[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'B')ut the same phenomenon that causes people to think the moon mission is faked causes people to disbelieve peak oil and global warming. So I choose not to just tolerate quackery but to challenge it, and challenge the thought processes which make us so vulnerable to it.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '
')Good for you, and I also try to challenge some things - but, have not the fortitude to be very challenging for very long, and will generally lose any argument I'm in.

[SeaGypsy]

Now who is being paranoid Mos?
You brought the term Tinfoilers into debate.
You choose to use this rhetoric to label anyone who doubts your oh so very straight position. I have never used this tag except in response to your over-use of it.
If I were to use it, I would reserve it for folks who believe every bit of anti American, anti Israel, pro alien conspiracy nut job story.
The 3 instances i have brought up in response to your gross over-use of the term are all very logicly debateable. If you or others don't want to take the time to wade the mud of youtube looking for contrary evidence to your predetermined position, those who have can hardly expect a reasonable debate.
You continuously keep trying to build your straw man, again with a conspiracy theory about H1N1. I guess you have heard about the microchip embedded in the vaccine for it? Although I have looked at that CT I don't believe it. I didn't take the vaccine because I prefer to trust my own immune system, not because of a CT.
On your Science as magic parable. I also find this really interesting.
I have a friend who has taught himself how to collect bits of spiders web and use them surreptitiously to make things 'magicly float' in the palm of his hand. He has suckered so many people. I have watched him do these trigks hundreds of times and seen most people really believe he has some incredible power. Point being science does not have to be very advanced to be convincing as magic, it merely has to appear to defy objective reality.
As Mesuge has argued with you being a 100%er so do I.
You can't convince me that those pictures you provided are anything like adequate reference for the fact of manned moon landings. When vehicle number plates can be read on earth, by satellite, through the haze of apmosphere; again why no decent pictures of the rover or any of the other stuff?
You refuse to address specific points of contention, continuing with straw man argument and derogatory labelling of your opposition.
In effect you are just preaching to the converted, thus are no different to those who believe every crackpot CT and argue others should also.

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut the same phenomenon that causes people to think the moon mission is faked causes people to disbelieve peak oil and global warming. So I choose not to just tolerate quackery but to challenge it, and challenge the thought processes which make us so vulnerable to it.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', ' ')When vehicle number plates can be read on earth, by satellite, through the haze of apmosphere; again why no decent pictures of the rover or any of the other stuff?

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', ' ')is it all because of man

[SeaGypsy]

I guess you must have seen the various probe shots of other planets in the solar sytem? The US is very good at cameras and space probes, why not fly one close enough to the moon to get said pictures? The gizmos are going past that way anyhow; wouldn't it be in US interests to once and for all lay to rest this argument?

[Ludi]

Photo of where humans wandered around on the Moon and left junk behind:



http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation ... ding-sites

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'I') guess you must have seen the various probe shots of other planets in the solar sytem? The US is very good at cameras and space probes, why not fly one close enough to the moon to get said pictures? The gizmos are going past that way anyhow; wouldn't it be in US interests to once and for all lay to rest this argument?

[Ludi]

Links showing photos of the landers and their shadows:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/m ... sites.html

[SeaGypsy]

That picture is a joke. The fact that NASA would release it and others in it's series as evidence brings even more doubt to the credibility of their story. The shadows run contrary 180 degrees from those of the surrounding landscape for starters. There is no detail there of any worth. If they want to prove it really happened fly up close enough to actually see the footprints, buggy, tracks, etc. Why not?

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'T')he shadows run contrary 180 degrees from those of the surrounding landscape for starters.

[SeaGypsy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'I') guess you must have seen the various probe shots of other planets in the solar sytem? The US is very good at cameras and space probes, why not fly one close enough to the moon to get said pictures? The gizmos are going past that way anyhow; wouldn't it be in US interests to once and for all lay to rest this argument?

[Ludi]

You don't even know how to interpret the photos I'm showing you, so this is pointless.

So, like I say, I concede on grounds of this is a stupid argument!

Buh bye!

[SeaGypsy]

My interpretation of those pictures is that they are bodgy, show no real detail and that the shadows are contradictory. They are also nowhere near the resolution possible these days or even 20 years ago.
You find this all a bit frustrating Ludi and so do I just on the other side of the debate.
To refocus on the progenator's original post, this is one of 3 main examples which I chose to bring up as highly questionable US propoganda; which he and his article writer choose to label as 'tinfoil'. That is what gets my goat.
The article specified is a deadset propoganda support piece, no more than a feel good excersize for the believers of the status quo.

To bring a new angle to the debate, I would like to see America be all it really can be at it's greatest. There are so many real achievments which Americans can be rightly proud of. I believe the US has at various times sullied it's own reputation with hyperbole; unnecessarily.

A short list of American achievements which rate in my book:

The Constitution.

The modern fine arts.

Modern mass production techniques.

Intellectual and political authorship.

Real exploration of space.

Development of high tech in a wide variety of fields, especially in medicine.

International development aid. (I know/ 2 edged sword...)

International diplomacy. (Again...)

Countering radical Islam and Communism.

The USA could have been a truly great nation for all time, had the core principles of the Constitution been resolutely stuck to. The permission of many treasonous acts by Government and beaurocracy over several decades has whittled away at the nations credibility, especially from an outsider's objective view. This is a damned shame. Bluff and bluster can never replace true greatness as envisioned by the authors of the Constitution. The 'Free World' leading nation has become, in many people's eyes within and without, a pariah. As a born American I find this to be sad, an awefull shame and a waste.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', '
')Different topics with different levels of proof. Hardly comparable to my mind.

[SeaGypsy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', '
')Different topics with different levels of proof. Hardly comparable to my mind.

[dorlomin]

I have yet to see an internally consistent narrative raised as a counter explanation to the events of the Apollo 11 moon shot on this thread. There seems to be an acceptance of an amorphous series of questions about that event being sufficient to act as proof that 'some nefarious' was afoot.

Reflecting on this I am struck by how instructive this thread is in explaining the course of history that became the triumph of the west. And how people should reinforce these lessons as we move into a post peak oil world.

Human minds are incredible pattern matching machines. Having taken some undergraduate courses in AI we were taught the huge capacity of humans to derive patterns from the world around us and the huge difficulty we have in making machines perform remotely on that scale. We have an ability to take a series of disparate events and create narratives from them that that we can use to imagine how the world could be not only how it is. [To be a bit more technical we take abstractions of the world around us and build mental models, for example we could see the changes in the seasons and the arrival of the herds of Springbok out on the African Veldt this allowed us to plan our lives ahead and to read the weather not just simply react by instinct]. But there is a flaw in this, we can perceive patterns where none exist. This flaw is not fatal and sometimes can be useful, we anthromorphised nature, declaring weather gods with human-like behaviors so we developed stories to explain the weather that applied our imagined gods and their needs. With this we had a simple model for weather that was better just random guesses or even instinct but was imperfect.

Now rewinding to the year 1000AD, famously given as the nadir of Europe or atleast the jump off point where it was able to end the external invasions and begin our slow outward push. Looking at the world of 1000AD almost no one would have predicted that Europe would surge out to become the dominant global culture in merely 500 years. The Fatimid Calaphate ruled the huge expanses of the MENA and was among the most advanced civilizations history had ever known, the Song dynasty in China had over 100 million people and an economy Europe could not even begin to imagine, great and famous empires also existed in India, Pakistan, and the Khemer in SE Asia. Western Europe was not even the most advanced part of Europe as the Byzantians still ruled a literate and well structured Empire. Western Europe was a backward illiterate, technologically retarded and politically disparate.

What changed that within 500 years these barbarian dukedoms and principalities clinging onto the edge of the great Eurasian land mass would go on to sweep all before them and in just over 950 years walk on the moon?

They developed a series of intellectual tools that allowed them to go beyond the intuition of our pattern matching machine. These tools are what are sometimes referred to as memes of a culture, the same way that genes are to a species. We developed tools that allowed us to view the evidence of the world objectively, to compare different possibilities and to enumerate the properties of the world we observed. Skipping lightly through the history this began within the church and the scholastic movement specifically (which before it became dogmatic and ossified in the post reformation view of Aquinus was a dynamic and explorative philosophical\ theological movement). Through Arabian (and a couple of Jewish) philosophers, the scholastics discovered the Ancient Greek\ Roman worlds of science (the Western Christians had retained some Plato largely as a result of St Augustus' reverence for him). An intellectual explosion was ignited as Europeans discovered Galens, Ptolomy, Pythagoras and not least Aristotle. But this surge of curiosity broke out in a world that did not have gran imperial palaces and bureaucracies, it was into a region of tribes and petty warchiefs who were forging protostates. Originally confined to the church it broke out into the aristocracy and merchant classes. Science as we know it was conceived.

But this was not an abstract love of knowledge. The tools of the ancients of looking at the world, discussing it and trying to build models of the universe and explanations of its behavior gave the new kings the tools they need to become strategists and not just war chiefs of large tribes. Before this intellectual movement warfare was largely calling together your vassals (Such as Harold Godwinson and William the Bastard did for there epic confrontation in 1066) and charging off living off the land, robbing the locals and hoping for some kind logistics. Yet by the time of Edward I (crudely caricatured in Braveheart as Edward the Longshanks) his military expeditions were properly supported by logistics tails with prebuilt supply dumps, calculated food consumption levels, animal fodder and weapons needs. The skills of observing the world and developing more advanced explicitly literate models of the world beyond the intuition of a good war chief had arrived. As strong states emerged the kings who could apply premeditated planning and analysis won out over the more romantic types who relied on God, chivilraic values and intuition.

But Europe was now a mass of competing states. The reverence for the ancients that stifled innovation in Empires and Imperial courts was not able to work in Europe, every petty king wanted to get one over the next guy. Experimental science became hugely important in the arms races, better steel, better gun powder, better castles, better logistics. Europe’s avaricious consumption of any technology no matter its origin meant that Chinese compasses and Arabian star maps were incorporated into Europe who immediately set about improving them and trying to explain them better to make more use of them. This is not just reductionist meta historiography, people like John the Navigator founded an institution that was the NASA of its day to incorporate these new foreign technologies and explore to find new lands to exploit. He was able to do so because he was a king and not subjected to a centralized empire.

Of all the competing kingdoms and all the competing means of analyzing the world what we now think of as the scientific method emerged. You take all the facts you can observe and construct an explanation of an event with them and use that explanation to derive as of yet unknown information about the world. The competitive nature of the kings and states was being reproduced by academics, each explanation for an event was put up and subjected to scrutiny by peers. The best were accepted.

This system of competitive analysis of the world allowed Europeans to built ever better and better guns, better navigation, better ships, better steel. The old great empires began to fall in front of these barbarians with their science. But it was not just science, over the longer term the Europeans that had the most scrutiny of their governments tended to perform the best so the NW kingdoms that were able to shake of Romes Bishops sprinted ahead of the old powers of Spain and Italian cities.

Why is this relevant to this thread, well our intellectual tools are being abandoned in the west. We now want to fall into a more primitive and comforting world of emotional truth, intuition and feeling. We want to believe what feels right. It is the old world certainties that predate the brutal cold hard world of empirical science. People will boast that they 'believe' what feels right to them. That they do not and cannot build internally consistent narratives to set up against the mainstream but at looking at a couple of pieces of evidence 'feel' they know the right answer.

Many people like to boast they are the intellectual heirs of western skepticism because they question mainstream narratives. But this is a total failure to understand what western skepticism has been. Its not just questioning but building strong counter examples and submitting them to peer review. These septics are far more the heirs of the Chinese mandarins who 'questioned' western science because it did not fit what they wanted to believe about the universe or the Popes and Cardinals who rejected Copernicus because it felt wrong, they also knew that they had questions about much of that model of the universe that did not 'feel' right. But there counter example was week and relied on what people felt.

In a prepeak world we have been pampered by the indulgence of over abundant energy. This has cushioned us from hard choices. In a post peak world for democracies to function and make good choices many people are going to have to discover that questioning authority for its own sake is not skepticism if it prevents us taking hard and unpopular actions that are necessary to adjust to changing energy availability. If people wish to be skeptical that will mean putting up clear well argued counter examples that can be examined and the consequences explored.

This whole world of reacting intuitively to politics is over.

Or at least the states where citizens indulge in that will find it a very hard job keeping any kind of civilization going.

[AgentR]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'T')he US is very good at cameras and space probes, why not fly one close enough to the moon to get said pictures?

[Mesuge]

Sadly, and as expected no real effort of 100% ers to address the specific questions since my last post. So, let's focus on the immediate - midterm future in the space area, are there any signs of possible structural changes there..

Hm, firstly the actual costs to get some ultra-minimal hardware land or orbiting the moon (probe of few kg) is way bellow the "estimates" mentioned by AgentR and others above, partly because of the increased competition in global private business of sat cargo lifting, partly because this has been for long time mis-used as silly excuse (we don't have money/scientific interest to be wasted on already done "extensive" lunar research).

Also, the X-prize offers bonuses for teams delivering images of Apollo missions hardware. Will this particular venue achieve anything meanigfull in the area of independent verification and is it transparent enough? I don't know. But the simple fact, there are currently handfull of private companies able to tweak their run of the mill cargo rockets to send a small payload to moon is promising for any other possible space exploration related application, like trying completely new approaches, e.g. solar wind powered crafts for deeper solar system missions or pursuing any other science goals not on the top list of NASA/ESA at the moment. I think we touched it in the begining of the thread, that the traditional NASA contractors are pretty pissed off from the prospect, that little guys like SpaceX, can deliver for a fraction of their cost, and kick them out of the gov. business after the Shuttle is retired later this year.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/ ... guidelines
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/