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I worked with a guy that said the moon landing was fake. The only evidence he could provide was the number of images of space that claim to be real but end up b

I worked with a guy that said the moon landing was fake. The only evidence he could provide was the number of images of space that claim to be real but end up being doctored or fake, every time I called him out on his bs I was wrong and the image was fake. Thanks Scientists!

nsxwolf 4y ago
If it makes you feel any better, it's essentially impossible to convince a moon landing hoax believer they are wrong.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  I think you are right. There is no desire to learn the truth. Since the early 1950s NASA had completely public video feeds for just about everything they did. News organizations around the world had access to the feeds, as well as the freedom to send their own cameras and recording equipment. Newsrooms all over the world have footage in their archives of the same launches, from different angles. And their own copies of NASA footage too. How do you fake all that? If I remember correctly, during the Mercury program one of the splashdowns was so off the mark that it took the Navy a few hours to recover the capsule. The major US news orgs didn't want to deal with it so they broadcast old footage of an on-target recovery but got caught because other orgs showed the real thing.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  TBH, I think extreme skeptics (e.g., flat-earthers) play a useful role in public discourse. They effectively shine a light on the limits of each person's ability to justify their beliefs, vs. what beliefs are generally accepted just because nobody challenges them. I've seen a similar effect in several Christian communities in the U.S. If a Christian is mostly surrounded by other Christians, it's easy to accept lots of beliefs because they're not challenged. But if they end up in an environment where people challenge those beliefs, or if there's a lot at stake for holding wrong beliefs, they tend to scrutinize their beliefs much more carefully. I think, overall, they benefit from pruning down their beliefs to a smaller set of better-justified ones. So to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse.
  - daveslash 4y ago
    I was just talking about this this-morning with a friend. We're discussing the on-going Alex Jones trial. When I first heard that the moon landing was faked, I did stop to ask myself "Wait, could it be true?". When I first heard that 9/11 was an inside job and that the folks on the news were "crisis actors", I did pause and ask myself "wait, could it be true?" When I first heard some of Alex Jones' stuff years ago, I again stopped to wonder if there was perhaps some truth to any of it. To be clear, I don't believe any of those conspiracies. And Alex Jones' stuff hurts my brain. But I have always been of the opinion that it is good that we have a few "crazies" who are "way out there" in our society to serve as a check on all of us. I agree with you: "to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse." It always felt to me like having a few of those folks around was a healthy balance, even if we mostly wrote them off. Somehow.... it seems like that balance is way way way off today. I don't want these types to disappear altogether, but I'd like to see us get back to some sort of balance.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think there's a similar lesson to be had about the limits of trying to control what everyone believes. X percent of people believe the earth is flat and XX% percent believe that aliens that abduct humans. Some people have a huge issue with this.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  This hasn't been my experience. A lot of people say they think the moon landing was fake because they have a general distrust of anything the government says, and are particularly skeptical of anything from the cold war era. But they may still be willing to listen to reason if you approach the subject with a compassionate mindset, not shaming them for questioning authority but instead acknowledging the basic legitimacy of their anti-authoritarian skepticism. After all, the government has done shady shit before, it just happens that the Moon landing isn't one of them. The depth of publicly available information about the Moon landings helps a lot too. Most people have only seen a few minutes of video footage at most, and may conclude that Hollywood could fake that video. But the amount of documentation about even the most minute detail of the Apollo program is staggering. If it were all fake,it would be the greatest most detailed work of science fiction ever created. Seriously, it would put Star Trek/Wars to shame. No fiction has lore with such fractal depth of detail as NASA, not even close. Not even Silmarillion comes close.
  - bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
    No matter what your belief is, I think we can all agree that a user with the name Michael Collins defending the moon landings is probably one of the best examples of nominative determinism we will ever get
dylan604 4y ago
Where are you browsing for images of space that everyone you looked up it was fake?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I think these fake photos are ones his friend offers up to him as evidence. It's not too hard to find "fake" images from NASA; they release a lot of composite images, false color, etc. Presented in the wrong way, or to somebody inclined to cynical skepticism, these can be construed as 'fake' and used to reinforce that cynical skepticism. An important question to keep in mind when playing this game: was the fake photograph ever a real fake photograph, or is it a fake fake photograph? Sometimes people deliberately construct fake photographs specifically to be debunked as fake, to bolster their claim of the whole thing being fake. e.g. I photoshop a picture of Mount Rushmore on the Moon, claim I got the photo from NASA and say "Look how obviously fake it is! NASA thinks we're utter fools." Except usually it's more subtle than that. They'll take a picture of a desert on earth, adjust the colors to make it look like Mars, then present both the original and the altered alongside each other, claiming the doctored image of an earth desert is purported to be real by NASA. If you can bait somebody into defending the faked image, you can debunk them easily since the whole thing was a setup.
  - daveslash 4y ago
    Right. Agreed. To add to that... Many of the images that we get from NASA in general aren't event "photos", they're composite images, just as you said. For example, a lot of "color" images are composites of black and white images shot through blue,green,and red filters and then re-assembled on the ground. They're "true" in the sense that they're not deliberately falsifying things, but not they're not "true photos". Somewhere (can't find the source at the moment) I recall reading that some of the early lunar reconnaissance photos were purposefully made lower quality by NASA because the U.S. wanted to keep it a secret from the Soviet Union just how good our orbital photography had become. Just because it has some obvious and provable editing does not mean that it's a falsification.
    - 4y ago
hedora 4y ago
Nvidia faked the moon landing pictures back in 2014: https://www.cnet.com/science/nvidia-silences-moon-landing-conspiracy-theorists-with-its-new-gpu/ https://www.cnet.com/science/nvidia-silences-moon-landing-co... https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/10/11/turing-recreates-lunar-landing/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/10/11/turing-recreates-lu... The conspiracy crowd likes to claim the illumination in the real photos is wrong. What better way to show off your photo realistic light model?

nsxwolf 4y ago

If it makes you feel any better, it's essentially impossible to convince a moon landing hoax believer they are wrong.

Kon-Peki 4y ago
I think you are right. There is no desire to learn the truth. Since the early 1950s NASA had completely public video feeds for just about everything they did. News organizations around the world had access to the feeds, as well as the freedom to send their own cameras and recording equipment. Newsrooms all over the world have footage in their archives of the same launches, from different angles. And their own copies of NASA footage too. How do you fake all that? If I remember correctly, during the Mercury program one of the splashdowns was so off the mark that it took the Navy a few hours to recover the capsule. The major US news orgs didn't want to deal with it so they broadcast old footage of an on-target recovery but got caught because other orgs showed the real thing.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
TBH, I think extreme skeptics (e.g., flat-earthers) play a useful role in public discourse. They effectively shine a light on the limits of each person's ability to justify their beliefs, vs. what beliefs are generally accepted just because nobody challenges them. I've seen a similar effect in several Christian communities in the U.S. If a Christian is mostly surrounded by other Christians, it's easy to accept lots of beliefs because they're not challenged. But if they end up in an environment where people challenge those beliefs, or if there's a lot at stake for holding wrong beliefs, they tend to scrutinize their beliefs much more carefully. I think, overall, they benefit from pruning down their beliefs to a smaller set of better-justified ones. So to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse.
- daveslash 4y ago
  I was just talking about this this-morning with a friend. We're discussing the on-going Alex Jones trial. When I first heard that the moon landing was faked, I did stop to ask myself "Wait, could it be true?". When I first heard that 9/11 was an inside job and that the folks on the news were "crisis actors", I did pause and ask myself "wait, could it be true?" When I first heard some of Alex Jones' stuff years ago, I again stopped to wonder if there was perhaps some truth to any of it. To be clear, I don't believe any of those conspiracies. And Alex Jones' stuff hurts my brain. But I have always been of the opinion that it is good that we have a few "crazies" who are "way out there" in our society to serve as a check on all of us. I agree with you: "to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse." It always felt to me like having a few of those folks around was a healthy balance, even if we mostly wrote them off. Somehow.... it seems like that balance is way way way off today. I don't want these types to disappear altogether, but I'd like to see us get back to some sort of balance.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think there's a similar lesson to be had about the limits of trying to control what everyone believes. X percent of people believe the earth is flat and XX% percent believe that aliens that abduct humans. Some people have a huge issue with this.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
This hasn't been my experience. A lot of people say they think the moon landing was fake because they have a general distrust of anything the government says, and are particularly skeptical of anything from the cold war era. But they may still be willing to listen to reason if you approach the subject with a compassionate mindset, not shaming them for questioning authority but instead acknowledging the basic legitimacy of their anti-authoritarian skepticism. After all, the government has done shady shit before, it just happens that the Moon landing isn't one of them. The depth of publicly available information about the Moon landings helps a lot too. Most people have only seen a few minutes of video footage at most, and may conclude that Hollywood could fake that video. But the amount of documentation about even the most minute detail of the Apollo program is staggering. If it were all fake,it would be the greatest most detailed work of science fiction ever created. Seriously, it would put Star Trek/Wars to shame. No fiction has lore with such fractal depth of detail as NASA, not even close. Not even Silmarillion comes close.
- bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
  No matter what your belief is, I think we can all agree that a user with the name Michael Collins defending the moon landings is probably one of the best examples of nominative determinism we will ever get

dylan604 4y ago

Where are you browsing for images of space that everyone you looked up it was fake?

MichaelCollins 4y ago
I think these fake photos are ones his friend offers up to him as evidence. It's not too hard to find "fake" images from NASA; they release a lot of composite images, false color, etc. Presented in the wrong way, or to somebody inclined to cynical skepticism, these can be construed as 'fake' and used to reinforce that cynical skepticism. An important question to keep in mind when playing this game: was the fake photograph ever a real fake photograph, or is it a fake fake photograph? Sometimes people deliberately construct fake photographs specifically to be debunked as fake, to bolster their claim of the whole thing being fake. e.g. I photoshop a picture of Mount Rushmore on the Moon, claim I got the photo from NASA and say "Look how obviously fake it is! NASA thinks we're utter fools." Except usually it's more subtle than that. They'll take a picture of a desert on earth, adjust the colors to make it look like Mars, then present both the original and the altered alongside each other, claiming the doctored image of an earth desert is purported to be real by NASA. If you can bait somebody into defending the faked image, you can debunk them easily since the whole thing was a setup.
- daveslash 4y ago
  Right. Agreed. To add to that... Many of the images that we get from NASA in general aren't event "photos", they're composite images, just as you said. For example, a lot of "color" images are composites of black and white images shot through blue,green,and red filters and then re-assembled on the ground. They're "true" in the sense that they're not deliberately falsifying things, but not they're not "true photos". Somewhere (can't find the source at the moment) I recall reading that some of the early lunar reconnaissance photos were purposefully made lower quality by NASA because the U.S. wanted to keep it a secret from the Soviet Union just how good our orbital photography had become. Just because it has some obvious and provable editing does not mean that it's a falsification.
  - 4y ago

hedora 4y ago

Nvidia faked the moon landing pictures back in 2014: https://www.cnet.com/science/nvidia-silences-moon-landing-conspiracy-theorists-with-its-new-gpu/ https://www.cnet.com/science/nvidia-silences-moon-landing-co... https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/10/11/turing-recreates-lunar-landing/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/10/11/turing-recreates-lu... The conspiracy crowd likes to claim the illumination in the real photos is wrong. What better way to show off your photo realistic light model?