h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is ones of these things were I find both sides of the arguement compeling and that it requires some -like pondering.

The Van Allan belt and that solar flare which should have seared through the paper thin aluminium of the capsule and burnt them alive are compelling arguements.

While the mirrors, moonrocks and the Russian probe crashing in the background are pretty hard to say 'liar'.

I suppose it's like 9/11. You simply did'nt believe it until you went home and watched the news!!!

I /wish I had recorded the programme now on Channel5 exposing the sceptics stories.
They mentioned the belt, they were only in it for a short time, to kill it would mean staying in in for 2 months.
They mentioned an expert who talked
the belts risk, was it Van Allan? When was he alive? Was it him who said you would die? Anyway, I think they said that the person who said you would die if you went through it had changed his mind before he died. Sorry, I wish I had recorded programme, it was really good.
As for solar flares, on of the astronaughts(sp?) said the flares are predictable by computer and they turned the space craft into a position where the tough base of craft faced flare, which also meant the ships fuel was also acting as an extra barrier to solar flare.
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In the programme they set up a fake moon landing site which sceptics claim was done, and did several tests to disprove sceptics claimes.
One claim is that the moonwalk is a slowed down running man on earth. An engineer got a spacesuite and ran across the desert and slowed the film down, which sceptics claim was done....but it didn't look like the moon walk, there was no weightlessness to walk, it just didn't look like propper moonwalk they did.
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They went through the usual debunking of sceptics claims of there being no stars in moon photos. This actually happens on earth too as you can't see stars if in a bright area, like the moon's surface.`the human eye and camera film can't record a brightness range from very dark to very bright. They also debunked the converging/diverging shadows as proof of more than one light source in a faked moon landing photo, well this you can test yourself on a sunny day, look at lampost shadows, etc they diverg, etc too..particularly if ground is uneven as on moon, but we only have one sun on earth too, and it still happens.
They went through every claim the sceptics made, I always thought moon landings took place, so I just learnt even more about moon landings and realised even more just how brave the people who went to moon were, with zero chance of rescue!
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Most of, if not all, of the sceptics have a vested interest to keep the moon landing being faked story going, one was a publisher, one had written a book about his claims. Not one of the thousands actualy involved in the actual running of the moon landing have come forward to say it was faked, despite the fact that proving it was faked must be worth millions of dollars when sold world wide . I just find the sceptics stories a little insulting to those whe died to get to the moon, just so they can make a quick buck!

I don't believe that railway trains can go faster than 30 mph. It's a well known fact that the human body will not be able to withstand speeds greater than that.

!

PP

It's all propogated by ignorance. If our students weren't avoiding and failing science so much in school they might not be so willing to buy into all this claptrap.

It drives me nuts when I see that even on a show like Mythbusters they even express the typical attitude that the audience doesn't like science. They now give "Warning: Science Content" announcements before even pretending to give any real scientific information. I know it's meant as a joke but it expresses a very dreadful antiscientific trend in modern society.

If you aren't afraid of this trend yet, just look at what Dubya has done for science policy in the US. If more people here cared about science and were more aware of what is going on in scientific research today he might not have so easily gotten away with it.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

The moon-landing conspiracy theories, like just about all of them, are perpetuated by listing "facts" and dazzling the gullible with supposedly-irrefutable evidence. It usually turns out that this "evidence" is enirely refutable, has been refuted, and needs to be continuously refuted because the bloody conspiracy theory keeps being passed around.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/moontruth.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_moon_landing_hoax_accusations

the last one rebutts most of the "evidence" regularly cited by conspiracy theorists.