Wednesday 18 January 2012

One Small Blog


The other day I was looking at some pictures of the rock formation on our closest planetary neighbour sometimes known as the Face of Mars. Now the image below shows the first picture taken of this rocky outcrop.

Kind of looks like one of Chimps from Planet of The Apes

Looks a lot like a face doesn't it, I mean almost enough like a face that you could seriously believe that it was carved by someone at some point. That image was captured Viking 1 back in 1976, and led to all sorts of conspiracy theory nonsense. Let's have a look at a more recent image.

By the way this is where I plan to build the main building of my Mars estat

Now if you look below the 'nose' there you can see there's clearly a ridge joining the top and bottom 'lips'. While the rest of the face may have weathered away over time but that ridge, well erosion doesn't make things grow, and mouths don't have joins between the top and the bottom. For me it's fairly conclusive that this is not a face. It's a result of the brain's facial recognition software misfiring. This got me thinking about the most moronic conspiracy theory that exists. Namely that in 1969 the US Government engaged in a whopping fib as to events transpiring on the Moon.

Oliver Postgates original fake footage was rejected by NASA

So let's run through the obvious reasons why this is... sorry I was going to say retarded, but I once knew a kid with downs syndrome and he was obsessed with space and the idea that the Apollo 11 mission was faked would really upset him, so how about... moronic. Before I get on to the science related stuff I want to run through the stuff based on human nature.

Not all humans are a product of nature.

First of the Moon Landing happened at the height of the Cold War. For those of you who don't know much about history I'll summarise, Russia and America weren't getting on. In fact there was a thing called the Space Race. For reasons unknown, well actually the entire thing was stirred up by a man who wanted a space program... can't remember his name, Russia and America had decided that what with a meaningful war being out of the question a race to the moon was the best substitute. Now for those of you who have never been involved in a competition with someone else one of the things you do if you lose is check that the other guy actually won.

Well he said he had a full house, why would he lie?

Now at this point the conspiracy theorists jump in with some bullshit about the Russians and Americans being in cahoots, which by extension of course means that the next twenty years of the Cold War up to and including the fall of the Berlin Wall was also a colossal fib. This was at a time when every nation on earth was engaged in the most elaborate spy-game of all time, so in addition to these two governments being engaged in this deception every other government on earth was also in on this and didn't use the opportunity to show up the most powerful nation on earth.

If he wasn't wearing any trousers would you just let it slide?

Next up let's look at a famous quote from Benjamin Franklin.

"Three people may keep a secret, if two of them are dead”

How many people would have been in this on conspiracy? Yet over the years there has been not a single whistle blower... believable that there was some sort of cover-up before the internet was invented, but since no-way, you'd be able to get the info out long before the cover-up swooped in. Even the conspiracy sites don't have any bullshitters pretending to be insiders from the program. Next up, you still need to build, and launch, a massive fucking rocket.

Massive fucking rocket is a technical term.

Because people would've noticed if you pretended to go to the Moon without launching a massive rocket. So having covered all the basic reasons why you have the intelligence of a dead gazelle for questioning whether or not this transpired. I'm now going to drill down into the science of the moon landing debunking.

Pictured: Science

I'm not going to go through all the little 'flaws' found in the video footage of the event. That's been covered fairly exhaustively by many people including Patrick Moore and Mythbusters. Also the truth of the matter is that if you want to believe this then you'll write that off as others who have bought into the lie. However I think we can all agree that the idea of a conspiracy so monumentally huge that the entire scientific community being in on something that actively harms the advancement of human knowledge is fundamentally ridiculous. To believe that you first have to believe that every single person who has ever decided to work in the field of science has done so with an ulterior motive. Again not within the realms of human behaviour as I have experienced it and probably not as you have if you are honest. So when you hear that the Moon is moving away from the earth at a speed of 3.8cm a year, then you can easily accept that it is a peer reviewed scientific fact.

This may well overtake the Glen Beck picture as my most used image.

It is. Here's a question for you though, how do we know that? Well there is a simple explanation. You see if you have two mirrors placed together at a right angle to one another and you fire a laser at them, then no matter what the laser will bounce back to a sensor next to the point of origin. Using an incredibly accurate clock you can measure distance in the most accurate way known to mankind. So here is the final nail in the head of mindless conspiracy cunt-ery. We measure the distance to the moon using the mirrors on the lander from the Apollo 11 mission. That's right conspiracy theorists. To accept that the mission never happened you have to accept that the above fact is made up... which begs the question of why? No-one on earth would ever have noticed.

"Is it just me or does the Moon look 3.8cm further away than last year?"
"I have no fucking idea... why would you even ask that? Are you a moron."

Oh and also this.

Taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter...
as part of NASA's 'Suck it, Bitches!' Program 

That's a photo taken of the landing site by the LRO back in 2009, it also took pictures of all the other landing sites, because even NASA is sick of this bullshit by now.

"I've actually managed to distil my hatred for this
bullshit into the most potent acid ever discovered"

Look I believe that the governments of earth are up to all sorts of skeevy unethical stuff but this is conspiracy is born of a complete inability to accept that mankind is capable of the exceptional. If that's your point of view then allow me to ask exactly how you are reading this? Because believe it or not the creation of the internet is actually significantly more difficult than sending two people to the Moon.

eddie <if you want to argue about this with me fine, but I may lose control and slap you>

1 comment:

  1. Nice. It's amazing how prevalent this particular brand of fuckwittery actually is.

    Brian Cox's comment on Stargazing Live the other night was priceless: "If you still don't believe that we went to the moon, turn over to ITV. I don't want you anymore."

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