This thread is inspired by Trixie’s thread Space is Fake.
I wanted to contribute to it but found it locked down, so I’m starting a new thread to post what I was going to say:
Here’s a good test that any average citizen in the US can perform in order to verify whether the first American Moon landing was a fake or not. Did the Americans plant an American flag on the Moon? Shouldn’t it still be there? It doesn’t take that powerful a telescope to answer this question–my sister, when she was 8, had such a telescope propped up in her bedroom. All you would need is a map of the Moon showing where that flag is, and then go to work.
Please somebody do this and get back to me (and Trixie).
I’m certain when humans start landing on Mars, a few hardcore Solipsists will claim that’s fake too. People need to understand that some minds stick their heads in the sand, and that’s it. They’re done with reality. They will live out their lives in a fantasy world, forever unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.
We live in the Desert of the Real. Quoting Morpheus:
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
People are beginning the experiment, funding and preparing human voyage to Mars.
I support this. The sooner the best aspects of humanity can traverse planets and stars, leaving the cesspool and slave populations behind, the better everybody is off. Everybody gains, win-win-win-win situation.
From Mars, the astro-humans of the future will look back at sub-humanity on earth, questioning the Moon landing and Mars landing, disbelieving it.
Flat-Earth society, they will deny that humans ever left the (false) safety and comfort of their very own homes.
I used the powerful telescope in my backyard Observatory. I saw the US flag for myself, and saved some pictures. Pay me $10000 and I’ll show you them too.
This is pure genius…abandon the only known planet in the galaxy capable of supporting life, and put all the geniuses on a fragile space-ship in search of new-worlds, while leaving Earth at the hands of a cesspool…Everybody gains, win-win-win-win situation…
Well, I haven’t had one since the early 60’s, but in order to discern a one meter square that is 250 million miles away, I would think it would take considerably more than ye ole home magnifying glass.
It didn’t seem that implausible to me that with a high end telescope that could be propped up in one’s own back yard, you could see objects the size of the American flag on the Moon. But I do mean high end–not some cheap ass kid’s telescope you can purchase for under $100. But maybe around the $1,000 range. So yeah, not everyone would own one, but I never thought we’d be limited to going to an observatory, having to go through some red tape at an institution like a university or scientific organization. ← If you have to do that then it defeats the purpose of getting ordinary citizens to check for themselves, because having to go through anything institutionalized means almost certainly having to be wary of conspiracies. The ol’ medium because man and God.
Having said that, I have my doubts about the article you posted. I might be wrong in thinking that even really expensive high end telescopes are sufficient to do the job, but when the article says “Not even the most powerful telescopes ever made are able to see these objects,” red flags are raised in my mind. I mean, we’ve invented some pretty powerful telescopes, and the article’s telling me that none of them are even powerful enough to see the flag on the moon? Like if the Hubble telescope, which has seen distant galaxies, potentially life sustaining planets, quasars at the edge of space, was pointed at the Moon, it could not possibly make out the American flag?
In any case, that’s one strike for the conspiracy theorists. Though I’m skeptical about the article, I’m less skeptical in the claim that we can’t see the flag on the Moon… because it isn’t there. This article nicely discourages people from attempting to verify that.
I am not claiming that the flag is not there. I just can’t imagine a consumer grade telescope being anywhere close to strong enough to see such a thing, and certainly not strong enough to verify the absence of it, requiring much more.
Note that you didn’t red flag whether the Hubble telescope really did detect those items of high political concern, but rather red flanged the telescope company for merely denying that there is a scope that can see the flag.
You continually, even unconsciously, display that conformist bias. But at least you openly ask the question rather than merely attack the conspiracy theorist. That’s a start (and enough to keep you separate from the conformist’s deeper ranks).
Celestron AstroMaster 114 EQ Reflector Telescope
114mm Newtonian reflector telescope,
tripod with accessory tray,
20mm eyepiece,
10mm eyepiece,
permanently mounted finderscope,
planetarium software
$159.98 (on sale now).
The diameter of the Moon is about 3500 kilometers. So to see a one meter object represented to appear the size of the Moon in the sky unaided (about the right size to clearly see that it was a USA flag), you would need a magnification of [size=150]3,500,000[/size].
Go shop around. See what you can find for under $3,500,000.
Let me try to explain this (since it keeps coming up):
I didn’t question the discoveries of the Hubble telescope because they were already there in my mind–have been since I can’t remember–whereas the claim of the article is new, never heard it before in my life. The way the mind works is like this: older ideas will react like anti-viruses to new ideas that clash with them, like the claim of the article with my claims about the Hubble telescope. The new ideas are always the first ones to be doubted. This is natural. Everyone’s guilty of it, even you.
Why did I accept the claims about the Hubble telescope way back when I first heard them? Why didn’t I doubt them then? I don’t know. I doubted less back then. But there’s more to this than the gullibility of youth and the wisdom of age. There’s also motives, hidden agendas. People will tend to be more conformist the less imperative the ideas being conformed to are to them. I know that RM:AO is very important to you, so it is imperative to defend it against all the mainstream and conformist sciences (like Relativity and QM) when it clashes with your theory. You have a reason to fight against these. But there’s other sciences which you most likely never even thought of doubting. They say that the blood consists, among other things, of white blood cells and red blood cells. They say that the white blood cells fight off foreign bodies and red blood cells carry nutrients, oxygen, and other important molecules around the body. I believe this. You probably believe this. But why if you’re such a non-conformist? Because you have no need to doubt it. It doesn’t clash with RM:AO (I don’t think).
When it comes to philosophy and serious thought, people will have their “area of expertise,” let’s call it. These are their realms of independent thinking (if they can achieve that). When it comes most sciences–like Relativity theory, QM, and even whether a man can see the American flag on the Moon using a consumer grade telescope–I have very few qualms, very few reasons to spend my time thinking about why it might be wrong. It is not my area of philosophical expertise. My area of philosophical expertise is the philosophy of consciousness. There you will find that I do clash with mainstream thinking (mainly physicalism) as I wrote a whole book (click “my thoughts” in my sig) in which Chapter 1 is devoted to a critical attack on physicalism. And the theory itself, I’m confident people will agree, is reasonably independent from the norm, and an example of creative thought. But people think I’m crazy–they call me a dualist, a believer in the soul, living in the dark ages–and they think that science has proven that reductive physicalism is correct, and I have to jump through hoops to convince people that though the science of the brain has revealed much about how the brain works, to use that knowledge to explain consciousness is to overstep the bounds of science and parade philosophy in the guise of science.
So you have your area of independent thought, and I have mine. But the question of what makes one an independent thinker is not only answered by looking at a man’s area of philosophical expertise, but on how he handles challenges in all other areas–that is, areas in which he mainly conforms to the mainstream. When challenged, does he defend his position dogmatically, or is he open to alternative points of view? (And of course, as we agreed in the other thread on independent thinking vs. conforming, such a test would be useless if done in a (perceived) hostile and aggressive manner–in that case, no one will be open to the alternative points of view you propose).
I have long since held true to the attitude that ultimately, I know nothing. I call myself an epistemic skeptic. But this doesn’t mean that every thought that enters my mind is accompanied by the qualifier: “I don’t know this but…” or “This may not be true but…” I generally let my thoughts flow through my mind the same way everyone else does. This is natural. I’d be surprised if you don’t. But where the skeptical attitude comes in is when someone, or myself, actually poses the question: do you really know that? Then I have no qualms with qualifying my statements with the negative: “no, I don’t know, but I believe it for now.”
I’ll take your word for it, James–like I said, not my area of expertise–but it remains lingering that the claim in the article does sound like a hyperbole, and I’ve noticed that you haven’t disagreed with this (yet).
Converting one’s belief should be a highly interesting topic for you. You make the understandable mistake of thinking that I am trying to sell my ideas to this crowd. That would involve techniques for converting (reversing the polarity of a mental particle). No matter how much evidence is given to the contrary of an opinion, if it isn’t presented in the proper manner and sequence, the opinion will not change (RM:AO explains why). I haven’t been attempting to change opinions. That would require me to have a use for a faithful following.
My interest has been more about how to communicate the method for resolving real life and the most serious issues, not merely how to acquire a faithful yet ignorant following. A critical part of that is communicating it to a person who is qualified to carry it. And that qualification requires that they are not swayed by sales techniques as much as by actual undeniable logic (as opposed to seemingly undeniable pseudo-logic or merely persuasive reputation). Real problems are not resolved by average people while in a hostile social era.
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You figure out how much magnification you want merely by figuring how large you would want the object to appear to you as if you were not looking through the instrument.
You can consider the flag to be a small portion of the Moon. So how big would the picture of the Moon have to be in order to make that small portion of it appear large enough to discern it as a USA flag? I would want it to appear to be about as large as the Moon appears to be when not aided by a telescope. With that, I could very probably tell for certain that it was a flag and probably a USA flag. So given that the Moon is 3,500,000 meters wide and the flag is merely one meter wide, obviously I would need to expand the picture of the Moon 3,500,000 times larger.
Dat’s one big motha ofa magnifying glass. The telescope company was obviously assuming that you could discern easier than I do (requiring only 0.12 miles aperture).
Sadly it probably still wouldn’t really work simply because of the atmosphere reducing the seeing conditions, but hey.
My argument was that it was placed there by taking a shuttle into orbit, and placing the mirror on a small robotic minishuttle with a trajectory as such that it would land on the moon. This means apollo was never required to land on the moon.
I mean, it’s not 
