Me, Penn, and Joe Rogan

The Bad Astronomer

Muse
The Bad Astronomer
Joined
Feb 19, 2002
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So a few of you may know that after my brilliant talk at TAM5, I was quickly whisked away to embark on an adventure. It involves the slammer, a slight factor of fear, and of course a vast conspiracy of such epic proportions that it cannot, in fact, even exist.

Therein lies the tale.

Enjoy.
 
Great stuff.

One thing I wondered was.

Isn't the absense of blast craters evidence against the Moon hoax?
If the concept art showed blast craters.
And NASA wanted to fake a landing.
Wouldn't they have included the blast craters?

Another thing I thought about was the game moon lander, the landing would have been a task of easing the lander down right? And the engine would have been shut off a couple of feet beore landing? Only blowing away a little dust?

Where as the takeoff would have been full blast? Blowing out a lot of dust?

Anyway. Great show.
 
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ROBERT Van Allen?? Do I hear the sound of Rogan's credibility washing down the toilet?

Maybe ROBERT Van Allen was the guy who discovered that the belts can catch fire.

By the way, the "belts" are actually shaped more like mushy doughnuts. (The word "belt" implies a thinness that is not really accurate.) And the doughnuts are nested: There is an inner region and and an outer region.

Although the "mushy doughnuts" is my own characterization, I use as my initial source an older Astronomy text: Exploration of the Universe, 3rd Edition, by George O. Abell. The was the text selected for use in a General Astronomy class taught by--um, what was his name? Oh, yeah!--James A. Van Allen.
 
you know I go with the Buzz Aldrin take though.

Rewriting history is not nice.

People, lots of people, not only gave their careers to the moon landing, some gave thier lives.

You repeat a lie often enough, and people believe it.

I just want to thank Bad Astronomer for taking this issue on. Because NASA seems to think taking it on is giving these nut jobs more than they deserve.

For myself, growing up with the space race, it means a lot that something I was so proud of as a young child, gets the respect it deserves.

I have friends that question the moon landing! I mean, these are I thought intelligent people. They come at me with the "where there is smoke there is fire". Well, sometimes smoke is just steam, a lot of hot air spewing out from somewhere.
 
Caught the program on iTunes Podcast. I always catch these things a day after they happen but it gives me something to listen to on my to and from work. BTW, loved the program. It seemed to go so quickly. Penn and Michael only got to talk during the confusion of the blowing dust/blast crater discussion and I Michael was instrumental in getting past that log jam.

Anyway, I have a friend. He's a well educated, published researcher. Imagine my shock when I found out he believed the lunar landing was a hoax. Having looked into some of the arguments in the past, I was able to have an intelligent conversation on the subject and I think I was able to soften his conviction a little. However, he wouldn't shake two concerns. He didn't believe that the astronauts would survive the radiation exposure they'd receive in the Van Allen Belts and the fact that in some pictures the camera reticles appear to be behind the subject astronaut. Phil covered the Van Allen Belts in detail but I didn't hear an answer to the apparent obstructed reticle.

Loved the program, loved the presentation at TAM 5 and looking forward to TAA 2.
 
That was great.

If you can send Joe Rogan the 2x speed version here at You Tube:



At 20 seconds in, the astronaut falls, and sends a perfect parabola of dust straight out, about 3 times as far as you could on earth with that sort of impact. It looks so unreal, that anybody who sees it and says that is what it would look like on Earth in a studio is being dishonest. This single few seconds of film would have been impossible to recreate at that time.
 
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Great job, Phil. A couple times I got the sense that Joe was softening a bit, but then he got his second wind with the whole blast crater subject. Too bad the show was so short!
As far as his problem with the dust kicked up by the rover; with no atmosphere on the moon, wouldn't the dust particles stay more or less clumped together? I would imagine that if you could gather a handful of dust on the moon and throw it snowball-style, it would pretty much maintain its spherical shape until gravity brought it down. Am I right in visualizing it this way?
 
Blackwell said:
Great job, Phil. A couple times I got the sense that Joe was softening a bit, but then he got his second wind with the whole blast crater subject. Too bad the show was so short!
As far as his problem with the dust kicked up by the rover; with no atmosphere on the moon, wouldn't the dust particles stay more or less clumped together? I would imagine that if you could gather a handful of dust on the moon and throw it snowball-style, it would pretty much maintain its spherical shape until gravity brought it down. Am I right in visualizing it this way?
Click to expand...


Just watch how the dust behaves in the video I posted above - very unlike anything I have ever seen on a beach or when digging into cocoa to make hot chocolate (there are never any 'dust clouds' stirred - the dirt goes up and goes down). There is no way that video was filmed anywhere that had air.

The video (during the 2x speed parts) also perfectly illustrates Phil's description of the jerky arm movements when it is sped up.
 
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Nice work, Phil! If only they were all that much fun to debate, eh?
 
I've read your book Phil and it is very well done but it is a whole different animal to hear you debunk live. You come off sounding even smater.
 
I enjoyed this so much - I sat in my hotel room last night listening and chuckling. I've also forwarded to several people. thanks!!
 
Starrman said:
That was great.

If you can send Joe Rogan the 2x speed version here at You Tube:
Click to expand...

I don't get it... where there also wires levitating that guy in order to allow him to jump so high in the air, or does he have special jump boots?
 
Starrman, that's prefect. I'll send that to Joe-- the point I was making with the film is that the astronauts' movements that don't rely on gravity look sped up in those films. So obviously it wouldn't work to simply take the footage and speed it up. Thanks!
 
I enjoyed the piece, too, and it was amazing to hear Penn say so little during his show.

Joe has apparently done his research, and so if there's going to be a round 2, Phil might start off with, "Have your read my book and/or my website?" and "Is there any evidence that I could present that would cause you to change your mind?" Because if the answers are "yes" and "no," not much progress is going to come from the debate.

I wonder if Joe would be convinced by all of the published scientific research out there about the moon rocks and how they couldn't possibly have come from the earth? What do the hoaxers say about that? (That they were sent back by unmanned probes?)
 
I caught the podcast of the show - great job! It was wonderful to have someone with tons of facts in the area to debate a hoax believer.

Keep up the good fight!
 
OK, I do have a question (which seems obvious enough that I'm sure it's just me...)

Isn't in possible that the landing site that can be seen in current images, but doesn't seem like "a blast crater" or whatever in photos, was made by the arrival AND departure of the craft?

Why isn't it possible that the arrival made some disturbance in the dust, and the departure made a little more? That way the photos that were real time on the surface look less dust-disturbed than the current because it was less disturbed.

OK, so someone school me. I should probably do my own research before posting here, but you guys know everything.

-A
 
a.real.girl said:
Isn't in possible that the landing site that can be seen in current images, but doesn't seem like "a blast crater" or whatever in photos, was made by the arrival AND departure of the craft?
Click to expand...

I think that the landing pretty much blew away all of the dust in the area-- as Michael pointed out in the piece, the moon dust is like chocolate powder on a bowling ball-- you can blow it off and leave a little bare spot, but you aren't going to make a crater in the rock, the way a meteorite would. You can clearly see the dust blowing away in the movies from the Apollo 11 landing just before it hits the surface.

The ascent module got out of there pretty fast-- I would be surprised if it had any noticable effect on the surroundings. In fact, somewhere there's video from a TV camera that was left on the moon showing the ascent, and you can see that the ascent engine doesn't really affect the surface.

Also, Phil made the point that the Clementine data showing the smudge is not a photographic image, which you can see here (at the bottom of the page):

http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/answers/lunar_lander.html

It's a "photometric anomaly," showing that there's a bare patch on the rocky crust of the moon. It doesn't really look like a crater at all.
 
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