not going far enough.

    The point is, Apollo's goal never was to do good science, setting up an outpost and/or preparing to colonize the Moon; a lot remains to be done there. But now, in the eyes of the public, going to the Moon "has already been done", is expensive, etc.

    So maybe we should tell them all it was a hoax, perhaps they'll be more supportive of new Moon landings?

  • by Flabdabb Hubbard ( 264583 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:40AM (#421702) Homepage Journal
    I mean, if there is a conspiracy, they are hardly going to admit it, are they ?

    Anyway, what I find more offensive is that US taxpayers money is spent on garbage like astronomy, when it has been widely debunked. The idea that my future depends on the position of uranus when I was born disgusts me, and quite frankly I find it hard to take this idiots seriously.

  • I beleive that the moon landings were a hoax.

    I worked for Grumman Aerospace 10 years after the Luner Module (LEM) project, with Grumman had done. After seeing and working with the engineers there, I was convinced that they would not be capable of making a functional lunar module.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth

    It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)

    Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.

    Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!

    Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
  • by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @12:41PM (#421709) Homepage Journal
    Come on, do you think that whoever scheduled that crap even cares whether there's anything to the apollo hoax fable? It's all about ratings, and controversy is good for ratings. And if you can have controversy without getting anybody killed [go.com] or suborning prostitution [fox.com], so much the better.

    __________________

  • No message. OT: Why can't you post no body and just put (nm) in your subject to save people the trouble of opening it. Lots of folks do this on webboards everywhere, but not on slashdot.
    ---

  • You know, the moon astronauts left a reflector on the moon. Anyone can get the co-ordinance from NASA and shoot a laser up there to check the distance between the earth and the moon.

    Is that proof enough for ya?

    But I digress. The real problem here is, well, I can't believe you Yanks would let anyone, let alone a national network like FOX, broadcast such lies regarding the greatest accomplishment of the United States of America.

    I mean, one of the few times that not just a nation, but an entire world came together when a human being left the earth and stood on another island in the stars. He looked back and blotted out the Earth with his thumb.

    Human kind would never be the same again.

    Until about 30 years later when we all forget about it, don't care, and we crassly sell cheap cable TV shows debunking one of the few times in our horrible war torn history when humans stopped slaughtering each other for a few months.

    Thanks FOX executives. I hope a meteor falls on your heads.

    ______
    jeff13
  • Thank you . We will get back to you as soon as possible. Right now, let's look at the situation in where is on the scene. Is anything new happening there ?

    Better that than having the entire sequence of events compressed into a one-minute news bite, then sandwiched between a 10 minute "news" piece on a new sitcom that network is producing and a 10 minute scare piece based on pseudoscientific drivel ("is something in cereal HURTING YOUR CHILDREN?!")
    --
  • The moon is geologically stable, dead, as it were. There's little for us to learn there, really, the rock makeup has shown to be fairly uniform, so we wouldn't gain much by a second trip. It's not like anything has changed on the moon in the last few decades. To do anything interesting would involve things like heavy drilling or excavating, and think about the uproar that would cause...
  • by wayne ( 1579 ) <wayne@schlitt.net> on Sunday February 18, 2001 @03:50PM (#421719) Homepage Journal
    In one of the classic posts to rec.humor.funny (ca 1992) is the one about astronauts not falling off the moon because they were wearing heavy boots [netfunny.com].

    After reading the post, there were a couple of followups where teachers asked this question on some tests:
    Test Questions 1 [netfunny.com]
    Test Questions 2 [netfunny.com]

  • Anecdotal supplement to your first argument:

    One of my professors in schoool was the guy responsible for calculating the trajectory from Earth to the Moon (& back). Once the vehicle left earth orbit, it followed a path charted out by William Owen, now PhD and a professor [usouthal.edu] at the University of South Alabama.

    There had to have been dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people like him that had a direct role in getting the spacecraft there & back again. If this whole thing was a hoax, he probably would have known it, and a whole lot of other people besides him would have known it. Swearing such a large group of people -- mostly civilians, mind you -- to secrecy is probably just about impossible.

    How then can it have remained such a big secret? Aside from Dan Ackroyd's character in "Sneakers" [1], this is a pretty minor conspiracy theory, and one with far less supporting evidence than some of the others. The people at Fox seem to have spent too much time watching the X-Files and believing every minute of it.

    [1] And let's not forget some of Mr Ackroyd's other wacky ideas, e.g. all the nutty stuff he said in everything from "Ghostbusters" to "Grossse Pointe Blank" -- that wasn't just part of the script, he really believes in astral projection, Gozer, etc. Hardly a good spokesperson for a solid scientific discussion...



  • I Want to believe.
  • First of all, I think you're overestimating the influence of academic postmodernism on non-academic society. I don't think the people who buy into these paranoid delusions are on the cutting edge of metaphysical theory here, and I think even most of those who do subscribe to postmodernism do so only in the abstract, and don't really subscribe to the notion of subjective reality (who was it who said "There are no cultural relativists in a plane at 20,000 feet"?)

    I think one of the reasons we're seeing so much of this drivel lately is because of a few reasons. One, we just ended a 50 year cold war where the government encouraged paranoia. Two, the presentation of entertainment as news has been shown to be commercially succesful. This doesn't mean everyone's believing in it, just that they find it entertaining. Three, the wretched state of scientific knowledge in the general population (at least in the US). This isn't a result of some philosophical movement in the universities, and it's not simply the fault of the schools. Most adults don't really seem to give a damn about acquiring any real scientific knowledge; this has actually gotten somewhat better in recent years I think (witness the popularity of scientist-writers such as Hawking and Gould). The combination of paranoia, desire for entertainment, and scientific illiteracy is driving most of this pseudoscience I think, not just because they read a little too much Foucault.
    --
  • You're correct. The Earth is significantly larger (solid angle subtended is what's important) and has a much larger albedo (fraction of light reflected, moon~0.05, earth~0.4 in visible) than the moon. So earthshine is more than an order of magnitude brighter on the moon than moonshine is on the earth.

    Although, I'm not sure about the phase of the earth during the moon landings. For all I know, there may have been a technical reason for doing the landings at some particular phase. There might have been one or several lunar landing at a time (near full moon, near new earth) when most of the earth was not lit by the sun, significantly reducing the earthshine. But if the landing did occur during different phases, then maybe the brightness of shaddows could be used to test the moon landing hypothesis. For some reason, I think I can guess what the results would be.
  • we have the 800-odd pounds of lunar rocks which couldn't have been produced on Earth

    And will soon lead to the destruction of same [sfsite.com]! Buwahahaha!!!!!

    __________________


  • 1. In the Midrashim (Jewish legends from
    0 through 300 AD) there's a story of a rabbi
    who joins an Arab on the trade routes and
    reaches the place where the earth meets the sky.
    This should be no surprise, as Jewish cosmology
    started out derived from Babylonian cosmology,
    with a Heaven, Earth, and Sheol.


    2. Herodotos discusses a Phoenician ship
    that circled Africa (clockwise)
    in the heydey of the
    Persian empire. The Phoenicians come back
    after 2 years and report that at one
    point during their journey the sun rose
    and set to starboard. (This would be
    at the Cape of Good Hope.) Herodotos,
    being a flat earther, says he does not believe them. This is how we know the trip
    actually took place.


  • by Daemosthenes ( 199490 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:44AM (#421735)
    The FOX TV network has cancelled plans for a "Vietnam: Was it a Hoax?" shockumentary, as well as a "Cuban Missile Crisis: JFK's Popularity Stunt" miniseries...


    47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
  • by quickquack ( 152245 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:45AM (#421737) Homepage
    These are quite a good (and funny) read.

    http://www.primeline-america.com/moon-ldg/ [primeline-america.com]
    http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/eth69.html [angelfire.com]
    http://batesmotel.8m.com/ [8m.com]
    http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html [forteantimes.com]

    Some people are crazy too, like this guy, who says the MOON is a fake. [reptiles.org]
    ------------
  • Yes, I think that ___-ism is the root cause which undermines our collective belief in ___-ism and post-___-ism. Hence, current society gravitate towards ___-ism with a vengence.

    It is sad, perhaps, but such ___-vistic ___-ism is an important facet of our ___-ism beliefs. Hence, our dillemma.

    We have reached a stage in our development where facts and beliefs are intertwined in both post-___-ism and pre-___-ism thinking. It is impossible to untangle the Giodion Knot without resort to ___-ism, thus we resigned ourselves to ___-visitic thinking.

    (Inspired by the Prof Sokal).
  • ... pretty funny. Obviously they're getting a bit tired of having to refute claims that their greatest accomplishment was nothing more than some sort of "2001 remade as some kind of nationalistic publicity stunt" hoax. The writeoff at the end is best though:

    Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, the STS-98 crew is preparing to come home [....]

    Heh. They've been trying to shoot this down since 1977, yet people still give them a hard time about it. I'd be annoyed too. Hell, I *am* annoyed. Why do people fall for this kind of crap?



  • The cross-hairs were on the cameras, not pre-printed on the film. Things are very bright on the moon, owing to the lack of an atmosphere, and the fact that the earth is around 100x brighter in the sky than the moon is on earth. Very bright light bleeds into dark areas on film. (Have you ever accidentally overexposed a picture?) In pictures of bright objects (well-lit mountains, etc...) where the crosshairs overlap the both bright and dark areas, they appear to slide behind the bright objects because the bright light bled into the (very very narrow) dark area created by the crosshairs.

    I didn't see the show, but if the nasa guy said that there were crosshairs on all the pictures, he was mistaken. There were crosshairs on all the *cameras*.
  • > Your statement is erroneous, I assume you _meant_ to say "prove that the sun is the center of the solar system
    > and not the earth".

    Nope. I said what I wanted to say. Read the rest of my post.

    And it would be a trivial exercise to prove that the Sun is the center of the Solar System; otherwise it'd be called the **Terrestrial** System. ;)

    Geoff

  • Ack! . . . skepticism closing in . . . All Slashdot readers actually . . . perl scripts written by the Man . . . all of reality constructed to manipulate me . . . must not interact . . . must not . . .

    [KABAM!]

  • Of course the ignorant will eventually go away. When they die. Of course, you have to live with their kids, then. With any luck, they won't successfully reproduce. Since bad habits are contagious (possibly stupidity, too), perhaps their descendants will eventually forget to breathe and die out entirely.

    I'm not sure if it was Plank, Rutherford, or some other really famous scientist, but one of them said (loosely quoting) "Scientific theories don't become laws because of repeated failure to disprove the theories. Rather, they become laws because all of their opponents die."

    -Paul Komarek
  • I really wish people would make an effort to educate themselves before making statements like this:

    If the Hubble can zoom in on galaxies that are millions of light years away i'm sure it resolve a LEM on the moon only a few hundred thousand miles away.

    Distance is not the issue.

    Repeat: Distance is not the issue.

    When you're observing an object with a telescope, there are two factors that come into play: brightness (visual magnitude) and apparent size (how large the object appears to be in the sky.) For example, take the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, which is the spiral galaxy M31 (The Great Andromeda Galaxy.) This object lies at a distance of 3 million light-years, but has an apparent size that is larger than that of the full Moon! (Think about that .. how large must that galaxy be!)

    The usefulness of a telescope is largely a factor of how much light it can collect, not how many times it can magnify an object! When I have my telescope out in the backyard and I'm looking at galaxies tens of millions of light-years away, I typically use an eyepiece that gives me 50X magnification. This is more than sufficient because galaxies are large objects! Even at distances of tens of millions of light-years, 50X is more than enough to see them. Higher resolutions are useful for resolving spiral arms and the like, but ridiculous magnifications are not terribly useful when imaging remote galaxies.

    In fact, there is a practical limit to the amount of magnification that a telescope can provide. This usually amounts to 50X per inch of aperture (the diameter of the primary mirror.) So if your telescope has an 8" mirror, the maximum practical magnification you can expect is 400X. (Note that this means that the cheapo Tasco scopes that are sold in department stores that promise "650X" with a 2-inch mirror are complete bullshit.)

    But let's look at the Hubble, and your expectation that it should be able to view artifacts from the lunar landings. For a telescope with a circular collecting area of diameter D (2.4 m for Hubble), the smallest feature that one can resolve at wavelength L (550 x 10^-9 m for visible light) is given roughly by:

    resolution = 1.4 L/D = 3.2 x 10^-7 radians

    This estimate gives the "diffraction limited" resolution, or the resolution based on light's wave-like characteristics. It is difficult to improve upon this limit.

    The distance to the Moon is roughly 240,000 miles. Hubble's resolution corresponds to a physical dimension of

    size = x = 0.08 miles = 405 feet = 124 meters

    This is about the size of a football field .. obviously much larger than any of the artifacts left over by the moon landing!
  • by localroger ( 258128 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:47AM (#421758) Homepage
    The Earth is flat. It is only 6,000 years old, and is actually sitting on the shells of four very large tortoises. Film at 10.

    Later: Is Clinton more evil then Hannibal Lecter?

  • by localroger ( 258128 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:51AM (#421770) Homepage
    A few moon rocks and the non-stick frying pan

    Teflon was not invented for heat shields. (It would perform poorly as one.) It was invented for the Manhattan Project, where it was used to create grease-free seals in the miles of pumps and piping in the Y-12 gaseous diffusion U235 separation plant.

  • by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @09:51AM (#421786) Journal
    Holy crap, what year of your BA are you in? This sounds like an essay written for a metaphysics class by a terribly _earnest_ student with a dictionary.

    Furthermore, postmodernism is generally ascribed to a movement in art, literature, or so on. Postmodernist _existence_ is a bit of a leap. Postmodernist science is something of an oxymoron.

    Facts and objective truth have never been too well received by the general populace. _Never._ There's nothing special about our current time that makes us more susceptible to it, other than perhaps that we have _more_ information and differing (sometimes nonsensical) viewpoints than ever before. Jung's 'collective unconscious' in a very limited way is true, but completely irrelevant to this argument. If we once thought of visions from heaven where we now see UFOs, we're still interpreting things as subjectively as ever.

    Also, it could be put forth that Schroedinger argues against the existence of objective fact, or at least against the possiblity of ever knowing anything objectively. The act of observing affects the observation always and fundamentally. There's no way around it. What's objective then?

    Regardless, we can drag yet ANOTHER Name into this discussion to explain it all: Occam, and his lovely razor. The simplest explanation in this case is that most people are just fucking STUPID. We are a race of stupid people, many of who willfully refuse to use their powers of logical thinking and deduction. Seems like as life gets easier, we get worse at it too.


  • by donutello ( 88309 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:11AM (#421825) Homepage

    Q:What do you call someone who's crazy about the moon?

    A lunatic

  • by localroger ( 258128 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:01AM (#421847) Homepage
    1. The lack of any dust on the landing feet of the lunar lander. (It would seem to me a landing like that would kick up quite a bit of dust, some of which would setttle on the landing feet)

    Dust does not "kick up" in a vacuum. It follows the same trajectory as a rock. Dust blown away from the lander during its descent would not land on the lander.

    2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon.

    The astronauts used standard Hasselblad 2-1/4 inch film cameras and TV cameras. These cameras do not put "crosshairs" on the film. Those would have been added later. I haven't seen the show or the pix you are referring to, but I do know that some pix I have seen on the Web have clearly been tampered with -- not by NASA but by someone else out to make "unbelievable" moon photos.

    3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)

    The moon's surface isn't entirely dust and sand, it is also rock. Again, there is no atmosphere; only particles big enough to be directly moved by the blast force will be moved at all, and they will follow a parabolic trajectory away from the lander. They will hit the ground long before the hatch is opened as there is no atmosphere to suspend them.

    4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?

    Not really. The LEM didn't need a lot of thrust to lift off (1/6 gravity), and there was no atmosphere to carry the blast sound back to the lander. The lander's engine noise might have been comparable to the hiss of gas escaping under pressure from a container -- a high frequency not readily picked up by low-frequency mikes and not readily transmitted through the frame of the lander.

  • by llywrch ( 9023 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:04AM (#421851) Homepage Journal
    > I'm waiting for Murdoch to green light the Fox special "The Great Holocaust Hoax" and "The Great Spherical Earth Hoax."

    LOL

    Years ago when I was in Junior High, I had a Science Teacher who posed a very simple, yet very challenging question:

    Prove that the Sun is the center of the Universe, & not the Earth.

    (For the sake of the exercise, he ignored the question whether the Sun is in revolution around another point, or that point is in revolution around still another point.)

    The point of this exercise was not to convince us that Gallileo & Copernicus was wrong, but to consider facts & draw our own logical conclusions. Most people would have to say that the Earth rotates around the Sun because that's what they were taught in school. And some of these people eventually realize that that not everything they learned in school was correct, & so start questioning other things they were taught.

    Such as Evolution. Or the Holocaust. Or whether the Earth is round.

    And when someone questions these things, instead of an informed argument, the questioner is greeted with derision & unsympathetic laughter. Very similar to the youthful nerd who asks a difficult question of her/his teacher that shows she/he knows more than the instructor. Or that she/he bothered to do the homework.

    Or begins twisting another person away from logical thinking into the land of superstition & faulty thinking. Read the books of L. Ron Hubbard with a critical eye, & you will be amazed what bizarre creations one can create based on urban legend, lazy research & a fevered imagination.

    Geoff

  • by jamiemccarthy ( 4847 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:06AM (#421856) Homepage Journal

    "So, can anyone explain to me why these things happened?"

    Three of your four questions were answered in the link given in the article [badastronomy.com].

    Another good source was Michael Shermer's "E-Skeptic" email for February 17, 2001. I won't copy and paste it in because I don't know if that's allowed; unfortunately I also can't find it online at the Skeptic magazine website [skeptic.com]. Oh well...

    "The nasa guy on the show commonly said that their arguements did not make sense, but he never actually said why. He never gave any explanation for their arguements, just a general, that guys crazy."

    As Skeptic's writeup commented,

    "Unfortunately, this NASA guy had obviously never read any of the conspiracy claims, or the answers to them, for this is the biggest no-brainer debunking in skeptical history that anyone who actually knew something about the Apollo space program could have handled."

    This is a common trick used by sensationalistic crap TV. They have an "expert" who has not had time to think about debunking the specific issues, and then frame the presentation as if his failure to immediately respond means that all scientists everywhere are similarly dumbfounded. This is not science, it's National Enquirer type entertainment.

    "1. The lack of any dust on the landing feet of the lunar lander. (It would seem to me a landing like that would kick up quite a bit of dust, some of which would setttle on the landing feet)."

    The badastronomy.com link [badastronomy.com] given in the story writeup answers this.

    First, the lunar dust is denser than what we think of as dust; it's apparently more like dense sand.

    Second, your intuition about how much dust would be "kicked up" is based on your experience in an atmosphere. If you spread out dust and blow straight down into it, the pressure of your breath into the atmosphere will spread around the dust a lot more than your breath alone. You'll see dust curling up and around, and being pushed out, and drifting down slowly, due to the atmosphere.

    With a rocket in a vacuum, only those dust particles directly pushed by the rocket exhaust move. An area directly underneath the rocket would be swept clean, but just a few feet away there may be no effect -- or there may be thicker dust because what was under the rocket had to go somewhere.

    "2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon."

    The badastronomy.com link [badastronomy.com] given in the story writeup answers this.

    It's bleed-over. When the thin black lines appear in front of something light-colored, the exposed film appears to erase the thin black lines. You see this all the time, and it's something photographers have to be aware of.

    Besides, what is the claim here? That NASA didn't actually use crosshair cameras in their $30 billion "simulated" moon landing? Is the theory that NASA instead went out of their way to meticulously paint black crosshairs on the background of the photo? Absurd.

    "3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)"

    The badastronomy.com link [badastronomy.com] given in the story writeup answers this.

    See number 1 above. The crater was there, but more localized than your experience in an atmosphere would expect.

    Also, the main point here is the rocket motor which the non-moonie suggests had "30,000 pounds" of thrust. Guess what? It had a throttle. Would the astronauts endanger their lives and mission by roaring down at the surface at maximum velocity so that they had to have the throttle wide-open to land? Of course not.

    They did the 30,000-pound burns high above the surface, and by the time they were a few feet above the surface, it was operating at a fraction of its capacity.

    "4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?"

    I didn't see the show and I don't know what was said about this; this is the only point that isn't addressed at badastronomy.com or in the Skeptic writeup.

    I guess the issue is that the LEM lander was doing rocket burns during descent and we should have heard the noise on the tape. I would point out, first, they were not doing continuous burns, I don't know what fraction of the descent time the rocket was actually on. Second, I do not believe the comm link was open the whole time. Third, I would not be at all surprised if the rocket motor caused more vibration than noise inside the LEM. Again, our experience in an atmosphere can be counter-intuitive, and rockets are constructed so that most of the energy, sound and otherwise, goes out the nozzle.

    Fourth, given the deceitful way that these charlatans try to convince the gullible, I would not be at all surprised if they distorted the evidence regarding rocket noise.

    Jamie McCarthy

  • by update() ( 217397 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:19AM (#421857) Homepage
    I saw a commercial for the Fox show where the "expert" raised the question of why the astronauts' flag was waving in the vacuum of the moon. I figured, duh, even I know the answer to that one. I was surprised to see the badastronomy response to that point, though:

    Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.

    Isn't the real answer that the flag was made with springs so it would stand out straight on the pole? That's why it's not hanging limply.

  • by localroger ( 258128 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:09AM (#421879) Homepage
    I gotta say that fox really blew it when they said "the only way to know for sure it to look for the leftover equipment on the moon, but no telescope exists that is powerfull enough". thats gotta be bullshit. The moon ain't that far away.

    The moon is pretty damn far away. Go look at it sometime. About the size of a dime held at arm's length, it is really about the same size as the entire continental United States.

    We can in fact detect reflections form the very carefully machined retroreflectors left behind by the astronauts, but even the best telescopes ever built would not be capable of resolving the LEM as a distinct object, much less resolving the other junk left up there by NASA.

  • by Griim ( 8798 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @11:24AM (#421906) Homepage
    HB=Hoax Believer

    PHB=Pointy Haired Boss

    Coincidence? I think not.
  • by Joe Rumsey ( 2194 ) on Sunday February 18, 2001 @10:31AM (#421908)
    That's the actual derivation of the word, you know. From m-w.com:

    Etymology: Middle English lunatik, from Old French or Late Latin; Old French lunatique, from Late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna; from the belief that lunacy fluctuated with the phases of the moon

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