"The number of people who believe we haven't visited the moon is growing year over year." It took a lot of evidence to convince anyone that Vikings visited Ame

"The number of people who believe we haven't visited the moon is growing year over year." It took a lot of evidence to convince anyone that Vikings visited America before Columbus. There is at least a small amount of evidence to suggest that crossings and even a trickle of trade pre-dated the Vikings: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy.htm http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy.htm Other circumstantial evidence includes architecture and burial customs among South American native civilizations that could be interpreted as Egypt-influenced. Yet the majority of scientists greet these claims with extreme skepticism. How could the ancients have crossed the Atlantic? With what? Long boats? When a great, almost mythic feat is not repeated for a very long time, people will begin to doubt it. That's not new and it's not because "people are stupid." It's because people lie and exaggerate a lot, and thus people respond to that by being skeptical of grandiose claims. It also doesn't help that governments often lie as a matter of standard policy, a fact that very rationally leads people to be generally skeptical of what they say. If our civilization fell and another rose in thousands of years, I'd expect that many would respond with tremendous incredulity to the idea that the ancients visited the Moon with primitive metal tubes full of fossil fuel and discrete component computers. How absurd. Instead, they would reason, this was obviously some sort of national myth and a part of the American cult of state -- the rocket is an obvious phallic symbol and it being full of oil represented petroleum as the basis of American power, etc. The only way to disabuse people of the moon hoax theory is to go back to the Moon (or further). I happen to think we went to the Moon. I also happen to think it's at least possible that ancients (Egyptians, Phoenicians, etc.) crossed the Atlantic. But I guess I'm a bit of an optimist about what humans can do when they really put their minds to it... with tubes full of fossil fuel, or long boats. :)