At work today a discussion about the Luna landings broke out. There are ten of us in the conversation. Two - myself (43yo) And one other (53) Had no doubt about events.

The balance of our team (All under 30) decided the opposite. In fact I felt I was being belittled bcause I fell for all the propaganda.

This got me thinking. Is this whole moon thing about ego? Is it a case that a generation removed, we were so easily fooled by NASA and whoever else is meant to be behind all this.

Is it simply because we used computers the size of buildings, we simply couldn't be smart enough to go and do all the things NASA and others achieved during the era.

I mean at the time of Apollo 11 United States engineers stopped Niagara falls from flowing so they could inspect the rock face. Now is that the darndest thing? And sorry but I think that's as big a job as going to the moon. Do people challenge that? Nup

And this is nothing new. Pyramids Stonehenge you name it...the claim is man didn't build it. well i got news for people. Humans are pretty niffty and smart when we put our mind to it - and I am tired of hearing my ancestors wheren't smart enough, or didn't know how do stuff....cause the reason we are where we are today...is because we did believe we could do things...more importantly...we went and did it

Glen

I've found that when people say that we weren't smart enough to make it to the moon in the 1960s that they are really displaying that they aren't smart enough to use a little logic or critical thinking I suppose in some sense it is natural for the next generation to think that because they may live in a more technologically advanced age that that equates to being intellectually superior as well. I'm sure in the past that there were people listening to music on 8 track cassettes thinking that they had it all over those shellac playing luddites fromt he last generation!

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

Nice point about the 8 track...but can we keep that quiet... If you show that thing to the youngsters out there. THEY WILL KNOW WE WERE STUPID

:P

welcome to the board, first off.

second . . . I'm 28. as I've said (repeatedly), my parents hadn't actually met yet during the Apollo landing. however, I'm also a student of history. I am perfectly aware that many, many people born long before I was were capable of things of which I am not capable now. (heck, there are people born after I was who are also capable of things of which I am not capable now, but that's a different issue.)

I think part of it is that, except for a very, very narrow age bracket, those of us born post-Apollo were born post-Watergate. "the government lies to us" is something we absorbed from infancy. the youngest of us also quite vividly remember Iran-Contra. ("our government lies to us and itself and breaks laws it doesn't like.") the older generations, those born pre-Apollo, weren't exposed to that sort of thing as young as we were. at least, I don't think they were, but objectively, how would I know?

further, I think my generation has been, for the most part, raised devoid of common sense. we all knew how to program VCRs before we were out of diapers, but more of our parents used television as a babysitter than any generation's parents before us. certainly reading wasn't something we were expected to do outside of school.

that, too, factors into it--in general, I've discovered that "look it up" is an instruction easier handled by people older than I. (heck, "go to a library" is an instruction easier handled by people older than I.) I'm one of the youngest people around who grew up with computers--Sharon Meiselman's family got one when she and I were in second grade, after we'd gotten one that only worked in BASIC for the gifted kids in our class. we've been spoonfed information all our lives, and finding it out for ourselves is becoming a dying skill.

now, I don't want to imply that these generalizations apply to everyone--heck, I've got friends whose parents are still hippies, whose families didn't even have televisions. as for me, I got in trouble in kindergarten for bringing a book to recess. (they wanted me to play with the other children, but I didn't really like the other children, except the aforementioned Sharon, who was much better socialized than I.) most of the history teachers at my high school required lengthy end-of-semester projects that had to have x-number of books in the bibliography. (books! at the time, if you went online, it was AOL or CompuServe!)

still, what do you do? our government has been known to lie to us since before we were born, and we weren't given the skill set required to learn facts for ourselves. (and, yes, some of us are just stupid, but that's certainly true of any generation.) it's easier to just disbelieve everything than to pick and choose what's true and what isn't--though, come to that, it's just as easy to believe everything. we just know you can't.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

MG, welcome to the board!

And to you and Gillian - excellent analyses. I have to agree that there's an onerous mixture of arrogance (I suppose every generation has some naturally, thinking they're superior), ignorance (which is not just tolerated but encouraged these days), and free-floating cynicism (which is ladled out in large doses in every medium).

MG, tell your hoax-believing friends that being all hip and cynical is cheap - anyone can do that. Tell them it takes a little work sometimes to understand the truth. And tell them that ignorance is nothing to be proud of. Really, belittle them for it if that's what it takes to get through the attitude.

Oh, yeah, and send them here. (Stretches, flexes arms and fingers in preparation for application of clue-by-four.)

Send all of them here (but tell them to do their homework first)! It's time we had a few more people to educate.

JayUtah mentions on his website why some people like to believe in conspiracies:
http://www.clavius.org/why.html
The most common desire I've observed is to be "smart," or, as Jay puts it:
Other links for your workmates so they can do some homework:

Some very brief answers to many of the hoax-believers' arguments:
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...=105193#105193

Fellow-contributor Bob B's site:
http://www.braeunig.us/space/hoax.htm

JayUtah's brilliant site, Clavius:
http://www.clavius.org

Thomas Bohn's great site with "lunar photo anomalies" you can reproduce at home:
http://www3.telus.net/summa/moonshot/index.htm

Thanks everyone for the input - I am pleased to see this not a modern problem. I was speaking to my father about this topic on the weekend and he told me a funny story from his shool days just before the war, maybe 1938 or so.

Seems a kid rocked up to school with the news that a British bomber on some sort of arial survey mission had actually flown over the Himlayan mountains. The other kids proceeded to beat him cause he was obviously lying. Aircraft couldn't fly that high, and how could the pilots breath.

Years later Dad found the story was true lol.

I think the general coments about our cynical nature are true, and sadly in some of instances well founded. Also the insider elitist comments do ring very true.

When I was a kid, Chariots of the Gods ruled supreme - I was convinced aliens had walked among us. That was till I read a brillian book (Dont know the author) Called "The Past Is Real" It was a series of essays by scientist who each took a claim from Chariots and shredded it.

So you guys will be pleased to know I have started the re-eductation program of my work mates - though i still not sure if the knitting needle goes through the eye socket or up through the nasal cavity :roll:

Glen

I would suggest that where you can you use evidence that does not come from the US government as that is considered by some as a biased source :roll:

Every thing the US government says must be lies, allegedly :roll:

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Heh-heh. Every time someone whips that one out, I give them, "So Donald Rumsfeld is not the Secretary of Defense. The government says he is, and the government always lies, so only an ignorant sheep would believe he is."
I loudly maintain that according to them Rumsfeld is not SecDef (This works especially well if they also mistrust the media, because then you can call them an untrustworthy source of corroboration) and can be quite a jerk about it until they own up that maybe not everything the government says is a lie. Then they tend to agree that individual claims should be looked at on the basis of the evidence. Then you can look at the evidence. The biggest obstacle to overcome is that fashionable, knee-jerk mistrust of government.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

If anyone wants to see the footage that was taken on that flight (Its quite spectacular by the way) then they should try and track down Wings over Everest the film that was built around that footage.

As for the rest of the film well, one person who saw it described it as "... very pukka and bigglesish but still very interesting, talk about on a wing and a prayer!"

Basically very outdated, but a wonderful insight into how the era made documentaries and as I've already said the in-flight footage is spectacular.

If your in Australia the ABC shows it late at night once or twice a year.

Sounds a bit like a book in my collection "Some Trust in Chariots". Printed only once while Chariots of the Gods (et al) keep getting re-released year after year. Sad really.

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We all know those Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

John Sladek, The New Apocrypha, pg 34.

One example I use in this regard is in relation to the attempted assination of Reagan in 1981. There were reports that Jim Brady had died from his wounds, but the White House quickly contradicted the reports saying that he was alive but in critical condition. Hardly anyone believed the White House, assuming that they would state he was alive until Brady's family could be informed privately. To everyone's surprise, Jim Brady really was alive (and still is AFAIK) and proved that the government sometimes does tell the truth.

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Yo Adrian. The Phillies won the Series.

Yes, I think ego is involved. Some conspiracists seem to want to "get back at the brainiacs" by exposing their deception, &c.

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

I never understand why people say the technology wasn't good enough to navigate to the moon in 1969, but they have no problem believing that unmanned craft reached Venus and Mars 5 years before, even though they're at least 200 times further away. :-?

the irony of this line of thought (by the HBers), is that if we weren't smart enough to make it to the moon, how are they smart enough to know that? baffling.

taks

We still use computers the size of buildings. The world's fastest computers have pretty much stayed the same size for decades; only their speed has increased. There were small, low-powered computers in the 1960s.

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

well... maybe.
the density (flops/m^2) has increased dramatically, if that's what you mean by speed. but now they have to do more.

from what i understand, typical stability equations ala those used on the LM are pretty easy to implement even with analog systems... well, i suppose easy is a relative term. by that i mean you don't need a teraflop supercomputer to do the work. heck, we're just first getting pentium processors in space...

taks

Well to be fair, most "computers" that big are made up of smaller linked computers which all act as a single computer. I don't recall any single machines that would be the size of Colossus today, though hey, I'm happy to be corrected, it wouldn't be the first time today.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

the density (flops/m^2) has increased dramatically, if that's what you mean by speed. but now they have to do more.

Of course, but they're still the most powerful computers on Earth. We always write software that just barely exceeds the convenient capacity of the machines. I'd give the capacity in cubic meters rather than square meters because we're packing things more densely vertically too.

from what i understand, typical stability equations ala those used on the LM are pretty easy to implement even with analog systems...

Yes, although the comparison really isn't valid. It's not a matter of analog versus digital in terms of sufficiency or capacity. Analog computers work very fast for the jobs they do. But they're difficult to program because they have to be programmed essentially by design. But your point is still valid: the digital autopilot code is relatively simple.

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

Then what do you class the internet as?

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.