When we return to the moon, what could we do (feasably) Too put an end to this hoax junk? Lights, messages, something?

Nothing that one couldn't choose to ignore.

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I can't think of anything that would prove it to someone who is willfully disbelieving.
Even if you put them on a mission and had them walk around on the surface they could still claim it had somehow been staged.

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But then, we could just leave them there. That would shut them up for a while.

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That's why it's important to try to get HBs to tell you what kind of evidence would convince them that the Moon landings were real. Unfortuately from what I've seen here and at Apollohoax most refrain from doing so. So I agree with Mushashi and Jason, there is unlikely any amount of evidence that would convince a hard-core HB that the landings were real.

We will never be able to eliminate 100% of these hoax claims because no matter demonstration is performed, somebody will dream up a conspiracy theory to try to explain how it was faked. Nonetheless, it might interesting to think about poddo's question in terms of what demonstration could be done that would convince 99% of the world that these hoax claims are nonsense.

Turn the moon into the Coca-Cola logo.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

That would certainly do it but I think poddo used the term "feasibly".

How did your debate go poddo? Or hasn't it happened yet?

Cheers

Jon

the debate is tomorrow. Since posting about it here a while ago, I've already convinced some, and they'll be helping me tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes! Oh, and back on topic, I like the coca-cola idea :-p

Nah... you'd also need a Pepsi on the darkside 8)

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Are you a Bright?

Just imagine the bidding war that could be created between Coca-Cola and Pepsi for that kind of advertising. NASA could probably get the whole project funded through the private sector.

"By executive order the moon has been renamed. It is now to be referred to officially as, 'Pepsi Presents the Moon'."

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
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A serious answer to the question: Anything on the moon visible from Earth with the most powerful telescopes we have would need to be bigger than a football stadium. Waving lights, etc., or deploying some kind of banner won't be big enough. A nuclear explosion might be big enough to see, but carries the obvious ill connotations. The problem with any of these stunts is that they can be arguably achieved automatically, and so there's no proof of a manned landing in any of them.

You must understand that the conspiracy theorists believe in a hoax not because there is not enough evidence to prove that the original landings were real. There's plenty. They believe in a hoax because they have previously decided on that belief. It has nothing to do with the evidence they present (or rather, their attempts to explain away the evidence in favor of actual landings). Read through some of these threads and see how quickly the conspiracy theorists abandon the evidence once it's challenged and fall back to vague political or social arguments.

Conspiracism is a religion. By this I mean that the central tenets of an adherent's belief are propositions treated within the community as axioms. That is, they are taken on faith and little attempt is made to make them objectively evident. The rest of the belief system follows from these axioms. In conspiracism, the axiom is a distrust in all forms of authority, whether formalized in government or informal authority based on perceptions of superiority and inferiority.

So in a larger sense, it's more of a psychological issue than a scientific or technical issue. The scientific and historical merits of Apollo's authenticity are underminded because they must be undermined in order to preserve the axiom.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Excellent point.

Or a distrust of the authority of the senses when the evidence detected by them whacks a conspiracist over the head with the nature of reality!

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Didn't Bill Kaysing backtrack on the recent show? Didn't he say that only a new, non-NASA mission to the Moon that showed images of the landers would convince him, then change his story to nothing could convince him once he heard that such a mission was being planned?

I can't think of a better demonstration of the gulf between rationality and the attitudes of HBs.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

Just speculating, but would a small rocket (powerful enough to get, say, 30-40 km off the surface) and capable of launching a number of magnesium (or other powerful flares) that could be observed by telescope/binoculars/TV be a strong proof?

Then again, the HB's would probably say they had been launched from Earth and cleverly timed--I guess Jay's right, there isn't any proof True Believers will accept.

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So when the Chinese astronauts are standing next to the Apollo 11 landing site waving at the camera, that will convince him?

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No, at least not publicly. He makes money out of peddling this crap, so it won't make very good financial sense if he admits he was wrong for so many years.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

Here's an idea:

Put a hoax believer (ie. Bart Sibrel) on the Moon, point a video camera at him, and then say "If you really believe you're not on the Moon take off your helmet."

I'm sure that the other HB's will think he's in a vacuum chamber here on Earth... but it would be fun to see Bart reconsider his stance on the issue.