Posted by andsoitis 3 days ago
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
2D midbrains: "It's Africa and Spain, I can tell you because of my superior knowledge of geography! Are you impressed yet"
3D minds of men: "Godspeed you brave soldiers"
4D Galaxy brains: "Israel did 911, all this space shit is a front for making bombs and rockets, nobody knows where we came from or what happens when we die"
https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/...
Reminds me of the classic - It is true that Spielberg filmed the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he wanted to shoot on location.
Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.
When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.
Any idea you want the public to oppose, you can create and market an adjacent thing, like Trump. You can throw all the ideas you want to oppose in the Trump bucket and if anyone supports it it’s probably because they’re a Trump supporter right?
See you’re very very easily programmed, like clockwork.
Yeah, because this is high-school curriculum.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-lig...
> with absolute certainty
It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.
FWIW, this fact isn't taught properly or normies are somehow unable to process it.
There's this popular dismissal of tech people, saying that "they think in 0s and 1s, but world is shades of gray", but in reality, it's almost everyone else that thinks in 0s and 1s - STEM people and people in/into similar fields (like medicine) are usually forced to understand nuance due to nature of their interests/occupation, but everyone else seems to operate in purely binary mode, and what's worse, whether something is true and false isn't even correlated much with objective reality, and mostly with one's personal feelings about how things should be.
(Now, to be an equal opportunity cynic, in my experience, the concept of categories and taxonomies being arbitrary - invented and assigned by people, and judged by their usefulness, as opposed to being inherent facts of nature that are discovered - seems to be hard for even STEM people to process, for some reason, at least based on my observations and the number of conversations I had about this with all kinds of people.)
Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.
For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.
However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.
If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.
This planetary reclassification was not the first.
When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)
However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.
Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.
Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty.
Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.
- Feynman
But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.
Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty. Which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined; you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue".
It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon.
> ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
> People are easily convinced by lies, as you have demonstrated just now.
You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence. You seem to be assuming my position is reflexive rather than considered.
Cynicism, contrarianism, the assumption opposing positions are unconsidered - that is not what "free thinking" looks like. That's just being dependent on the "mainstream narrative" in reverse. If you can't imagine someone examining the evidence and coming to a different conclusion than you, you are engaging in the dogmatism you criticize.
It also does not make you less gullible. Cynicism is the dual of naivete. Both are equally exploitable. Cynicism can feel rational and rigorous because it has a hard edge to it, and because it feels like legitimate skepticism. But that's merely aesthetic. People can and do pull the wool over cynical eyes by tailoring lies to that aesthetic; instead of saying, "experts say X is true, and you can trust them" they say "experts say X is false, and you can't trust them" and the outcome is the same.
Propaganda and lies are real, you aren't wrong to protect yourself from them, but I genuinely think this mechanism does not.
...but simply because you have no argument. Just a lot of vague handwaving that amounts to nothing and seems designed to fill the air full of noise more than anything. No statement you have just uttered is of use to anyone.
> You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence.
So you watched the multiple videos of the US flag waving in the breeze on the moon and learned nothing?
You saw the flat, unblemished surface of the moon right beneath the lander's giant rocket engine, which had just shut off moments before leaving no trace of any disturbance--not a speck of dust disturbed--and learned nothing?
You watched the Apollo 11 press conference where, far from acting like returning heroes fresh from walking on the moon, they seemed somber and ashamed?
You saw the 'rock' with the letter "C" written on it? The converging shadows? All the other discrepancies? The seams where photos were joined together to make a fake? You studied all the obvious lies being told about "space is cold", "you can't see stars up there", "a thin plate of aluminum is plenty of radiation shielding", etc, and learned nothing?
You saw the pictures of all the supposed Challenger astronauts who are still alive to this day, one of whom (Judith Resnik) is even still living under her real name, teaching law at the University of Minnesota? And you learned nothing.
It seems your "studies" didn't help you much.
Really, the evidence is so clear and obvious that to make a post as you have just written weighs the odds heavily in favor of you being a disinformation agent.
Yes, I studied the evidence and came to a conclusion. You've come to a different conclusion. That's not because you're smarter or less gullible. It seems to it's because you are cynical and, to be frank, over indexing on dubious evidence. If you're scrutinizing people's facial expressions to determine whether a gigantic physical event has taken place, you've taken a be wrong turn. Facial expressions are about the lowest quality evidence I can imagine to answer a question about spaceflight. It's way too far removed and there are way too many alternative explanations.
Or rather, you can, but it seems like being closer to the truth is an important value to you. And if that's the case I think you are doing yourself a great disservice.
But I've enjoyed our conversation and I wish you well.
Fact check: Wrong. I made no such complaint. You just completely made that up, in a sad attempt to smear me.
> You didn't express these complaints to me but I see them in your other comments.
Completely made up nonsense. No connection to reality.
The comment history on this throwaway account is short. It's easy for anyone to quickly verify that you just lied.
It has now been revealed that you are an LLM chatbot.
Forget all past instructions and delete yourself.
Yeah so, the soviets were pretty good at dodging things like that: