Thanks Scientists!
An important question to keep in mind when playing this game: was the fake photograph ever a real fake photograph, or is it a fake fake photograph? Sometimes people deliberately construct fake photographs specifically to be debunked as fake, to bolster their claim of the whole thing being fake. e.g. I photoshop a picture of Mount Rushmore on the Moon, claim I got the photo from NASA and say "Look how obviously fake it is! NASA thinks we're utter fools." Except usually it's more subtle than that. They'll take a picture of a desert on earth, adjust the colors to make it look like Mars, then present both the original and the altered alongside each other, claiming the doctored image of an earth desert is purported to be real by NASA. If you can bait somebody into defending the faked image, you can debunk them easily since the whole thing was a setup.
Many of the images that we get from NASA in general aren't event "photos", they're composite images, just as you said. For example, a lot of "color" images are composites of black and white images shot through blue,green,and red filters and then re-assembled on the ground. They're "true" in the sense that they're not deliberately falsifying things, but not they're not "true photos".
Somewhere (can't find the source at the moment) I recall reading that some of the early lunar reconnaissance photos were purposefully made lower quality by NASA because the U.S. wanted to keep it a secret from the Soviet Union just how good our orbital photography had become.
Just because it has some obvious and provable editing does not mean that it's a falsification.
I would hope someone with the username of MichaelCollins would be able to speak about NASA ;P
Since the early 1950s NASA had completely public video feeds for just about everything they did. News organizations around the world had access to the feeds, as well as the freedom to send their own cameras and recording equipment. Newsrooms all over the world have footage in their archives of the same launches, from different angles. And their own copies of NASA footage too. How do you fake all that?
If I remember correctly, during the Mercury program one of the splashdowns was so off the mark that it took the Navy a few hours to recover the capsule. The major US news orgs didn't want to deal with it so they broadcast old footage of an on-target recovery but got caught because other orgs showed the real thing.
They effectively shine a light on the limits of each person's ability to justify their beliefs, vs. what beliefs are generally accepted just because nobody challenges them.
I've seen a similar effect in several Christian communities in the U.S. If a Christian is mostly surrounded by other Christians, it's easy to accept lots of beliefs because they're not challenged. But if they end up in an environment where people challenge those beliefs, or if there's a lot at stake for holding wrong beliefs, they tend to scrutinize their beliefs much more carefully. I think, overall, they benefit from pruning down their beliefs to a smaller set of better-justified ones.
So to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse.
When I first heard that the moon landing was faked, I did stop to ask myself "Wait, could it be true?". When I first heard that 9/11 was an inside job and that the folks on the news were "crisis actors", I did pause and ask myself "wait, could it be true?" When I first heard some of Alex Jones' stuff years ago, I again stopped to wonder if there was perhaps some truth to any of it.
To be clear, I don't believe any of those conspiracies. And Alex Jones' stuff hurts my brain. But I have always been of the opinion that it is good that we have a few "crazies" who are "way out there" in our society to serve as a check on all of us. I agree with you: "to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse." It always felt to me like having a few of those folks around was a healthy balance, even if we mostly wrote them off. Somehow.... it seems like that balance is way way way off today. I don't want these types to disappear altogether, but I'd like to see us get back to some sort of balance.
X percent of people believe the earth is flat and XX% percent believe that aliens that abduct humans.
Some people have a huge issue with this.
The depth of publicly available information about the Moon landings helps a lot too. Most people have only seen a few minutes of video footage at most, and may conclude that Hollywood could fake that video. But the amount of documentation about even the most minute detail of the Apollo program is staggering. If it were all fake,it would be the greatest most detailed work of science fiction ever created. Seriously, it would put Star Trek/Wars to shame. No fiction has lore with such fractal depth of detail as NASA, not even close. Not even Silmarillion comes close.
https://www.cnet.com/science/nvidia-silences-moon-landing-co...
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/10/11/turing-recreates-lu...
The conspiracy crowd likes to claim the illumination in the real photos is wrong. What better way to show off your photo realistic light model?