How can anyone have the naivety to think that it does not matter.whether..?

Question

we went to the moon or not?

There are 400,000 reasons to say we went (the number of Apollo workers over the 7 year period), and another few hundred absolute witnesses (the controllers who worked the banks of displays at Florida and Houston - how would you get a Hollywood past them for 7 years).

There were half a dozen stupid and scientifically lacking reasons given by Fox news, and half the kids in the USA believe the latter.

Those kids should be celebrating the most exciting and amazing voyages of discovery ever, and instead they are listening to the ramblings of ignorant crackpots.

Is anyone else as worried as I am about this phenomenon?

Two things:

I believe that the spread of false information on the internet and then between friends and relatives on mobile phones is a major problem of our times.

Remember the Mars thing recently. Millions of people worldwide thought they were going to see Mars as big as the moon on Aug 27. Ok that was relatively harmless, but it got millions out, some having Mars parties, when the whole thing was just false info spread quickly without our modern tech.

Conspiracies are something else. They are food for the likes of Timothy Mcveigh - people who go to the extreme with their belief that the government is always trying to fool them.

And to the guy who said what did the moon landings do for us....

Well apart from the science, if you care to read the history, you will see that it was a triumph of achievement of what in 1961 when Kennedy said "before the end of the decade" seemed an impossible feat.

Go get the DVD series "From Earth to the Moon". Just see the pain, agony and thrill of the achievement.

Kids today play down the acheievment becuase they see the Shuttle successes, ISS, and deep space probes, but they do not realize what it took to get men out of Earth's orbit and to land on a rocky, alien and extremely hazardous place - then get back.

We can't do it now. There is no rocket powerful enough to lift humans beyond orbit. There is no machine to soft land on the moon. They were scrapped and would have to be developed again.

Answer 1

I agree, though while it seems to make you angry, it just makes me sad.

Crazy ideas come from all sorts of places. If the education system is so fundamentally flawed that it's not producing rational people able to think for themselves and fend off the crazies, then it's a much bigger problem than just losing a precious piece of our history -- it's losing our identity as humans.

It's also not Fox's fault. If it weren't them, it would be someone else. The blame lies squarely on all of us who know better, because we're responsible for passing that knowledge to the next generation, and we are apparently not doing a very good job.

Answer 2

Another thing I am having a hard time understanding: Why would returning to the moon convince these skeptics? If the first trips were faked using the comparatively primitive special effects of the late 1960s, why can't the return be faked using all the fancy computer graphics we have now? Seems like that would be easy.

Answer 3

Some people are just conspiracy junkies. If I said the moon was shining I'm sure they could come up with a bunch of reasons why it was artificially lit and why.

Answer 4

There are worse things to be worried about.
Like why people believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. And there are 6 million reasons why.

Answer 5

But for real though. What good has going to the moon, if indeed it did happen, done to us? What was the major advantage.

Answer 6

It doesn't matter. People that stupid shouldn't be paid attention too for any reason.