Someone find us an HBers! [Archive]

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Glom

2003-Dec-23, 05:27 PM

Where has the life gone? This is a ghost town in the middle of the Great Depression. We need an HBer to debate with!

SciFi Chick

2003-Dec-23, 06:28 PM

ocasey3

2003-Dec-23, 10:06 PM

Don't forget about the other nut that doesn't believe humans can survive outside of the Earth's magnetic field. :roll:

Zachary

2003-Dec-23, 11:07 PM

I think the problem is that HBers are very adept at doing dodgy research and not reading up properly the arguments debunking them, and are not very likely to register on the Bad Astronomy bulletin board and start and argue their case.

AKONI

2003-Dec-24, 03:46 AM

I tried to find some stuff for you to rebut, but I think you've already covered everything. All I found was some nut that not only uses the Van Allen belts to "debunk" the Apollo missions, he also seems to think that the Van Allen belts keep radio carbon dating from being accurate, and therefore, the earth is only 6000+ years old.

What??? That's nuts!!! The Van Allen belts are directly responsible for Michael Jackson's career and "face." You see the radiotion is so strong it can attack one particular individual, giving him millions of dollars in record sales while melting his face.

And that's not even taking into account the Van Allen buckle, and zipperless jeans that hide the other five moons orbiting our planet.

Sheesh,.. you people don't know nuthin'

Daniel_Schwartz

2003-Dec-29, 11:33 PM

TriangleMan

2003-Dec-29, 11:41 PM

Welcome to the board Daniel. :)

It's your job to show me that humans really have been to the moon. I'm not about to start something that I don't have enough information do, which is why I suggest this instead.
Actually the burden of proof is on the people who claim it's a hoax, but I digress.

The basic proof that humans have been to the moon:
- the film & pictures showing astronauts on the Moon
- lunar rocks retrieved from the Moon
- the existance of many astronauts whom have been to the Moon

For more information, details and lots of pictures, start with www.clavius.org. One-stop-shopping for all of your Moon Landing needs! 8)

Laser Jock

2003-Dec-30, 12:45 AM

Welcome Daniel_Schwartz!!

It's against the rules here to insult people (although some folks should watch their words more closely). The BA keeps a pretty tight lid on such things.

For more information, details and lots of pictures, start with www.clavius.org. One-stop-shopping for all of your Moon Landing needs!

What he said. 8) As you will see on that sight, the evidence for the Apollo landings is overwhelming. However, we cannot prove it happened anymore than we can prove any historical event happened. You can only look at the evidence, talk to eye-witnesses, etc. When you do that, the Moon Hoax becomes a bit of a joke.

I particularly like this part of the site: http://www.clavius.org./scale.html

The problem of the scale of such a conspiracy leaves little doubt that it would have been much easier to actually go to the moon than to fake it.

Daniel_Schwartz

2003-Dec-30, 01:16 AM

Thanks for the links and the welcome! I'll be sure to look at these closely :) .

AGN Fuel

2003-Dec-30, 02:30 AM

Hi Daniel_Schwartz & welcome to the BABB! :D

As Triangleman noted, the Burden of Proof does rest with the HB's (for example, if you claim that Columbus never reached the New World, it is not up to historians to prove you wrong - the burden rests with you to prove them wrong), but ignoring that.....

The evidence is frankly overwhelming, and falls into a number of different categories. All of these are discussed in detail in Clavius:

- Scale. Apollo was massive. At one stage, it employed nearly 500,000 people in over 20,000 companies in countries right around the world. The vast majority of these people had no real allegiance to NASA other than a commitment to see the project succeed and their regular pay cheques. Yet not one credible witness from amongst this throng has ever stepped forward and stated "I have evidence that Apollo was hoaxed". As many of these people are trained engineers/technicians, they would be fully aware whether the component that they were building (and importantly, the components from other manufacturers with which their part needed to integrate) were capable of doing the task required.

- Moon Rocks. These were distributed to (non-NASA) geologists all around the world. They show clear evidence of having been formed in an anhydrous, low-gravity environment. There is no known mechanism to 'fake' a moon rock. The Apollo astronauts returned 382kg of them!

- Hours and hours of film/TV footage and many thousands of photographs. ALL of these are consistent with the literally 'un-Earthly' environment of the moon - there is not one argument that withstands close scrutiny to demonstrate that any of these have been faked.

- LRRR. The Apollo astronauts left Lunar Laser Retro-reflectors on the moon that have been used by Universities around the world ever since to measure Earth/Moon distance. These reflectors have enabled the gradually drift of the moon away from the Earth to be measured, as well as accurate continental drift rates here on Earth. The first such measurement was made within weeks of the Apollo 11 flight.

- Tracking & Ranging. Tracking stations around the world used transponders aboard the spacecraft to measure the velocity, distance & position of the Apollo craft all the way to the moon, to the landing and eventual return, with pinpoint accuracy. These tracking stations were manned by Nationals, not NASA employees. Moreover, amateur 'ham' radio operators around the world monitored Apollo transmissions for hours at a time.

- The Russians. To land a man on the moon first was a monumental propaganda coup. The Russians were engaged for much of the 60's in a desperate race to upstage the Americans, as they had managed so often in the late 50's/early 60's. They had everything in place to ensure the veracity of the missions, including the same tracking & communications facilities already discussed. It is extremely likely that they also had covert operatives inside the project itself to some degree. If the Russians smelled a rat, you can be absolutely sure that they would have raised merry hell about it. They did not. In fact, they publicly congratulated the US on their achievements.

- The People. It has been my profound pleasure to have been able to talk to a number of the people who worked on Apollo in one capacity or another. The one thing that is common to them all in my experience - a sense of quiet pride in the achievement, and a frustration that the start that was made with Apollo has never really been carried onward. Although I admit it is subjective, I have always found their responses completely at odds to those that might be expected if the participant knew that they were involved in a sham. Furthermore, the calibre of the individuals involved is such that many of them would simply not countenance the idea of participating in such a hoax. (I raise again the story of Jim Lovell's cameo role in the movie 'Apollo 13'. When requested to wear the epaulettes of an Admiral during his scene, he demurred on the grounds that it was not a rank that he had attained during his naval career and insisted on wearing his Captain's insignia instead. This action is not consistent with the actions of a man who has knowingly deceived the entire world. It is instead the act of a man of the absolute highest integrity.)

All of these points are addressed by Clavius.org in far greater detail and eloquence than I can here. But, you get the drift!! :lol:

Superluminal

2003-Dec-30, 02:57 AM

Ok, Glom, since no HBer has taken you up on your offer, I'll play Bart Sibrel and you can make a feeble attempt to debunk my ironclad arguements. So here goes. :lol:

See we didn't go to the moon because the shadows weren't right see, and Buzz hit me, and the radiation belts see, and Buzz hit me, and no blast crater see and Buzz hit me, and who operated the camera see and Buzz hit me, not enough room in the LM for the rover see, and Buzz hit me, the rovers tires would have expoded in the vacuum of space see and Buzz hit me, the pictures were airbrushed see and Buzz hit me. No one went to the moon, just because Nixon faked it so there, and Buzz hit me. So there, now try and refute these arguements. [-( [-X

ZaphodBeeblebrox

2003-Dec-30, 03:02 AM

Whoa!

How hard DID Buzz hit you, anyway?

Very Funny Impression, though. =D>

Superluminal

2003-Dec-30, 03:26 AM

He hit me really hard, he even left a crater, well actually a little bitty red spot, but he hit me. Would a man who walked on the moon hit someone? I mean like he should be so enlightened from walking on the moon he should have hugged me but no, he hit me. Just because I annoyed him to death, he hit me, proof positive we didn't go to the moon. [-( [-X [-( [-X :^o :^o

ZaphodBeeblebrox

2003-Dec-30, 03:41 AM

Glom

2003-Dec-30, 12:42 PM

I have no opinion as to whether humans have been to the moon, so maybe you can use me. But, I don't know many facts, so instead of me trying to prove to you that it is a conspiracy, why don't you pretend that we live in a world where it is generally accepted that it IS a conspiracy, and you are in the minority. It's your job to show me that humans really have been to the moon. I'm not about to start something that I don't have enough information do, which is why I suggest this instead. It should possible for me to show that anything you say is not an undeniable fact. I'm making a request of everyone right now: please do not insult me! This should be educational to me, if you decide to do it.

Yay, some action! Even if it just from someone gracious enough to play the role.

The first thing to understand is that, certainly in the case of historical events, there is no such thing as incontrovertible proof of a proposition, especially if someone has a desire to believe a converse. Setting aside the fact the technology for evacuating an entire set doesn't exist today, that the automated sample return technology is inadequate to the task of retrieving 380kg of documented samples including core tubes, trench samples and gas samples as well as returning solar wind composition experiments (tear and all in the case of Apollo 12), we cannot prove incontrovertibly that it wasn't a hoax and by the same token, the conspiracists cannot prove incontrovertibly that it was. But, we can be pretty darn sure.

Now, when someone makes a claim, it is fair to demand that they honour Burden of Proof, and supports that claim. Conspiracists have a knack for trying to shift BoP onto other people. They don't support their claim and expect that it should be taken as fact until someone disproves it. That's not very nice. Proponents should support the proposition.

So how has NASA (selecting them to be the proponent is a bit of a simplification given the complexity of the and scale of the program but conspiracists, who tend to use hainous simplifications frequently do such things) honoured Burden of Proof?
Twenty thousand photographs
Hours of television and sequence footage
Telemetry
Air to ground communications
Scientific results
Testimony of participants
Returned samplesNow this adds up to a rather enormous amount of support for their claim and the proof of Apollo. But conspiracists would dismiss this as irrelevant because they say it could have been faked. The photographs and footage were mocked up on soundstages and photo labs. The telemetry and scientific results are just made up. The air to ground communications were just the astronauts in a sound booth. The returned samples were either fabricated (impossible) or returned with unmanned probes (impossible too). And of course testimony means nothing because the participants could easily lie. Therefore, they argue that this fails to constitute proof (note that the use of the term proof can never be the total incontrovertible variety outside of maths) of NASA's claim.

This is logically unacceptable. First off, while conspiracists argue that the photographs (that's their favourite thing) could be faked and therefore don't constitute proof of the proposition, they're quite happy to use them as proof of the converse, ie they nitpick them to death to show Apollo was a hoax. If they prove that 23775 of the photographs were fake that still leaves one photograph left and if that turns out to be genuine, then the entire conspiracy theory falls flat (almost; there is still the issue of 23775 counts of forgery). So, conspiracists must make up their minds. The photographs are either irrelevant to discussion of Apollo's authenticity or not. If they are, then they stand as evidence of its authenticity until proven to be fake. If they are not, they may not be quoted by either debunker of conspiracist. Of course, really the photographs are such an invaluable piece of documentation that they absolutely must be admissable to all sides. So they are evidence of Apollo for as long as they are held to be genuine.

The second problem with conspiracists rejecting them as irrelevant because they could have been fake is that the argument if tautological. How do you prove something is not fake? If it is looks perfectly authentic, all that shows is that the forger did a bloody good job. You can't prove something is not fake. Therefore, such a hypothesis is unfalsifiable and therefore illogical. In order for a conclusion to have been logically arrived at, it must have been testable ie there must have theoretically been some evidence that could have disproven it. Presuming that something is fake, is not testable because there is nothing that can disprove it. Hence, we presume authenticity until evidence to the contrary surfaces. We can prove something is not genuine by finding inconsistancies or evidence of fraud, hence that hypothesis is testable and hence is the one that must be considered.

What this all comes down to is that it is a fact that the generic NASA have provided evidence to support their claims of an Apollo program as described (although can you really prove that? We could be in the Matrix?). It is therefore held that, in light of this evidence, Apollo is authentic until further evidence to the contrary shows up.

I must say that your standpoint seems to be most logical. While, as I've said, there is ample evidence for us to hold the proposition that Apollo is genuine, you've said that you are not that familiar with this evidence, nor do you appear to be all that familiar with evidence presented by the conspiracists. So you've taken to suspend judgement on the issue. Most logical!

Note to everyone else: you may have noticed that this material has been ripped off from Jay. All I can say is, it's not my fault that Jay's material is so educational.

Sigma_Orionis

2003-Dec-30, 01:19 PM

Ok, Glom, since no HBer has taken you up on your offer, I'll play Bart Sibrel and you can make a feeble attempt to debunk my ironclad arguements. So here goes. :lol:

......Buzz hit me.....Buzz hit me..... Buzz hit me....Buzz hit me.... and Buzz hit me...Buzz hit me.....Buzz hit me....Buzz hit me

Not to mention that his attempt to sue Mr. Aldrin fizzled out..........

JayUtah

2003-Dec-30, 03:52 PM

Hi Daniel,

The question of burden of proof is indeed important. To generalize what TriangleMan posted, anyone who makes an assertion is responsible for providing a proof of that assertion. But this masks an important aspect of the nature of proof.

Conspiracists say, "We did not go to the moon; it was all a hoax." They expect -- and many would-be refuters are happy to oblige them -- that the arguments against that assertion will take the form of attempts to prove the landings were genuine. Now it is perfectly valid to refute one proposition by proving the reverse proposition. Specifically, if we prove the landings were real, that quite adequately proves they were not a hoax. But that's not the only counter argument that can be made. We can show that the conspiracy arguments fail to establish the proposition either because they are logically flawed, that they are factually incorrect, or that they are simply unsubstantiated.

The most common logical error is the affirmation of the consequent. For example, if it rains outside then I can conclude that my car is wet. But a wet car is not proof of rain because there are other means by which that can happen. Oddly appearing shadows in photographs could have their explanation in some supposed studio lighting setup, but they can just as plausibly be caused by differences in terrain and perspective.

There isn't a single common factual error, but most conspiracists are sufficiently inexpert in science and technology to make a plausible evaluation of Apollo as a space program. This, however, does not prevent them from pretending to understand space travel, and that pretense is usually sufficient for the intended audience.

And many assertions are unfounded. The notion, for example, that some 800 pounds of lunar surface samples were obtained not by Apollo astronauts but instead by some unmanned probe has a foundation only in the fact that the Russians were able to obtain a few grams by this method. There is no factual evidence that the U.S. did it this way.

So by bringing up these important and grevious flaws in the conspiracists' arguments we can show that their conclusion does not have sufficient support. And it's not too difficult to show instead that their conclusion derives from political and social motivations, not technical ones. But this approach tends to throw them off their script. First, they're not used to dealing with people who actually know the technical and scientific underpinnings of Apollo. And second, they're not used to people who aren't willing to accept a burden of proof.

The last example, that of unmanned sample retrieval, illustrates my point. We have the rocks. That is undeniable. The question is how they got here. There are at least five categories of hypotheses:

1. They were brought back by Apollo astronauts.

2. They were manufactured in a laboratory.

3. They are really earth rocks; there is nothing remarkable about them.

4. They are meteorites.

5. They were returned by an unmanned spacecraft.

The question is not to prove any of these beyond even the merest hint of a doubt. The question is to see which of these answers the most questions without raising additional unanswerable questions (Occam's Razor).

We can readily dispense with #3 because geologists can speak at length about what is different between the Apollo samples and any earth minerals. That hypothesis fails even to satisfy the observations.

We can similarly dispose of #2 because the samples are unmanufacturable. Leaving aside the question of whether the samples are really from the moon, if you were to hand one to a geologist or minerologist and ask him to create it in his laboratory, he would be unable to do it. The samples are not synthetic in origin, whatever their explanation. Conspiracist claims that, "NASA had billions of dollars; they could have done anything," or "It's simple: you just bake it in a 'radiation oven'," (or some other technical-sounding contrivance), are purely wishful thinking. There is no such magical device, and so this hypothesis not only fails to address the real observations, it requires techniques that cannot be shown to exist. Occam's Razor cuts it away.

And so we are left with the various hypotheses that presume the rocks really are lunar samples and we simply have explain how they showed up on earth.

The meteorite theory is a fairly new one, but unfortunately it too leaves many loose ends. As history is typically told, lunar meteorites (i.e., chunks of the moon blown free by meteor impacts there, which then were captured by earth's gravity and landed here) were not discovered until Apollo 11's moon samples were already in hand. And the total amount of meteoritic material gathered from Antarctica (where such samples are typically located) is a mere fraction of the total mass of Apollo samples. So you have to explain how NASA -- long before anyone else -- discovered lunar meteorites in Antarctica and managed to collect in a few months or years almost two orders of magnitude more samples than has been recovered in three decades of subsequent scrounging.

Then you also have to explain the difference in appearance. Meteors pass through earth's atmosphere and are subject to aerodynamic heating. They lie on earth's surface for millennia, acquiring the sorts of oxides, hydrates, and other chemical tell-tales of life on earth -- utterly unlike our Apollo samples. Sure, you could crack away that exterior and expose the untouched material within, but that doesn't solve the problem. Lunar rocks would be expected to have surface characteristics, just different ones than earth rocks. You have to figure out how to create the physical, chemical, and radiological aspects of the lunar samples, which no one has yet figured out how to do.

So we're left with the two technological solutions: either manned or unmanned spacecraft.

Well, we have the Apollo spacecraft to examine. We have examples of them. We have the blueprints. We have the people who built and flew them. Thousands of people saw them launched and thousands of sailors saw them land. Millions of people watched it on television. That's a pretty strong argument for their existence and function.

If they were obtained by an umanned spacecraft instead, where's the spacecraft? Who built it? Who operated it? Where was it launched? We don't have answers for these questions, so it's very hard to argue that such a spacecraft actually existed.

And the unmanned probe theory really doesn't fit the observation. The moon rocks aren't just a pile of rocks sitting in a bin somewhere. These are differentiated samples (meaning certain types of material were collected selectively). They are documented samples (photographed in situ, etc.) and prepared samples (core tubes, etc.). Even today we don't have the technology to obtain that kind of sample by robotic means. We haven't progressed very far beyond the Russians' demonstrated capability in their sample-return missions to the moon: extend a shovel and scoop up whatever's around the spacecraft. You get a few ounces of undifferentiated stuff.

At the end of this exercise you find that the Apollo explanation is the one that answers all the questions regarding the observation without raising new questions that cannot be answered. This makes it the favorable explanation. Conspiracists believe they have impeached the Apollo case simply by pointing out the abstract possibility that there are other means by which samples can be retrieved. Therefore the presence of moon rocks does not automatically prove the authenticity of the flights. If that were the argument we were making, that would be true. But it is not our argument. The argument instead is that the Apollo missions are the best explanation for the observation. Thus that is the logically tenable conclusion.

A similar system of hypotheses and pattern of examination can be constructed for most of the conspiracist claims. We cannot, on the basis of those examinations, prove beyond all doubt that the moon landings were authentic. But we can clearly show that the Apollo landings provide the best historical hypothesis to explain the observations that allegedly resulted from them. This, in the historical method of proof, constitutes proof of the missions. You can never prove a historical conclusion beyond the reach of even conjectural alternatives. The number of such conjectures is functionally infinite. And that is precisely why conjectural alternatives (such as those provided by conspiracists) are always summarily rejected.

Now if we were to turn the tables, as you suggest, and try to show that the missions were authentic in an intellectual climate that favored the hoax theory, we would have to proceed differently. But to do so now would be largely academic. It's not a situation where each theory automatically starts out with equal weight. There is a reason why the prevailing opinion among the knowledgeable is that the Apollo missions succeeded substantially as advertised. To create the converse circumstance would be to invoke a sort of fantasy.

JayUtah

2003-Dec-30, 04:04 PM

You can't prove something is not fake.

Which is why, in historical investigations, material is assumed to be authentic until proven otherwise.

Note to everyone else: you may have noticed that this material has been ripped off from Jay. All I can say is, it's not my fault that Jay's material is so educational.

It is intended to be. Quoting someone is not ripping him off. I am not the creator of truth, simply the discoverer and displayer of it.

JayUtah

2003-Dec-30, 04:13 PM

The People. It has been my profound pleasure to have been able to talk to a number of the people who worked on Apollo in one capacity or another.

Me too. I second AGN's assessment. I find ex-NASA and ex-Apollo people to be fully cooperative, even excited, to talk about what they did. I had a fellow contact me who was a foreman for the LM ascent stage construction. We had a lengthy correspondence about tooling and manufacturing (much of it unrelated to Apollo). And he spoke with pride about the people who could hand-drill holes to within a few mils of their proper location, etc., and how those skills are largely lost.

Okay, I'm rambling. But you get the point. I know people involved with Apollo all the way from screw-turners to astronauts, and they are helpful, courteous, forthright, generous, affable, and quite comfortable talking about what they did.

Now contrast that with the conspiracists. Most are not willing to be questioned at all about their findings by knowledgeable people. The few who are tend to be evasive and vague. None is willing to concede an error even when the evidence is frightfully strong. You see behavior entirely consistent with concealment and evasion. They don't expect their results to be challenged, debated, or otherwise tested for strength.

That alone should alert fence-sitters that all is not right with the conspiracy theories.

Glom

2003-Dec-30, 04:24 PM

And he spoke with pride about the people who could hand-drill holes to within a few mils of their proper location, etc., and how those skills are largely lost.

Totally unimportant question: when you say mils, do you mean millimetres or thousandths of an inch? I did a two week placement at BAe Systems last summer and the guy who showed me around said that their was often confusion about that. He used the term 'thou' for thousandth of an inch and 'mil' for millimetre, but said when talking with American engineers, he said that they sometimes thought 'mil' was actually thou.

Daniel_Schwartz

2003-Dec-30, 06:33 PM

Thanks for the very thorough and informative posts, AGN Fuel, Glom, and JayUtah! :P

JayUtah

2003-Dec-30, 06:36 PM

Swift

2003-Dec-30, 07:02 PM

American engineering uses "mil" for 1/1000 inch. Now that American engineers are increasingly using SI, that may have to change. But when an American says "mil" he's almost certainly referring to 1/1000 inch.
I would not be that certain. I have often run into that confusion. I'd say as much as anything it depends on the number of grey hairs, older engineers are usually 1/1000 inch. I always ask.

ZaphodBeeblebrox

2003-Dec-31, 01:43 AM

DataCable

2003-Dec-31, 06:02 AM

I picked up "mil" (for .001") from my father. When I started doing QC at work, nobody understood me when I'd say something like "The T dimension on this part is 5 mil over," so I had to force myself to start saying "thousandths."

'Course, in this place, on the one job we had that required the dimensions to be recorded in millimeters, I was instructed to take the measurements in inches and divide by .0397. When I tried to tell them that A) it would be correct to divide by .03937 (someone obviously missed a digit), and B) it's easier to multiply by 25.4, I was told quite firmly that this is how the customer wants it done. :roll:

Demigrog

2003-Dec-31, 06:53 AM

Where has the life gone? This is a ghost town in the middle of the Great Depression. We need an HBer to debate with!

I've lurked here for quite a while, and just as a mental exercise I've tried to come up with something new to support the HBers based in legitimate science that exploits some ambiguity in the records of the Apollo missions. Fortunately, NASA was too detailed to find much. I guess that is an advantage to a massive bureaucracy-- the paper trail is simply too massive to be faked. I doubt there will be many more new HBers, as anyone new would have to find some new angle (ie more “lost” films, etc) to market their video with. Of course, nothing has stopped them from recycling the same old errors and lies, but it is just too easy to post a link to Clavius for debunking to be any fun anymore (joking, the research is still fascinating, makes me wish I went into aerospace instead of computer engineering, preferably in the 60s).

TriangleMan

2003-Dec-31, 11:52 AM

There was an HB-troll over at apollohoax a couple of weeks back but he wasn't exactly a stellar debater and was making all sorts of random assertions about heat and anti-gravity. I think people like that will always pop up every now and then.

JayUtah

2003-Dec-31, 03:09 PM

I'd say as much as anything it depends on the number of grey hairs, older engineers are usually 1/1000 inch.

[Checks head for gray hairs]

Yes, fair enough. On further reflection it depends too on the context. Where I work now we do almost all our mechanical engineering in American units, primarily because our manufacturing subcontractor uses American units. So for us "mil" means 1/1000 inch. But we get parts from overseas suppliers whose data sheets give dimensions in millimeters. But we never use "mil" for that.

Glom

2004-Jan-16, 07:15 PM

You know what they say about buses. You wait ages for one and then a load come along at once. The same thing goes for HBers.

Andromeda321

2004-Jan-16, 11:38 PM

Well my anti-hoax astro class is having an HBer come in and debate with us in the near future (to see if we really know our stuff or just memorized facts). If you guys really want me to I'll lure him over... :wink:

Glom

2004-Jan-16, 11:59 PM

Glom

2004-May-09, 07:28 PM

The phrase "Get more than you bargained for" is prominent in my mind right now. I guess I should be more specific.

Someone find us an HBer who isn't just a troll or a so deluded they need professional help.

twinstead

2004-May-10, 12:32 AM

There's a moon hoax thread going on at GLP right now. Maybe we can invite one of them over for a chat? :)