Hacker News Reader

Comment by vermontdevil | Hacker News Reader

You would think the reflectors being on the moon would shut up the “moon landings were faked” crowd.

Alas, that's not how it works. Any video you could show of the laser experiment would also be faked. Even if you were to set them in front of the equipment, that'd be faked too. I often wonder as a thought-experiment what would happen if you bundled them onto a Musk style space tourism rocket and flew them to the moon to see the flag (for a bonus they can look back to see the spherical Earth) and then back, would they even then believe the conspiracy or their lyin' eyes?

(Then I catch myself on and realise it wouldn't even theoretically be worth wasting all that effort and money on someone so determined to be willfully ignorant. We live in a world where schoolkids can send a camera high enough to see the curvature of the Earth, yet we are to believe people who have made the denial of this a core of their identity do not see fit to replicate the experiment?)

I tell them that it’s faked and that NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to film the whole thing. He did such a good job because he filmed it on location.

That Mitchell and Webb has a brilliant sketch on this premise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw

<Devil's advocate>No point sending a camera up, the camera manufacturers have tweaked the firmware to create the illusion of curvature.

I _know_ the earth is flat, so I already know that GoPro are in on the conspiracy as well.</Devil's advocate>

Your "throw them on a rocket" idea is the only realistic way to convince them I would imagine. Which gives me an idea, maybe that could be my ticket to the moon

Won't work. The "rocket" is simply an advanced simulator with the ability to simulate zero G with high-def displays. No matter what kind of evidence you provide, they will always provide a (far fetched) counter argument.

It might be able to simulate zero-G, but any linear acceleration in excess of 1G cannot be simulated by a stationary device.

That's what you want me to think but you're part of the conspiracy too...

You can't even convince me that there is a Moon until after you release me from this simulation.~

I'm considering starting a solipsist meetup group. I can't be sure that there are any like-minded solipsists out there.

Which one of us is me?

Right. And even if they conceded that they were on the moon, they'd argue that the 1969 landing was still fake, with props brought to the moon way later.

It isn't as simple as point laser at moon, see light shining back with your own eyes, it requires a big telescope and computers and delicate sensors to detect because the moon and earth are so far apart.

I mean, if actual pictures of the landing site from LRO don't convince them: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/628457main1apo... then a few extra photons returning to the earth won't change their mind. (My personal favorite, in an aesthetic sense, is: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-15.html)

Maybe they don't know about them. It was an astonishing achievement - skepticism has its place.

As if it's not possible to place the reflectors using a robot.

i guess it was just lucky they had robots visit all the apollo sites to set them up, hey....

What if the moon is just really shiny?

Jokes aside, the Moon is rally dark. With an albedo of 0.12, it is one of the darkest major bodies in the Solar system, save for Mercury with an albedo of 0.11.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com