For reference, I have already told them why the sky has no stars (it’s because of camera exposure, the moon surface is very reflective so lower exposure is used to not overexpose the image) and why the flag wasn’t drooping down (there was an extending arm in the stand to hold it upright, as a flag drooping down is a sad flag). I have also explained that the videos of the moon landing were upscaled/remastered when they asked why the video quality of the clips were so good.
Currently, their main argument is the fact that the U.S. were able to do the moon landing in the mid 20th century while are experiencing delays for the current moon mission. They argue that, if the moon landing could be done way back then, with modern technology, it should be possible to quickly get back to the moon. They also argue NASA could have just reused the same designs as the Apollo missions if they actually went to the moon.
I have argued that NASA’s budget is a fraction of what is used to be, and that the addition of new modern technologies introduces additional parts that could break and thus need to be tested. I have also mentioned that the Soviet Union would immediately call out the US if they faked the moon landing, and that samples of moon rocks were sent to Soviet scientists to study and verify. They insist that the Soviets were scared of what the US would do if they spoke out against a fake moon landing, which I didn’t agree with (given they were both nuclear superpowers)
They then argued that it’s impossible to tell whether the moon rocks are actually from the moon landing, they could be samples collected by rovers. I responded that no rovers had successfully collected moon rocks at the time, and then they switched to arguing that it’s impossible to verify the rocks are from the moon. I followed up by saying there are methods of doing that (through the composition of the rocks and such). They then asked how anybody knows what moon rocks look like if nobody else has been to the moon, and I got kind of stumped. I tried to explain that there are models to how the moon formed, how we know the rocks aren’t from Earth, satellites that map out the surface, etc., but they reiterated that no one can “prove” that they were from the moon without going there in the first place.
One interesting thing they also mentioned is that, if the US really did do a moon landing, why the Soviets (during cold war era) or Chinese (in modern era) didn’t do what they do best and copied their designs to land on the moon. Given that the US and China are having a new space race with the goal of being the first to establish a lunar base, they argue that China could just copy the Apollo program designs if the US really did do a moon landing.
To summarise, their main points/questions right now are: a) Explain why the US hasn’t gone back in so long, and why with modern technology it seems so difficult? (especially given that NASA has been experiencing numerous delays in the Artemis missions, that certainly hasn’t given them a good impression…) b) How do you verify moon rocks without having actually been on the moon? How did scientists figure out what a moon rock looks like? c) Why aren’t the old Apollo designs being reused for a moon landing? (by either the Americans or the Chinese)
They say that there isn’t strong evidence either side (but believes that it is false, saying that “we will see” once someone else lands on the moon)
And what other points can I bring up to definitively say, yes, the moon landing wasn’t faked?
edit:
Another thing, they also can’t believe that astronauts could bring and ride the little moon buggies. I am also partially interested in how that was achieved to be honest!
The moon landing was faked, but they hired Stanley Kubrick to direct the shoot, and he insisted that they film on location.
Yay, it’s catching on, I don’t have to type it every time.
There is a mirror left on the moon you can shoot a laser at and have it bounced back to you, no other celestial object can do that. Its also foundational knowledge for gps.
Their answer to that is “the mirror was placed by robots. We had the tech to get robots there, but not living people.”
I’ve had to deal with these people before.
The answer my friend gave to that was “well have you tried this yourself? No? Well why do you believe there actually is a mirror there? It’s just another NASA lie”
The response to that is to tell them, ‘I thought you did your own resesech but now you balk at the idea of doing a resarch project to verify a claim, you don’t want to do your own research, you want to believe lies.’
And if they say they dont have the capability to do that experiment, then retort they most certainly don’t have the capability to do any of their own research.
And you think that’ll convince them?
Either that or it will make them mad so its a win-win
Yep, the laser array is the definitive answer.
One would think, but like I just said in another comment, my conspiracist ex-friend’s reply was “well have you tried this yourself? No? Well why do you believe there actually is a mirror there? It’s just another NASA lie”
You can do tours at Long Range Laser places. There’s two in the US and one on France. Take your idiot friend to one.
Oh they’ve since fallen even deeper into the conspiracy rabbit hole and they hit the flat Earth at the bottom, at which point I stopped wanting to spend time with them since listening to them really fucking tedious.
Frankly I’m not entirely sure they even believe in the Moon anymore at this point, considering how flat Earthers usually evolve
Wait, what is the moon to flat earthers, if not the moon?
Many of them legitimately think it’s a hologram, because reasons.
I’ve been vaguely aware of the conspiracy theory before but I looked into it yesterday for a bit, and apparently some moron filmed an atmospheric refraction phenomenon and concluded that the Moon is a hologram: https://sopuli.xyz/post/42150922/22267576
Ask what proof would change their mind and show them. Then when their mind is not changed, you will understand
This is it.
There’s a movement post-BLM where it’s not their job to explain racism to the ignorant. Very often, ignorant people refuse evidence. They waste everyone’s time and energy.
No technical rational explanation will ever get to them.
Most are there because they want to belong to a community, and because they like the idea of being right where everyone else is wrong, so that they’re the important ones for once.
That’s how you get to them: feed their need to belong, and their need to find enough self-esteem some other way.
You are wasting your breath with someone who is dead set in whatever they believe. They won’t be convinced until you’re converted.
2 Things:
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They left a mirror at at least some of the landing sites, and we can bounce a laser off that mirror back to Earth. Proof that we were there.
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They have sent probes up to circle the moon, and those probes photographed the sites. You can see lunar landers, abandoned gear, footprints, and the tracks from lunar rovers.
- You probably need special equpment to conduct the laser test. Noone cares to get access to that or trusts the institutions that do. Anyway, the laser is fake, it gets redirected somewhere else.
- All phographs are faked anyway.
Their logic.
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Aren’t there reflectors in very specific places on the moon that will respond to high powered lights shown at them?
There are indeed. I think at least 1 mission laid out 3 reflectors in a triangle so the distance to the moon could be calculated?
Literally not worth arguing with a person that believes this. These kinds of beliefs aren’t rooted in logic or reality so you’re not going to change their mind.
Mock him for being incurious, stupid and failing google-fu.
Or show him some of these links, your call.
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/space-astronomy/moon-landing-conspiracy-theories-debunked
https://starwalk.space/en/news/was-the-moon-landing-fake
https://askanexpert.asu.edu/earthspace/top-question/moon-landing
For the Artemis vs Apollo stuffs:
https://spaceinformer.com/artemis-vs-apollo-comparison/
And just to see how stupid he is, maybe ask if the earth is flat. If they say yes… just have him go watch this entire channel…
The reason I’m calling him stupid is because he’s either never actually searched or done any kind of research beyond conspiracy theory memes, or has immediately discounted the vast majority of people patiently explaining why he’s wrong.
As for why china didn’t try to go… they didn’t have a space program until recently. As for the soviets? Well. Why go when we happily shared our research with them? One of the main motivations was propaganda. It was a sort of proxy war and we won. Beyond that, there wasn’t much point in duplicating efforts.
Another point of fact that many people don’t address is how impossible it would be to fake the radio transmissions without getting caught.
Something had to go to the moon. Tiny changes in antenna alignment were sufficient to cause a loss of contact with the CSM. (A fun movie about this is called The Dish and is based on a true story.)
The thing is that the CSM wasn’t going straight to the moon, it followed a transfer orbit that intersected both earth and the moons orbit (and at a time when the moon would be there!)
This path meant that you couldn’t just point an antenna at the moon.
It also meant that you had to keep a lock on the CSM’s path or risk losing it forever (The Dish, they almost lost it.)
HAMmies had their own rigs which could listen in, as did virtually every government.
The precision required to catch the signal meant you could track its location in real time.
It also means we have tons of recordings with the appropriate amount of signal lag.
And there would be no way to fake those signals by broadcasting from earth- everyone paying attention would know. if ever the entire world watched something that first landing was it.
I will note that indeed. Don’t worry, they do believe that the Earth is round, they’re not that nuts!
You can’t use logic to talk someone out of a position they didn’t use logic to decide on in the first place.
Those kinds of people should get nothing but scorn from the rest of us. No conversation, no attempting to change their minds.
Just pure, unadulterated scorn and derision. Nothing else. Fucking morons aren’t useful for anything other than diluting the gene pool anyway.
In the current age of the Internet that doesn’t work. It used to be people were afraid of being shunned by their community as then they would have nothing. Now with social media there are echo chambers that amplify views deserving of shunning and give refuge to those who would otherwise be shunned.
But deprogramming people like this is hard, and won’t always work. So I won’t blame anyone for shunning people like this, but just know it’s not really solving anything.
Then let them. What does it matter to you? People are allowed to be complete morons if they wish.
It matters to me because the sheer number of these morons who are being exploited by the rich are actively making my life and the lives the people I care about worse. To do nothing about it is to admit defeat and accept this as the way of the world. I don’t want to do that, I’d rather at least try something, even knowing the likelyhood is low.
And I don’t think pure doomerism is helpful either. By encouraging against any kind of deprogramming, you tacitly make it easier for the morons to spread without resistance.
That type of thinking is no different than the christians who believe that unless everyone else believes as they do then they ALL go to hell.
That ype of “enforced community” bullshit is exactly that. Bullshit.
People spend way too much of their time worrying about everyone else. Yes, helping when you can is a good thing.
You, however, are the one professing all the doom here. If not everyone believes the right things then we are all doomed.
Except who decides what those right things are, and what will happen when you teach society to think in that way, and then some demagogue takes control, and decides to subtly start changing what those right thoughts are?
Why, you get what we’re going through right now, don’t you…
So no, group think is never a good idea even if the thoughts are the “right” ones.
My go-to is to just beg them to play Kerbal Space Program
They argue that, if the moon landing could be done way back then, with modern technology, it should be possible to quickly get back to the moon.
In the 1960s, getting to the moon was the most important thing in the solar system. The Soviet Union and the US spent ungodly amounts of money and risked uncountable lives in this endeavor. We did the thing, and now we’ve done the thing. We aren’t willing to risk those lives or spend that money anymore. New missions have to be much, much cheaper and much, much safer.
Technology has definitely improved, but there is a physical limit to the amount of energy that you can pull out of a given mass of kerosene and liquid oxygen. Getting to space hasn’t gotten any lighter, and fuel mass has always been the biggest hurdle. Again, play KSP. It will brand the tyranny of the rocket equation into your soul.
They also argue NASA could have just reused the same designs as the Apollo missions if they actually went to the moon.
They could, in the same way that we could start sending children underground to mine for coal again
To summarise,
a) Been there, done that. Anything new will involve sending more mass than the Apollo missions had to deal with. Tyranny of the rocket equation: more mass means more fuel means more thrusters means more mass means more fuel…
b) I could do some research and come back, but there is no answer to this that will satisfy a moon landing denier, because any explanation would require a baseline understanding of chemistry and also trust in the institutions that examine these moon rocks.
c) The answer to a also applies here
Ask them what type of evidence would convince them and go from there. If what they say is reasonable, present it. If not, then there’s nothing that will convince them
I think the most convincing evidence that we did go to the moon has to do with the dynamics of the moon dust in the original Apollo footage. If you look at the footage you’ll see the dust gets kicked up pretty high, higher than what you’d expect given Earth’s gravity, and it falls at a slower rate too.
So the question is: if they faked this footage then how did they get the dust to behave like this?
One possible explanation is that the footage was filmed underwater. The issue with this, though, is this is not at all how you’d expect dust to behave underwater. (you can go to the beach, kick up a bunch of sand underneath the water and see for yourself).
Another possibility is suspension cables. I guess you could explain the astronauts perceived lower gravity with suspension cables, but for pieces of dust? You can’t have suspension cables for individual pieces of dust.
So the simplest explanation is that this footage really was actually taken on a lower gravity environment, such as the moon.
If someone is denying the moon landing, I doubt pointing out the mechanics of dust particles in low-g environments will do the trick.
The strongest evidence is the fact that modern equipment can see the actual tracks the A11 astronauts left while hiking and driving on the moon.
If that’s not enough, it’s probably best to drop the matter. You can’t use evidence to convince someone who does not want to be convinced.
The strongest evidence is the fact that modern equipment can see the actual tracks the A11 astronauts left while hiking and driving on the moon.
The problem with this is that if you’re someone who thinks the moon landing is fake then you’re simply just going to dismiss this as yet another example of NASA propaganda. Because though those tracks are there, no one can actually see it for themselves (unless you happen to have a really high powered telescope, which is unlikely). The moon dust thing though, that’s something you can reason through and examine for yourself
Oh that is a good bit of evidence!
Ya’ll believe in the moon?
a) Explain why the US hasn’t gone back in so long,
Why would they? Nothing of value came from any of those missions and the risk is enormous.
and why with modern technology it seems so difficult? (especially given that NASA has been experiencing numerous delays in the Artemis missions, that certainly hasn’t given them a good impression…)
Because transistors are a lot more sensitive to EM than valves. Our current technology miniaturized lots of things, but that also means that a single piece of conductive material (like moon dust) or a single electron (from an em pulse) in the wrong place can wreak havok to it. Old computers required lots more electrons and space for their actual function so they were a lot more resistent to random variations. And we can’t make old computers anymore because we don’t have the factories for them, and you’re not going to create an entire factory just to produce a couple pieces for one mission, so they have to focus on isolating and making things more resistent.
b) How do you verify moon rocks without having actually been on the moon? How did scientists figure out what a moon rock looks like?
The moon is constantly being bombarded by unfiltered radiation because of its lack of atmosphere. This makes it so they’re composed of minerals that rarely occur on earth (they usually bind with oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere), have different isotopes (because of the radiation) and are much older (because no interference from tectonic movement/rain/wind/etc)
c) Why aren’t the old Apollo designs being reused for a moon landing? (by either the Americans or the Chinese)
Because they can’t for the same reason the US can’t, they don’t work with modern electronics, and no one can produce old electronics.
They say that there isn’t strong evidence either side (but believes that it is false, saying that “we will see” once someone else lands on the moon)
There is very strong evidence, your friend can corroborate for himself by spending a few thousand dollars (or he can understand that if anyone wanted to they could). First you need to buy a very powerful laser, then a very sensitive sensor, you hook them so they very close together and fire at the moon, you will never get a reading back, because the moon surface is a difuse reflector with a rough surface the light will scatter and go everywhere. However, when the astronauts went to the moon they left retroreflectors in specific locations, so if you pointed at one of those you would get the signal back approximately 2.5 second later.
And what other points can I bring up to definitively say, yes, the moon landing wasn’t faked?
I guess it’s easier to ask them “what evidence would convince you” because the answer will be none, of there was any evidence that would convince them they would have been convinced already.
Another thing, they also can’t believe that astronauts could bring and ride the little moon buggies. I am also partially interested in how that was achieved to be honest!
Not sure what’s there to not understand about this, so I’ll just say same way cars get to a dealership and you ride them afterwards.
