One of the threads of the moon conspiracy theories is that anyone about to speak out comes to an unfortunate end. Apparently theorists point to a much higher statistical rate of premature deaths of those involved in the NASA moon program than the general population. I'm guessing this will be cited by those advancing this theory. https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/07/apollo-8-astronaut-william-anders-dead
Not sure I agree. You are either a human-killing monster, or you’re not. And we’re not talking front;ine troops who were shot if they didn’t comply
Oppenheimer. Killing machine or very clever geezer? Or both? I’ve read and tried to understand exactly how a nuke works. The basics is easy enough but when you drill down a bit, it’s tricky to grasp. People like Oppenheimer and Turing worked this sort of shit out from scratch. Incredible.
More grist for the mill today... https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/07/...s-reportedly-killed-in-plane-crash/index.html
Occam's Razor. The weight of evidence that the US landed men on the moon and did so 6 times, is irrefutable. The shape of the dust plumes coming off the wheels of the lunar rover is almost evidence in itself. Then there's the regolith samples that they brought back that have been analysed by independent institutions all over the world. The list goes on and on. But non-believers always talk about missing stars and "incorrect" shadows. Pretty glaring details to mess up in a hoax. Or is that one of the conspiracy triple bluffs? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings
I wonder if the truth about how lady di died will ever come out, it certainly doesn’t *feel like we’ve had it up to now and we all know how devious the royal fambo are *cough* noncey princes hush money etc etc.
I think one of the reasons the Moon missions seem somewhat incredible (as in “incapable of belief”) to many people nowadays, is that we have a completely different attitude to danger in this day and age. There’s no way that a program carrying the huge risks that Apollo did would even get past the first couple of meetings today, but in those days organisations were willing to kill a few people in the name of progress, there were plenty of people willing to die in pursuit of that goal and the public were comfortable with that. Also, the Russians, followed by the Americans, had already cracked the really difficult elements of manned space flight, namely getting into space and then returning the crew safely to Earth. The physics of space flight is really quite simple, so at that point, getting to the Moon is just a matter of scaling up the delivery system for the long journey and coming up with a way to insert into lunar orbit, get to the surface and back home again.
No, the reason people disbelieve is that they are stupid, gullible and attention seeking morons. The same is true for most conspiracy type things. Do not underestimate how thick a lot of the public are.
Read an interesting/bat shit mental thread on the free bird app this morning blaming cloud seeding for our unusually chilly and wet start to the summer, and yes it was chock full of the usual tin foil hat brigade with nothing better to do that worry about made up horse shite.
My GF is somewhat susceptible to these, quite a battle to hold my tongue on occasion... She's far from stupid which makes it all the more baffling.
Relatively speaking it is. The really hard problems are escaping Earth’s gravity well and then not incinerating the astronauts when they reenter the atmosphere, both of which they’d solved. Once the craft is in space, it will just carrying on going in the direction where it was pointed and it doesn’t need to be particularly robust either as there’s no atmosphere and very little gravity to fight against.
There’s also the fact that some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true and the tendency of governments to engage in cover ups which often end up causing more suspicion than they allay. So, 911 truthers can point to Operation Northwood as an example of a willingness of the CIA to kill Americans in order to provide a casus belli. There are huge holes in the mutually contradictory official accounts of the Kennedy assassination. The Clintons are very dodgy people. On a related issue - I recently read a book which provided a highly plausible explanation for the Roswell incident, namely that the Russians were running an operation using a remotely piloted drone based on a flying wing design, which was crewed by genetically and surgically altered children. The idea was that this “flying saucer” would be seen by lots of witnesses, it would land and the “aliens” would debus and walk around, again, being seen by witnesses, before getting back into the craft and flying away. It was basically a psy op, with the idea being that such an event would cause mass panic, demoralisation, helplessness and loss of faith in the government (a bit like what happened following the War of the Worlds radio broadcast) so that America would be significantly weakened. However, the mission went wrong when the saucer crashed and the crew were killed. The American government covered it up, not just because they were interested in exploiting the novel aircraft tech that had fallen into their hands, but also the biotech contained in the unfortunate child crew members, one of whom (IIRC) had possibly survived. The Russians had run their own version of Operation Paperclip, which not only involved getting hold of the Horten brothers flying wing prototypes, but also seized a lot of the Nazi doctors who ran human experimentation projects along with the product of their terrible work. The American public would probably have been happy to support the use of Nazi military tech, but not the use of Nazi human experiments. This book wasn’t written by some crank, btw. The author is Annie Jacobsen, who is a respected journalist and writer who specialises in security and military matters. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/roswell-ufo-area-51-controversies-nazi-link/
Very true and allied to this is the pompous misconception that because of generational progress we must therefore be more intelligent and capable. Yes we are certainly wasting our time on stuff that would have been seen as 'space age' then, computers, mobiles, t'internet, streaming and wow! touch screens but as humans we have no more 'brain power' than we ever have had. Are we any more intelligent or capable than the humans who first created fire, or built the Pyramids, or measured the circumference of the earth (3rd century BC), or built the Pantheon or a trebuchet or the Duomo, or posited the laws of motion, or 'invented' calculus, or created a steam engine, or came up with the General theory of relativity (using a pencil & paper) or split the atom or desmodromic valve operation or flew to the moon?
100%. If anything, I fear we may be regressing because we outsource so much of our knowledge acquisition and the donkey work of thinking to machines. I for one, can no longer do complex long division or multiply fractions because it is years, decades even, since I've not been able to rely on my phone to do the calculations. Also, people these days, especially kids and young adults, don't have the level of general knowledge that previous generations gained, simply because they were unable to scroll through a bazillion streaming channels, social media and video platforms in order to find exactly what they want to watch and instead, had to watch whatever was on tv or read whatever was in the newspapers or in books stocked by the local library. So, whereas an intellectually curious 16 year old in the 1980s would have no option but to watch or read all sorts of things in which he/she did not have any prior interest, resulting in a broad range of learning, the equivalent person in this day and age will just go on You Tube to watch a 3 minute explainer and then the various algorithms will just push virtually the same content at them over and over, so they end up consuming a very narrow and highly curated body of knowledge. And then there is the deleterious effect on concentration spans, which, I suspect is not merely a matter of youngsters absorbing bad habits but is physiological, as their physical brain architecture has developed differently to humans from previous generations. Children have instant access to so much (over)stimulating material that they are also almost never bored these days and as boredom forces kids to use their imagination, that creative impetus is stifled. It will only get worse as AI becomes ubiquitous. I suspect the utopian idea of machines doing all the drudge work so that humans have time to create great works of art, music and literature will be inverted and instead the machines will make music, paint artwork and write novels while we do the menial tasks necessary to keep them functioning.
