I'm fairly certain that the calls to violence were a joke, but I see your point. Personally, my motivations to debunk them are two fold: I refuse to ignore claims that imply I am a liar, directly or indirectly, no matter how ridiculous the claim. I am also strongly motivated whenever I see someone misuse or misrepresent amateur astronomical data to forward a conspiracy theory - it's irresponsible and it even helped motivate a mass suicide once. Apollo hoax theories strike close to motivation 1 because family members worked directly on the project and spacecraft, so it impugnes what they did.
Suprising you feel this way Herr Heinlein.
Exactly the concept of negative rights. Something that you are not allowed to take from someone else...unless you must act to prevent them from taking the same or greater right away from yourself (by compulsion/force).To get this back on topic, when I say that a man has a right to believe in and spout off whatever conspiracy nonsense he wants, I am saying that it is wrong for anyone to use force to try and stop him from thinking or saying what he wants.
Er...what? Switzerland hasn't been involved in a war since like 1850.
hahaha, own3d
Yes, I once met someone who claimed the moon landing was fake because the sky was too dark. I go "It's space, what did you expect?" He goes "I was expecting the sun to give it at least SOME color." I try explaining how a vacume does not absorb sunlight, but it goes right over his head and he replies "Just because it doesn't absorb sunlight doesn't mean it's gonna be all black."Not at all. Those conspirators claim that the JAXA moon mission was also fake, and the HD records of the lunar surface are just 3D animations.
Even the Chinese flights are believed to be faked. These days more and more people even claim that manned space flight on the whole is just governmental fake. Nobody ever went into space. It's all just lies. Humans can't travel into space. ...
The internet is almost overloaded with such a kind of crazy people, and so our societies are. No matter what happens, even if Constellation would include a mission to one of the Apollo landing sites in future, those people won't ever stop to claim that it's all a big fake, including Ares flights of course. Their brains simply do not allow rationality. It won't ever stop. It is almost like an incurable disease. That's why I say: do not care about them, do not waste your time.
The fact that the sky is dark is actually not entirely trivial:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox
Yes. I assume he is an Elementary School dropout, if that's even legal.I think the guy Pilot is talking about assumed that the sun would illuminate the sky on the Moon during the day just like here on Earth.
Actually, the sky is not dark, you just can't perceive it directlyThe fact that the sky is dark is actually not entirely trivial:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox
It's easily solved by mathematic analysis method. Just imagine yourself in an infinite cubic grid of point light sources, in a centre of one of the cubes. You've got non-enumerable number of directions total - and just numerable - that is pointing to one on more stars - so the sky will be dark withbright points. That is, there's at least one configuration resembling given conditions. Theorem is provedThe fact that the sky is dark is actually not entirely trivial:
Except that you have an innumerable number of stars in each of the cardinal directions, and so each of your innumerable number of directions will intersect a star.It's easily solved by mathematic analysis method. Just imagine yourself in an infinite cubic grid of point light sources, in a centre of one of the cubes. You've got non-enumerable number of directions total - and just numerable - that is pointing to one on more stars - so the sky will be dark withbright points. That is, there's at least one configuration resembling given conditions. Theorem is proved
Who can refute?
Read again: The number of stars is countable. Not finite. Not uncountable.Except that you have an innumerable number of stars in each of the cardinal directions, and so each of your innumerable number of directions will intersect a star.
Read again: The number of stars is numerable - so is the number of "dead" directions.
I'm a little suprised that the Wikipedia entry on Olber's Paradox doesn't mention the inverse square law. Crudely put, the intensity of light received from a light source diminish by the square of the distance. A star a few galaxies away would send so few photons to Earth that they would be under the threshold of perception.
Yes, but if there are infinitely many of them, they all add up, hence this point (from the article):A star a few galaxies away would send so few photons to Earth that they would be under the threshold of perception.
If the universe is assumed to contain an infinite number of uniformly distributed luminous stars, then:
1. The collective brightness received from a set of stars at a given distance is independent of that distance;