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I love this question. It’s quintessential epistemology. You’ve flipped the question upside down without realizing it. First, you talk about ‘other people’, and

by jl2718 5y ago

I love this question. It’s quintessential epistemology. You’ve flipped the question upside down without realizing it. First, you talk about ‘other people’, and not yourself, or the person you are asking, who are the only people that anything can be known about. And then you talk about knowledge of a single unique event that you didn’t experience. And then you insert a predicate nominative that would reverse a prior belief, “fake”. Wow, so much to unravel there. First get comfortable asking the first-person active voice question of yourself, with the same level of skepticism you have of the third-person passive pluperfect predicate nominative. I think you’ll be amazed at how confident you are about things you know nothing about. Signed, - former NASA engineer. P.S. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Nobody thought much about how we got there with Apollo, just how to get back with Orion (we didn’t). We had to do some tests on the moon dust, but they sent ‘simulant’ instead, and for good reasons. Apparently it’s harder to get back there than we thought it would be.

jl2718 5y ago
While I’m at it, short story: There was an on-base McDonalds which I believe I was probably the only customer of. They shut that down to become the ‘Lunar Science Institute’ and moved all the moon rocks there. That was when we requested the moon dust and they sent simulant from Goddard instead. The McDonald’s was right next to the old Navy bachelor officer’s quarters, which we opened up to house the intern program. I had a few interns and a big empty lab so they used to hang out in my space. Well anyway, this is where my personal knowledge of the situation ends and the folklore begins, but, one of these kids had a crush on some girl who rebuffed his advances, but at some point acquiesced some form of willingness if they were on the moon to save mankind, something like that. Well, security was not great in that place, and I guess it hadn’t been upgraded since the days of serving Big Macs. He got the moon dust and laid it down on a bed for this girl. I forget how it ended for those two, but, we made do with the simulant.

by jl2718 5y ago

jl2718 5y ago

While I’m at it, short story: There was an on-base McDonalds which I believe I was probably the only customer of. They shut that down to become the ‘Lunar Science Institute’ and moved all the moon rocks there. That was when we requested the moon dust and they sent simulant from Goddard instead. The McDonald’s was right next to the old Navy bachelor officer’s quarters, which we opened up to house the intern program. I had a few interns and a big empty lab so they used to hang out in my space. Well anyway, this is where my personal knowledge of the situation ends and the folklore begins, but, one of these kids had a crush on some girl who rebuffed his advances, but at some point acquiesced some form of willingness if they were on the moon to save mankind, something like that. Well, security was not great in that place, and I guess it hadn’t been upgraded since the days of serving Big Macs. He got the moon dust and laid it down on a bed for this girl. I forget how it ended for those two, but, we made do with the simulant.