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Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

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Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#81

Post by avmich »

desikoder wrote: post #64
mullingitover wrote: post #51

Armstrong's exact argument about the vast numbers conspirators that would be required to keep perfect secrecy is exactly what I use when people try to claim that the coronavirus is some kind of hoax or that there's some kind of conspiracy about vaccines. Have you ever tried to get thousands of people to cooperate on anything, let alone perpetuate a massive lie, when they have nothing to gain personally from doing so?

Yeah, people have been selling an invisible product since thousands of years (religion), so it is quite possible to get billions of people to lie to themselves and to others.

I take issue with your "quite". Did you try to establish a new religion? Star Wars had some success on that, but even them - with all modern might of persuasion - didn't get billions - or tens of millions - of followers, and those who they did are arguably at least partially follow in jest.

You can't apply "religion" argument that easily.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#82

Post by paranoidrobot »

jodrellblank wrote: post #46
dreamcompiler wrote: post #5

What gets me most about these fools is they completely ignore how much such a huge fake job would cost. It would be so expensive that you could cut the budget in half and just...go to the moon.

Why would faking it with a soundstage and some actors in a room, and some small models, cost so much more? A big budget Hollywood film like James Bond Moonraker (1979) was 1/1000th the cost of the Apollo program, and with no famous actors/actresses, simpler script, TV quality, surely a fake would be cheaper than that? If someone thought it was fake, they ought to be asking where the budget really went and whose pocke…

Because you still need to build and launch a rocket, even if it doesn't go to the moon or carry the actual crew, it needs to at least go over the horizon convincingly enough.

All that design and construction still needed to be paid for.

Presumably faking the capsule return is cheap enough if you drop the capsule out the back of an aircraft.

Faking lunar return samples, returning signals from orbit for the various ground stations around the world, and a variety of other things also required a lot of deception, too.

Then, ofcourse, you have to hope that the Russians didn't put out a headline of "Americans fake lunar landing". Since they kept a close eye on things.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#83

Post by iainmerrick »

squarefoot wrote: post #35

Didn't they come back with lunar soil samples? Armstrong reply was brilliant, but I would have also added: "here's some samples we took by ourselves, feel free to meet us at xyz lab and analyze them". And btw, who the heck allows a negationist like that one to teach children?

Well, they could easily just claim that the samples are fake. If you try to rebut that, there’ll be further nit-picking arguments, ad infinitum.

I don’t think that’s the route to convince a true conspiracy theorist.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#84

Post by api »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #16

They would have you believe that the United States Government perpetrated a gigantic fraud on its citizenry. Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened, by any government. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago. Not defending the moon landing doubters, or conspiracy theorists in general, but: the proper response to…

Apollo looks nothing at all like the WMD lie. There is more evidence available today that the Apollo landings happened than there was at the time, such as photos of the landing sites taken by later Lunar probes. Lies generally degrade over time, not strengthen, and the WMD lie has collapsed.

Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Even the Republicans are now admitting that. Many knew it was a lie back then.

I remember as it was happening getting the impression that nobody believed it, that it was universally understood to be a straw man placeholder for the real reason for the Iraq invasion.

Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why?

The only even marginally plausible speculation I have is that some sizable contingent really believed the catastrophic collapse peak oil scenario that was popular back in the 2000s and that the invasion was rammed through damn-the-torpedoes to get exclusive access to that oil so America could weather the impending apocalypse.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#85

Post by dyslexit »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #42
dyslexit wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WMD claim had plenty of holes poked through it even at the time . There were constant stories making it clear the inspectors in Iraq were not finding anything, and whistle blowers like Valerie Plame who directly contradicted the White House claims. Today, less than twenty years later, it's no longer a question that there weren't any WMDs. The fraud Armstrong is pointing out isn't really comparable.

It’s a single example. The list of governmental frauds is as long as recorded history.

I would argue that government lies, especially ones that happen on a scale like that in the US, are not at all why we have conspiracy theorists. I think there's a more underlying human need to believe that there is something behind "it all", and when that is combined with a lack of education, political awareness, or just stubborness, you get people who will believe almost anything. That, and occasionally mental illness, is why you get people who will believe in lizard people who run the world, flat earths, and so on, not because of singular examples of wide scale government fraud.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#86

Post by coliveira »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #23
hodgesrm wrote: post #3

This is the sort of craziness that led to the Dark Ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. We humans are pretty much our own worst enemies.

I can't see the parallel between the willful ignorance displayed and the "Dark Ages." Do you think the migrating tribes just refused to believe those aqueducts existed?

The rise of the Church made most of the ancient culture to be believed false of demonic. Philosophers were the first put to the fire. Temples were destroyed, along with the books inside them. With the end of the Roman state, there was nobody left in Europe to maintain the engineering knowledge acquired by the ancient.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#87

Post by mjburgess »

desikoder wrote: post #64
mullingitover wrote: post #51

Armstrong's exact argument about the vast numbers conspirators that would be required to keep perfect secrecy is exactly what I use when people try to claim that the coronavirus is some kind of hoax or that there's some kind of conspiracy about vaccines. Have you ever tried to get thousands of people to cooperate on anything, let alone perpetuate a massive lie, when they have nothing to gain personally from doing so?

Yeah, people have been selling an invisible product since thousands of years (religion), so it is quite possible to get billions of people to lie to themselves and to others.

The "product" being sold is a doctrinal basis for group cohesion, the same basic constitutive role that the following ideas play: "property is theft", "LOTR is the best book ever written", "transwomen are women", etc. (These ideas constitute groups around them, forming a bedrock of a social belief system.

Ironically, this is exactly how conspiracies function: "we never landed on the moon".

This does not apply to people with material goals, rather than social(/epistemic) ones. The goal, "let's poison everyone with 5G" isn't an essentially meaningless doctrine ie., whose only impact is on belief, not on the world.

Goals to change the world, rather than to regulate belief, require actual self-awareness, coordination and a desire to realise that end-goal. In this case, i'd require >1mil+ people absurdly committed to poisoning everyone around them (and not least, to have some magical ability to induce a virus with a wifi signal).

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#88

Post by sm4rk0 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #3

This is the sort of craziness that led to the Dark Ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. We humans are pretty much our own worst enemies.

I get your point, but actually this (volcanic eruption) led to the Dark Ages:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762

(another HN front page story)

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#89

Post by jussij »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #16

They would have you believe that the United States Government perpetrated a gigantic fraud on its citizenry. Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened, by any government. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago. Not defending the moon landing doubters, or conspiracy theorists in general, but: the proper response to…

> The 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.

Expect Hans Blix exposed that lie very shortly those words where uttered:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1

If the moon landing is also a fraud where is the Hans Blix of the moon landing program?

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#90

Post by Rapzid »

Falling3 wrote: post #48
dyslexit wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WMD claim had plenty of holes poked through it even at the time . There were constant stories making it clear the inspectors in Iraq were not finding anything, and whistle blowers like Valerie Plame who directly contradicted the White House claims. Today, less than twenty years later, it's no longer a question that there weren't any WMDs. The fraud Armstrong is pointing out isn't really comparable.

That's not the point though. If Aldrin's implicit argument is the US government would never try and defraud its citizen, then any example of such a fraud disproves him.

It was a weak man argument. Armstrong's paragraph was meant to be taken as a whole; but this argument just extracts one sentence and tries to establish a false equivalency with it.. And a scarecrow. Pretty impressive piece of drivel TBH.
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