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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

#131

Post by steamedhams »

coliveira wrote: post #86
boomboomsubban wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn’t really sound like a good summary of centuries of Roman and post-Roman history.

History is complicated, but I would say that the Western European dark ages of 500-1000AD were caused neither by moon landing skepticism (or the 6th century equivalent thereof) nor its opposite.

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

#132

Post by fchu »

WalterBright wrote: post #36

While we laugh at skeptics, often they serve a valuable purpose. Skeptics have often revolutionized our understanding of the universe. Like Galileo. We should be careful of unquestioningly believing "established" facts.

Unfortunately we're now using the word skeptics for 2 totally different things - questioning dogma with sound reasoning and reasonable first principles - trusting one's own belief against overwhelming evidence of the contrary.

Galileo squarely belongs to the former, while flat earthers and moon landing 'skeptics' belong to the latter. Let's not conflate the two.

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

#133

Post by mullingitover »

mihaifm wrote: post #104
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?

They don't have to lie. You can have 90% of those 400k people do legit work, but still fake the landing. Maybe they built the rocket but encountered some technical bottleneck and had to fake the landing. Not a skeptic myself, but the argument that 400k people needed to keep a secret is pretty weak.

Even faking the landing would require cooperation from parties with nothing to gain, since independent parties were able to bounce a laser off the mirror that they placed when they landed.

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

#134

Post by WalterBright »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #73
WalterBright wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think lunar landing conspiracy theorists are going to "revolutionize our understanding of the universe"? No. But just be aware that ideas people laughed at as clearly wrong and absurd have sometimes turned out to be the truth. Some examples: 1. heliocentric solar system 2. evolution 3. Titanic breaking in half on the surface 4. quantum mechanics 5. all men are created equal

Again, there are specific, identifiable evidence based reasons you should listen to those theories, and you can do so without equating every lunatic with a pet theory to the popular image of Galileo.

People at the time thought the geocentric model was obviously, irrefutably true.

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

#135

Post by Rapzid »

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 all of the technology and machinery necessary to go to the moon was designed and built. The massive and massively expensive Saturn V rockets(many of them) were designed, built and launched to witnesses. The LEM, CSM, suites, computers, and etc were all built. The simulators were built and simulations run. Etc and etc and etc; hundreds of thousands of people invovled.

So, pretty much all the cost of going to the Moon and now add on the cost of faking it and maintaining that lie for 50 years.

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

#136

Post by jussij »

api wrote: post #84
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…

> Nobody believes the WMD lie any more.

Not many believed it at the time:

https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_miss...

NOTE: Check the date off that page.

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

#137

Post by ghthor »

moksly wrote: post #106
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?

I read about homeopaths on arstechnica the other day and I have to say that it shock me. How did we ever get to a society where people are injecting mercury to fight diseases? The worst part about it is that some of these people are the same who fear vaccines. It just doesn’t make any sense. How do you even reason with those people? https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/homeopaths-sell-inje...

The evidence about vaccines causing harm is piling up. The question of whether there is a conspiracy at least motivated by greed is also piling up. I personally think there is a even higher conspiracy, one on a spiritual level that is also involved in orchestrating the overall deception and harm caused by vaccines but I have no solid evidence for that.

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

#138

Post by fauigerzigerk »

mhh__ wrote: post #78
desikoder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Parent comment said nothing to gain from. Pascal's wager (at least) would suggest some kind of logic to it

Pascal's wager never made sense to me. There are infinitely many possible belief systems. The odds of picking the right one are infinitely small.

Picking the wrong one may even come with greater loss than picking none of them, because praying to false gods may bring upon me the wrath of the true gods more so than simply keeping an open mind.

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

#139

Post by WalterBright »

fchu wrote: post #132
WalterBright wrote: post #36

While we laugh at skeptics, often they serve a valuable purpose. Skeptics have often revolutionized our understanding of the universe. Like Galileo. We should be careful of unquestioningly believing "established" facts.

Unfortunately we're now using the word skeptics for 2 totally different things - questioning dogma with sound reasoning and reasonable first principles - trusting one's own belief against overwhelming evidence of the contrary. Galileo squarely belongs to the former, while flat earthers and moon landing 'skeptics' belong to the latter. Let's not conflate the two.

I suspect you don't realize how firmly people at the time believed in revealed truth and the evidence of their own eyes that the sun revolved around the Earth.

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

#140

Post by zuminator »

gameswithgo wrote: post #34
jwilber wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it really comes down to is these people severely lack in critical thinking, so while it is surprising that they fail to account for other, seemingly obvious externalities, it really shouldn’t be.

This critical thinking critique is pretty tautological. In effect we are saying "these people with wrong ideas, the problem is they are not good at getting ideas right". But that isn't useful/actionable knowledge. WHY are they bad at getting ideas right? Is it innate to the average human biology? Is it something that has gotten worse as more people have gotten onto the internet where they are exposed to non-curated d…

> Is it innate to the average human biology?

I think it is an natural personality trait gone haywire. Just as there are some people who are pure herd creatures, completely trusting of authority, there are others who are inherently skeptical as a genetic trait. Humanity benefits from a certain degree of skepticism but since it's a spectrum, some people possess it in excess. In antiquity such people may have been heretics who questioned the Church, and they led us to the Reformation and to scientific progress. In the more recent past, they believed in alien landings and the Bermuda Triangle. Nowadays they're anti-vaxxers or flat Earthers, viewing the government or scientific orthodoxy as windmills to tilt against.

Perhaps our current environment is to some extent conducive to runaway skepticism. Consider, obesity is rampant because human beings evolved in relative caloric scarcity, but in today's plentiful, carbohydrate rich diet, we find it hard to self-regulate our food intake. Perhaps conspiracy-theorism is rampant because humanity evolved in an environment where people were much less free to pursue their "alternative" urges, but the shackles have been loosened in the modern world. Freedom for better or worse also means freedom to hold fringe points of view.

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