(Yes, of course I know that’s not the Enterprise-D and that TNG came out in 1986, but you try making a better debunking joke.)

  • Mohaim
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    My favorite debunking is an old YouTube video called “moon hoax not” where a filmmaker explains that the due to technology limits of the time, faking the multi-hour live broadcasts in slow-motion, which millions of people were watching, would be impossible without there being telltale signs of it being spliced film (the splicing, film grain, etc.). Since slow-mo video (distinct from film; TV broadcasts were video) at the time could not play back more than a few seconds of footage, at most, it would have to be high-speed film played back at normal speed. Assuming you could find or make a high-speed camera fit to task. While the first landing had awful video quality, later missions had much higher quality and the film fakery would be impossible to completely hide. People these days massively overestimate the video (and film) technology that was available in 1969. (IIRC. It’s been years since I’ve last rewatched it.)

    Edit: TL;DR: Perfectly faking the multi-hour uninterrupted video broadcasts (i.e., either inventing slow-motion video that can last hours, or perfectly passing off a multi-hour film as video) in slow-motion would have been significantly more difficult than sending humans to the moon with 1969 technology.

  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Faking the moon landing would have been a massive coverup requiring the cooperation of at least one foreign nation. (Australia, because of Parkes)

    During the Nixon administration. Nixon couldn’t even cover up one little burglary.

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      This is the one thing that kills me with one of my favorite space movies, interstellar… they have that one scene at the school saying the landings were faked to bankrupt the soviets…like how the fuck did that make it into the movie.

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        It’s not there as some commentary by Christopher Nolan that the moon landings didn’t happen. It’s there to show that schools are willing to teach a lie as long as it serves the narrative of “past oppulence is what destroyed our world, so get out there and be a farmer!”

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          O damn never thought of it that way. I went and looked it up further and you’re spot on, it seems it was put into the movie to make people become farmers and not look to space. Basically try and solve the problems on earth.

      • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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        That guy lady is a silly and you’re supposed to think she’s wrong. She’s teaching lies in order to justify a bad worldview.

      • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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        That was making fun of people who believed things like that. It’s very obvious if you’ve watched the movie.

          • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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            Asking about that scene in Interstellar? The entire movie is a love letter to NASA and science. What do you mean?

            • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              I understand it is. It’s one of my favorite sci-fi movies, but like myself and others we were confused with the scene, but others have explained it.

  • beliquititious
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    Fake moon landing, aliens built the pyramids why do some conspiracy theories insist on robbing humans of their monumental achievements. My guess is that people who create and share conspiracies like those are too dumb to realize that other people have different knowledge than they do.

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      It’s probably because most of the people that believe these things are impossible can’t even chew with their mouths closed.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      I do like how the moon landing deniers forget about the phrase “it’s not rocket science” when pretending to know what they’re talking about.

      • beliquititious
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        Would you like me to edit my comment to say “why do some conspiracy theories…”?

        • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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          Ill add one off the top of my head, the assasination of julius caeser.

          Oh and that Arch Duke Ferdinand fellow. That caused a few wars.

          Conspiracies happen all the time.

          Stop being a shill for the governmental disinformation efforts.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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            1 month ago

            Just curious, was the anti-governmental assassination of the archduke the governmental disinformation effort or was the very open explanation for it and the Black Hand’s admission of their involvement the governmental disinformation effort?

  • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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    Also keep in mind that the astronauts communicated with Earth by radio. Anyone with even 1920s radio technology would have figured out that the astronauts weren’t broadcasting from the Moon.

    We were in the middle of a cold war with the soviets back in the 1960s. Proving the moon landing was fake would have been the propaganda coup of the century for them. What possible reason would they have to stay quiet about that?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      We were in the middle of a cold war with the soviets back in the 1960s. Proving the moon landing was fake would have been the propaganda coup of the century for them. What possible reason would they have to stay quiet about that?

      That’s always been my number one reason why the moon landing was definitely not faked. The Soviets never caught wind of it between 1969 and 1992? Come on.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Plus we left retroreflectors on the moon, that we can shoot laser beams at and get a return bean back.

        its used to measure the drift of the moon away from earth.

        the lunar reoglith is not reflective enough to bounce a signal back (and its been tested to death)

        • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          We know it reflects light, so that just tells me we haven’t used a big enough laser yet :p

    • CompassRed@discuss.tchncs.de
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      Not sure I understand. Are you agreeing that the moon landing happened but you also claim the footage is faked? Do you have any reasons to support that? You mention something about radio technology from the 1920s, but the moon landing occurred nearly 50 years later, so I hardly see how that is relevant.

      Edit: I misread your comment. Thanks to @turmacar@lemmy.world for pointing it out.

      • turmacar@lemmy.world
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        No, they’re saying regardless of if the signal was encrypted or whatever format it was in, anyone with a directional antenna could triangulate where the signal was coming from. If there were only a repeater on the moon that NASA was transmitting to that was then sending the signal back, that would also have been able to be determined.

        Both the Russians, who had a vested interest in embarrassing the US, and every other amateur and professional radio operator on the planet agreed that the moon landing was being transmitted from the moon.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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    Wasn’t 2001 also made at that time? As I recall, that was incredibly realistic (mostly), far more so than a cheap TV show

    (Not saying that 2001 is proof, just that ToS isn’t a great comparison)

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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    The problem with moon landings isn’t that they can’t be done, it’s that they are dangerous as shit, with little reward. You’d get a better deal out of being sent to a remote desert island.

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      To orbit the moon, a space craft needs to move at about 1.5 km/s, or 3300 miles per hour.

      So any landing starts with you going at 1.5 km/s and needs to end at the moons surface when you reach about 0 meters per second.

      If anything goes wrong with your engines while you slow down, you smack into the moon at either near orbital speeds, or at fighter jet speeds. The window for having an engine failure and being slow enough to survive is so narrow that it might as well not exist.

      That’s why Apollo used pressure fed, self igniting engines. As long as 2 valves opened, you had an engine. And Apollo landers had a totally separate ascent engine that worked exactly the same way, so if the landing engine failed, they could just drop the landing stage and return to orbit at practically any time during the descent. They even had a whole procedure of what to do if the ascent engine didn’t light when they were supposed to leave. Everything from jump starting the engine like a car with a dead battery, to physically getting access to the valves and manually opening them.

      I hate the current plan for Artemis. I hate that in 55 years, we’ve only managed to make shit more complicated. The current plan is for a vehicle with no abort capability to ignite its 3 turbo pumped, liquid methane fueled engines at least 4 times to get from low earth orbit to the moons surface, with days between ignitions.

      A capability that has never been shown to work or even exist in any capacity. Turbo pumps are finally machined pieces of engineering that need to behave exactly right, or they turn a rocket into either a bomb, or a giant tube that can’t move. And the current plan for Artemis calls for these finely crafted pieces of machinery to be subjected to the harsh environment of both space where they’ll sit for at least a week, and multiple ignitions, where they’re subjected to ridiculous temperatures and pressures.

      Absolutely ridiculous. We never left an astronaut on the moon in the 60s and 70s, but by god are they trying to open the first graveyard on the moon these days.

    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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      So your saying the return to the moon should not be for science but instead be a reality tv show?

      I like how you think kid.

      Temptation Moon 9pm/8central

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    However, for its time TOS effects were often really good. People expected the typical B-movie styles but got believable visuals.

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        Are you kidding me? Those things were fucking creepy. And the sounds they made? Uggghh…

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          Of all of my memories of watching TOS in my youth, there were two that stick by me the most.

          The first was sitting down to watch it with my brother on October 23, 1983 when I was six years old. Just after it started, there was a special news bulletin about some dumb bomb exploding in some place I’d never heard of and my brother- much older than me- kept telling me to be quiet and stop complaining so he could hear the news. Right as the bulletin ended, the credits for Star Trek started playing. It made me cry.

          The other one was seeing those aliens for the first time and thinking, “I guess aliens don’t have to look like us.” It was a profound thought for a child no more than eight years old.

  • OpenStars@discuss.online
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    2 months ago

    you try making a better debunking joke.)

    Are you kidding me? Lemmy is way too contentious to encourage me to do that - I am leaving posting to the professionals like you!

    • petrol_sniff_king
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      I believe in you. If you fill yourself with determination, you too can use comedy to challenge people and also complain about those people canceling you loudly on NBC.

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        Hypothetically speaking… how much money would I be able to make doing this? 😇

        But to be clear I mostly was joking about being a coward, not so much “cancelled”.

        img

        More to the point, Lemmy is about Linux and… uh… GNU+Linux, and I for one don’t need to be submitting posts that are not of interest to others. A skill which I seem to very much lack, most of the time:-).

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      I’ve been to the NASA space center and they’ve got a very vivid recreation of the moon landing in a museum. I have no doubt you could have faked the video. But how they got a moon lander and a flag up there remains a mystery.

      Also, we landed on the moon six different times. Even if you’re skeptical of Neil and Buzz, it kept happening through Cernan. By Apollo 17, it was barely newsworthy.

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        And the old saying “three people can keep a secret, if 2 are dead” comes to mind. The number of people who would know, just in astronauts, tells me someone would’ve squealed.

        There was a movie in the 1980’s that used this premise, but the astronauts weren’t supposed to know (I think), or were only told pretty late. Capricorn One (with OJ Simpson if memory serves). Not a great movie, hell, not even good, just an interesting concept.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          The number of people who would know, just in astronauts, tells me someone would’ve squealed.

          There are definitely conspiracies that have happened in the US that have stayed (officially) sealed for decades at a time. There’s also no shortage of (unofficial) leaks and Deep-Throat style informants willing to sell you a story about the moon landing being a hoax.

          I wouldn’t say the problem is that nobody squealed. I’d say the problem is that folks who claim they were in the room when Kubrick shot the B-roll for the moon landing from a Hollywood sound stage are not sources that stand up to prolonged interrogation.

          Capricorn One (with OJ Simpson if memory serves).

          I’ve heard of it. Mars instead of the Moon. An interesting premise.

          I’m also partial to For All Mankind as a “What If” of the US and Soviets continuing the space race for another forty years. Both explore interesting concepts about the intersection of politics and space exploration.

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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            For sure.

            Stuff can be kept secret, it’s just difficult, and is usually accomplished via all sorts of obfuscation.

            Like doing something layered deep within something else, making it appear to be a day-to-event (hiding materiel in containers labeled as something else, making it weigh and move normally, then having military deliver it as usual, because who would think these drums of fuel are actually heavy water, or something like that).

            The moon landings were live. Quite a bit harder, I’d think.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              The moon landings were live.

              That is, again, a thing skeptics will dispute for this or that reason.

              But that’s the thing with conspiracy theorists and skeptics. Ask a flat earther how you get live images from space and they’ll just tell you “We don’t, its fake”.

      • Nougat@fedia.io
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        I have no doubt you could have faked the video.

        Nope. In order to fake the video with a live background and real shadows, you would have to have had a single sun-equivalent light source to make all of the shadows point in the exact same direction, while at the same time no light whatsoever coming from any other direction.

        CGI wasn’t a thing in 1969. Ultimately, if you wanted to fake a moon landing in 1969, you would very quickly find out that it would be far simpler and far less expensive to just go to the moon.

        • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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          That doesn’t even take into account the dust. In the moon landing footage, lunar regolith doesn’t billow like it would in an atmosphere. Whenever it’s kicked, it falls back to the surface in a neat parabola every time.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          you would have to have had a single sun-equivalent light source

          Sprinkled into the Moon Landing Hoax lore are all sorts of arguments about lighting coming from the wrong angles and producing bizarre shadows, objects moving inconsistently with microgravity, and technical components (including the cameras used to film the landing itself) being impossible to operate from the lunar surface.

          The root of hoax theory isn’t merely that it was faked, but that a savvy observer of the footage can identify the Hollywood legerdemain.

          CGI wasn’t a thing in 1969.

          If you want to get hard-core in your Moon Hoax theories, you’ll inevitably run into people who claim it was.

  • sundray@lemmus.org
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    2 months ago

    On the other hand, do you know one of the companies that supposedly made the Saturn-V?

    Boeing.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      At least their build quality was generally good back then. I wouldn’t trust them to build a Saturn V today.

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        Arguably their quality contributed to them being allowed to effictively oversee themselves. Did it save some time and red tape at the time? Yes. Did it eventually lead to hundreds of deaths? Also yes.