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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

Foster Zygote said:
There's an old film of Grumman technicians in clean suits with a stack of Kapton sheets on a table, and they're crumpling them up and putting them in plastic bins to take to the assembly bay.
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That's not even the best part. They all signed those insulation blankets in Sharpie on the inside surface. Every descent stage left on the Moon permanently retains the signatures of the rank-and-file technicians who helped build it.
 
Joe Random said:
I was drawn to JREF on the web from alt.usenet.kooks on USENET by a specific nutjob astrologer (RIP Earl C.) ; I just wanted the entertainment of seeing him get dismantled. But as a side effect - watching people seriously and methodically design tests for the dowser Edge and seeing that test's aftermath taught me my first big chunk of critical thinking. He wasn't an abusive loon or troll, but rather someone who honestly believed in abilities which he didn't actually posses. Seeing how others designed tests for those claimed abilities, rather that just mocking a 'kook', was more instructive than I realized at the time.

Coolest thing about many of these conspiracy threads is learning things I would never know if it weren't for learned people in different fields explaining in detail why any given CT is total rubbish.
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Oh, old Earl.
Pretty sure my path was sci.skeptics, probably alt.kooks ‘cos of the crossposting, ending up at alt.folklore.urban and finding JREF on the way after URI Geller fans threaten my ISP to have me shut down ‘cos I hosted a video of him in a restaurant cheating at spoon bending.
 
kookbreaker said:
Hah! Earl C was never an astrologer. He was just another run-of-the-mill wannabee psychic, although he billed himself as an "emotionologist".

Ed Wollman was the astrologer/creeper/utter nutcase.

Both of them won kook-of-the-month awards, if not the yearly award.
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Wow, there's a couple of names I haven't seen for a while.!!
 
EHocking said:
I disagree. None of those “journalists” believe, they are just making copy to get paid
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Unfortunately some journalists do 'believe'. It may even be one of the reasons they became journalists - another example of selection bias.

The real question is why do they (and others) believe? There are basically two reasons:-

1. Ego. You're the kid who could see that the emperor had no clothes when everybody else was believing the lie. They think you're dumb, but you're actually smarter than them! (not)

2. Credulity. Humans are primed to believe what others tell them because this is what makes society work. Then you find out that people sometimes lie. But "Fool me once... don't fool me again" is a lesson that some people learn too well, making them too skeptical of the 'official line' and not skeptical enough of conspiracy theories. Still credulous, just the other way.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Unfortunately some journalists do 'believe'. It may even be one of the reasons they became journalists - another example of selection bias.

The real question is why do they (and others) believe? There are basically two reasons:-

1. Ego. You're the kid who could see that the emperor had no clothes when everybody else was believing the lie. They think you're dumb, but you're actually smarter than them! (not)

2. Credulity. Humans are primed to believe what others tell them because this is what makes society work. Then you find out that people sometimes lie. But "Fool me once... don't fool me again" is a lesson that some people learn too well, making them too skeptical of the 'official line' and not skeptical enough of conspiracy theories. Still credulous, just the other way.
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I can only disagree.
Interviews with ex-owners and ex-editors have shown they are pretty much cynical about their credulous target audience.
 
JayUtah said:
That's not even the best part. They all signed those insulation blankets in Sharpie on the inside surface. Every descent stage left on the Moon permanently retains the signatures of the rank-and-file technicians who helped build it.
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Which means that somewhere on the moon are graffiti such as: "Kilroy was here" and: "For a good time call 2287.5 MHZ".
 
EHocking said:
The “exosphere” of the moon is a trillion times less dense than earth’s atmosphere, while still being billions of times denser than interstellar vacuum.
106 to 107 particles per cubic metre for the moon compared to less than 1 per cubic metre in space. Staggering.
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I know I'm late to the party, but I have only reached page 31 at this point, and I did not see a correction to this, yet. Since this is a scientific discussion, I hope my pedantic comment is seen as the matter-of-fact FYI it is meant to be, not as a knock on your post. Anyway, I think you may have meant interstellar space averages about 1 particle per cubic centimeter. Now intergalactic space, would indeed match your stated value.
 
MBDK said:
I know I'm late to the party, but I have only reached page 31 at this point, and I did not see a correction to this, yet. Since this is a scientific discussion, I hope my pedantic comment is seen as the matter-of-fact FYI it is meant to be, not as a knock on your post. Anyway, I think you may have meant interstellar space averages about 1 particle per cubic centimeter. Now intergalactic space, would indeed match your stated value.
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More likely, in this thread, 1o per cubic ”.
That or the weight of two onions.

But yes, 1 particle per cubic centimetre
 
JayUtah said:
Gojira's origin story is that it's a lizard rendered to that size as a mutation from nuclear testing in the Pacific.

RTG means a radioisotopic thermoelectric generator. It's a gadget that produces a decent amount of electricity for a very long time. That means it's ideal for powering things when you really have no other option. The general idea is that of a thermocouple, which is a solid state thingy that produces electricity directly from heat. The heat is provided by plutonium.

Plutonium 238 isotope (238Pu) is a radioisotope. Like many of the elements that congregate around the basement of the periodic table, it is naturally unstable. It wants to decay, which means in this case throwing off bits of the nucleus. 238Pu does this by throwing off alpha particles—two protons and two neutrons held together by the Strong Force. This is an advantage because while alpha particles are a kind of radiation, they're relatively safe. They do have a lot of kinetic energy which gets converted to heat when the alpha particle hits something that absorbs it.

Plutonium can also undergo nuclear fission when enough of it is assembled in one place—the critical mass. That's not what happens here. It's what happens in a nuclear bomb.

So you have a long-lasting source of heat and a way to convert that heat to electricity. And you don't need anything else, which makes it ideal for use in space when you need electricity. Voyager's RTGs are down to the last dregs of plutonium, but it has lasted nearly 50 years. Apollo used it to power the autonomous surface experiments packages that were left running on the Moon after the astronauts left.

The generator itself was packaged with the experiments. To activate the generator, the astronauts had to extract the fuel catridge (the plutonium dioxide in its packaging) from a separate shielded compartment on the LM and install it in the generator. The shielded compartment keeps the cartridge safe during launch and flight. But ironically it's robust enough to survive re-entry where the rest of the LM descent stage would burn up. Because Apollo 13 brought its lunar module back to Earth, and because no one could easily get out and remove the cartridge, NASA had to deal with a potent radioisotopic fuel source landing somewhere on Earth. So they adjusted the ship's orbit such that it would fall in deep ocean and sink to the bottom. It will just safely sit there for the next 200 years or so until it decays to a negligible degree of emission.

Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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I think you missed the joke, Jay.

ETA: But still interesting
 
EHocking said:
I preferred interacting with JREF cranks who actually believed their argument and posts.
There was a degree of integrity about them even if their debating tactics were sometimes “flawed”.
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The people who wanted to be tested were always interesting, particularly as their objections to specific items in testing protocols were often quite revealing.
 
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