Enjoy that one...

http://www.msnfound.com/MetaGenerator.ashx...backlot_p_h.wmv

(Doug, please move this outta here if it doesn't belong, don't know where else to put it...)

Pando, I couldn't get this to play...can you post the url to the wmv file directly?

Actually I can't, that's the URL it plays from.

Try upgrading to MS Media Player 10 (highly recommended), but it should also play on MP9. You may also want to try to open the media player manually, and then cut and paste the URL into the File > Open URL box.

http://www.msnfound.com/MetaGenerator.ashx?movie=nasa_backlot_p_h.wmv

The Bad Astronomer takes on the Apollo Moon Hoax:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

This does not make me laugh at all...

Even if that stuff is believed by only 6% of the population, that makes 6% who are not confident with their government, who think that their government lies, manipulate them with the help of ugly little grey aliens, or purposely created the AIDS viruse in a military lab... How could these people be good citizens, or simply be happy? 6% of american citizens, that makes 15 millions!

Fox TV is not only responsible of sowing bad astronomy hoaxes; it is also part of a huge network of medias dedicated to much more serious hoaxes such as that there would be no greenhouse effect, and calling "junk science" the serious scientists in this field!! They also messed up entire domains related to astronomy, such as the common paradigms about extraterrestrial life (which shifted from 'ET" to "X files") or the UFO domain (When we speak of UFOs today, everybody thinks to the Area 51 or to the Roswell hoaxes)

This is what happens when 1/3 of the world medias are in only one hand. I do not elaborate too much on it -politics is not the topic of this forum- but such a situation is a threat, not only to science and astronomy, but to democracy itself.

No, the hoax on Apollo being faked does not make me laugh.

Anyone ever seen the Arte documentary in which it is 'revealed' that Stanley Kubrick was hired to make the sets etc...?


They even got Rumsfield admitting it was all a fake.


(spoiler: it was all taking stuff out of context, just to actually prove how extremely you could spin a story, classic stuff!)

I have all my arguments stacked up for whenever i meet someone who believes it was hoaxed. i am pretty persuasive, most often i find it is because they have only been exposed to a one sided hoax point of view and only trot it out because it is all they have learned or seen about the apollo missions in their lives. First question i ask people is to tell me why they believe it was hoaxed and where they got their information that it was hoaxed from, usually i find that that is enough to make them reconsider their view point. So many people spout the hoax bs because it is fashionable to do so. It is part of the anti-intellectual mantle people like to assume, one that the president of the US seems to like so much.

As for not finding it a laugh, the video of Buzz lamping that guy was the point at which i started finding it funny again. Right on the point of the chin. Kapow!

With all the issues like the moon landings vs. a hoax, the evidence for glabal warming, evolution vs. intellegent design, you have on one side a veritable mountain of evidence and on the other a small number of people going: 'that's too complicated for me to understand, my head hurts, here i have a simpler explanation'. Sadly the media always likes to present each side as having equal weight. People lead busy lives, they dont have time to seek all the facts and naturally rely on whatever 'authority' suits them best. Of course if that authority is faux news then they are never going to get a 'fair and balanced' outlook.

People who wilfully choose ignorance scare me.

One of my best experiences in teaching came when an otherwise intelligent student asked to do his argumentative research paper on the moon landing. Specifically proving it was a hoax. About a week into the assignment, he asked to change topics - It didn't take him long, once he researched the hoax claims, to realize that they are nothing but paranoid lunacy.

As Jim Oberg described them - Cultural Vandals. Nothing more. Hoagland is the same - just attention seeking.

It's a bit sad really.

Doug

I think there are two categories. Cutural Vandals and Moronic Followers - those who are dumb enough to actually believe the crap.

I'd imagine the people who believe it have an "AB BUSTER 3000" in their closet - they saw it on a shopping channel and it MUST be true

Doug

Alas Paxdan, this is just very classical manipulation stuff: medias like to "be objective" in presenting "impartially" the "two points of view" (And this is not special to Murdoch press, nearby all do) even if one of the point of view is obvioulsly false or minoritary.




Quite easy to be anti-intellectual, for peoples who are not clever or not cultivated. When I am deemed intellectual, this alway recalls me the cambodgian Red Khmers killing people with a showel because they were bearing glasses ans so were considered "intellectual" and "class ennemy".





What authority? It is on the TV (the hoax) so it must be serious!!!


When we are interested in space, we have to look very far, toward our origins and toward billion years old other forms of life. So when we come back to Earth, how certain visions look petty. Astronomy should be mandatory at school.

If someone can accept the idea of a huge conspiracy regarding the moon landing and subsequent return, then I'd be amazed if they can then accept the idea of an even huger conspiracy involving people analyzing the rocks brought back and the laser interoferometers placed on the Moon's surface, and at some point the conspiracy becomes everyone except you, and in that case, wow, you really are screwed, and who wants to be that screwed? That is extra, extra, extra, extra-screwed.

I'm not amazed at all. People have a remarkable ability to ignore or explain away facts if those facts don't fit what they've decided is the truth. The anti-intellectual mantle helps one to do that -- you simply say to yourself: "Well, these scientists were obviously in on the scam, and since I have absolutely no clue as to how they got these results from these supposed moon rocks, I can comfortably assume that the scientists are just using their scientific double-talk to try and fool me. Well, they can't fool me! I know better! It was all a scam! Hah! See? I'm smarter than they think! How dare they try and fool me with their made-up scientific double-talk, anyway!"

You see how the thing progresses? It comes from a deep-seated sense of inferiority over living in a world that's too complicated for them to understand, and a hatred of anyone who claims to understand things they don't... It's that fear and hatred that the politicians are currently using to their own advantage.

-the other Doug

only appropriate response to the madness:
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?

I'm not sure that conspiracy-believers hate everyone who has answers to things they don't understand, but that they're just scared of upsetting their worldview. Defense mechanisms and all.. if they were to accept that we had landed on the moon, part of them would have to change, and that change might be 'bad' or 'painful'.

Myself, I've often found that things that are painful in the short-term are decidedly beneficial in the long-term (eventually ), and really, if you're any kind of optimist you have to think this way.

Besides, who wouldn't want to walk around on the moon? That's gotta be fun, even if the moon is apparently just a big dusty rock. Boing, boing, boing. If you were an optimist, you could even imagine that you would find something quite impressive indeed. If you were a pessimist I suppose you'd think the Moon God (or even just good ole' God) would soon crush you while you sleep, and sure, your spacesuit might rip open, but I bet being exposed to the vacuum of space is pretty fun too.

Well, I do believe we landed on the moon, but I also know that the government lies, and is manipulative.


I still love the arguments about there being no stars visible in the picture. My sister was in a park somewhere once, and a friend took a picture. My sister was in the sunlight, but behind her, it was lightly shaded. Picture came out looking like it was nighttime - there was no background visible at all, even though it was still rather well lit. She just happened to be the brightest spot in the picture, and the camera compensated.
Either that, or the entire thing was staged, and she was actually in a lab somewhere, not a park.

You're just itching to turn this board political aren't you?

I was just expressing agreement with similar statements earlier in the thread (not by me). And quite frankly, you can take the "current" out of my statement -- all politicians, to one degree or another, appeal to peoples' fears and hatreds to gain their support.

Sorry, did not mean to offend...

-the other Doug

Now now boys - dont make me lock a thread

It's been moved.

Call me cynical, opined Phil (just back from vacation and feeling feisty) but I don't think the people behind (I mean really behind, at the deepest level) these hoaxes actually believe them any more than I do. Of course, some sad creatures lower down the chain of deceit probably do come to believe them. I think it's all about making money, from public speaking, web ads, TV specials and so on. The more controversial the better. Well, I did say call me cynical.

Phil

Interesting discution on how things work, when the matter is about determining our vision of reality. Life is done in such a way -especially at our epoch- that things you deem true or good, later appear false or bad. So we have to accept, or to become mad and angry. We too have defense mechanisms to protect us from believing anything, but these defense mechanisms do not know the truth themselve, so they can work backward, make us stick to false beliefs. Example 1: a man drinks too much, his wife asks him to stop. What to decide, that he must stop, or that his wife is a women libs extremist? Example 2: Greenhouse effect asks us to consume less energy. What to decide: to buy a smaller car, or to say that ecologists are a fundamentalist cult? Exemple 3: Scientists and US government claim to have been to the Moon. What to decide: be amazed and bewildered with wonder for such a feat, or hate whose who are able of this when we are not? etc etc.

A further difficulty is that sometimes, alas, government and medias lie, for various reasons, sometimes legitimate, sometimes not. So when people realize this, they become defiant, and more likely to accept "alternative" theories and views. This is perhaps the reason why a review like "Nexus" specially targets ecologists and New Age. (Nexus was a confidential australian amateur fanzine which suddenly got a worlwide distribution and is specialized into "alternatives" )

Doug, I understand that you do not want your forum to become a politics forum. But sometimes politics comes and seeks us and catches us wherever we try to hide, even in deep space. So we have hoaxes, political influence on space programs and budgets, etc. So I think that it is legitimate to speak of it, and clearly identifies the skates, while keeping away from directly expressing partisan political points of view unrelated to unmanned spaceflight.

(UFOs too are out of topic on this forum because it is "manned" spaceflight )

Richard:

No, no, UFOs are not manned spacecraft!

Every time *I've* been abducted, it was by dozens of tall blonde Venusian women with hourglass figures and (oh, joy!) all of whom have an insatiable predeliction for the harvesting of interplanetary genetic material, so the things are 'womanned' not 'manned' (I did check, see?).

(and then I woke up)

Bob Shaw

(thinks Bob's been smoking the Viagra again...)

Bob, that's not what you're supposed to do with it!

[quote=Richard Trigaux,Aug 20 2005, 06:44 AM]
Interesting discution on how things work, when the matter is about determining our vision of reality.

Here is something I wrote up a few years ago on the subject that has made the rounds. I might ass I have seen poles indicating as many as a third of young people in the US and England doubt the moon landings took place. The longer we wait until doing it again the greater the doubts that it was possible will grow.

Don

The reality of historical events is an interesting thing to try to prove.
It seems so obvious to us that Napoleon lived and that Rome once dominated
Western Civilization, and yet what percentage of people could write out
anything resembling a historical time line if they were asked?
A profound difference in awareness of history seems to occur with events
which are still within living memory. Many people still hear stories from
World War II veterans, and tales told by living participants still
circulate. All but a few World One veterans have died and direct living
memory of that event is fading fast.When I was a child there were still
veterans of the Civil War alive.
We are now as far removed from Apollo as Apollo was from the Spanish
Civil War, placing us about a third of the duration of time from then until
when Apollo will also pass from living memory.
After we who remember are gone, the very idea that we were once able to
leave Low Earth Orbit might seem fantastic. There will come a time when the
things we remember will seem as the stuff of legends. I suspect part of the
skepticism concerning Apollo comes from the enculturated belief that
progress is inevitable, that our reach will always be further than in the
past. People have a hard time believing we once did things we are no longer
capable of. While 40 years ago space exploration was striving toward
unlimited frontiers, today we are seemingly eternally confined to low Earth
Orbit, looking at our past like an aged Russian Gymnast looking at fading
photographs of her moment of glory when she was 14 years old.
This is what I see as the terrible truth lurking behind the expressions
of doubt in our past accomplishments. Perhaps it hurts so much to know we
have lost our ability to visit other worlds, that the frontiers we were
enticed with as kids have been canceled, that it is better to claim it was
all a fraud.

that was of course supposed to be two 'd's, not two 's'es. in one word of the above message.

Don

Yes DDAVIS there is a matter of time lapse and memory loss. But not only.

If you take the accounts of the Life of Jesus in the Gospels, with the miracles, sky becoming dark, resurection and all, we have absolutely no living memory of this. However there are peoples who admit all this as it, and others who state as abruptly that it is just a bunch of legends.

On the other hand, we have still living memories of the holocaust in World was II. But already we have people who, even against the law, say the holocaust did not took place, that it is a fabrication.

This was to point at the role of a priori opinions of people. For instance scientists are less inclined to admit the reality of miracles, while spiritualists need the miracles to maintain their vision of the world. Idem for the racists, to whom the holocaust is a painful recall of their own wickedness. So memory plays in fact very little role in their opinion making.

So why people could refuse the idea of the landing on the Moon? There may be several causes.

The most obvious would be a lack of confidence toward administrations, scientists and governments. There are many good and bad reasons for this. A good reason is for instance a growth of ecology awareness into the people when governments are heavily lagging into this domain. A bad reason is uncontrolled rumours such as the Roswell stories, which induces into thinking that the governments lies.

A subtle reason would be linked to fuzzy or sketchy ideas in the domains of ecology or spirituality, leading many people to think that science and technology would be "bad". (This is of course not the true ecology or spiritual stance).

Also, when people are confident with the society, they do not accept alternative ideas. But when they see that the society can be wrong, they tend to reverse their behaviour and accept all what criticizes or despises society. It is only later that they can realise that anti-society stuff can be bad too, and make their opinion from facts not from the political label of the speaker.

That 30% of people, or even 6%, cannot accept the Appolo story, it is a very disturbing thing, that goes far beyond any real or supposed criticism against the US government. I think that serious action should be taken, as for the ones who do not accept the holocaust. Both are as fearsome the one as the other.

Imagine they become a majority, and they make a kind of anti-science revolution?

There is also the fact that the anti-Apollo propaganda is fairly well done. For instance when they say that no stars are visible in the Moon photos, only somebody with a knowledge of photography can understand why, and thus infer that the argument is false, resulting from ignorance or deliberate tampering. As photographs are only a few minority, the anti-science revolution can still win, it depends only of the conformism of people will change.

[quote=Richard Trigaux,Aug 22 2005, 11:11 AM]
Yes DDAVIS there is a matter of time lapse and memory loss. But not only.

'If you take the accounts of the Life of Jesus in the Gospels, with the miracles, sky becoming dark, resurection and all, we have absolutely no living memory of this. However there are peoples who admit all this as it, and others who state as abruptly that it is just a bunch of legends.'

The ideas of religion are not really what I mean when it comes to our collective view of history. Miracles convienently happen ages ago where they cannot be disproved wheras the rise and fall of civilizations can be traced by sifting buried scraps and lucky finds of surviving bits of literature.

'On the other hand, we have still living memories of the holocaust in World was II. But already we have people who, even against the law, say the holocaust did not took place, that it is a fabrication.'

This continues today with the Turks denying the Armenian genocide. As the World War I era fades from living memory the Turks will have an easier job pushing their party line. Incidently it is not illegal in the US to deny the holocaust, but it sure marginalizes one who does! I have heard radio preachers actually say such things.




Imagine they become a majority, and they make a kind of anti-science revolution?'


There has been such an 'anti science' movement growing since the late 1960's. Who can blame them with the threat of atomic weapons, surveillance of citizenry by governments, overturning of outmoded moral codes by biological choices some view with hostility, and the knowledge that governments indeed do lie to us about big and little things as a matter of course. An appeaciation of science will only be likely among a modect portion of the population as views of history and even of the nature of reality continue to subdivide.

Don
'

Yes DDAVIS.

The antiscience movement, as you explains, has real historical causes, starting from the hazard of atomic weapons, biology, etc. The increase of ecology awareness, of social and political awareness, the rise of alternative ways of life (former hippies, New Age, etc...) led many people look at science (and at politics) with a more critical eye.

But rejecting atom bombs makes sense, when rejecting knowledge at a whole is stupid. So where is the mistake?

What I think is that the majority of people is still "square thinking" or "exclusively yes or no" without any nuances. This way of thinking lead many people to blindly accept or completelly reject things, when in reality there are nearby alway nuances. For instance science led to many useful discoveries, not only to the fabrication of atom bombs. So we could accept science, but an ethical (or at least controlled) science which works for the good.

So what happens when people realize that science allowed bad discoveries? Square thinking, they clip out the whole thing and deem science as being globally bad. This is in a way unavoidable, so long as there is no more clever thinking than square thinking. When people will learn more clever and efficient ways of thinking, they will still reject atom bombs but not Apollo. When they will do this is a matter of education, of correct work by the medias, governments, etc.

In an extreme way, square-thinking leads to fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism, we think, but atheist fundamentalism too, you just have to look at former Soviet Union, China, etc. Both kinds of fundamentalism being an equal threat.

The idea of an anti-science revolution is not an empty figure of style. It already happened several times. Remember that the ideas of atoms, democracy, abolition of slavery, mechanical calculators, do not date back from only the 18th or 19th centuries, but from antic Greece, two millenia earlier. But in the 4th to 6th centuries the catholics fundamentalists burned the Alexandria Library, the archives of the Roman empire, and nearby all the cultural artifacts of antiquity. Science-minded people had to flee to Persia and India, only to be caugh later by muslim fundamentalists, in the 7th and 11th centuries. All this was the most tremendous setback from all the history of mankind, and in certain domains we still not recovered of it today, 15 centuries later. Would such a thing happen today, I could not imagine the consequences, it could start a nuclear war, huge famine, or left us defenceless in front of cosmic-sized ecological catastrophes.

I am personally very sympathetic with movement such as ecology or New Age, which can bring many to our lifes and societies. but I am also aware that if square-thinking appropriates these movements, there is a terrible danger of fundamentalism here too. It is not at random if the hoaxers target these movements in priority. And, if technocracy continues with so much arrogance to destroy nature, the MAJORITY of people could prefer the havoc of an anti-science revolution.


So this is why the anti-apollo hoax does not make me laugh.

BBC Article 'The struggle over science'

Article from New scientist regarding Hubble's recent Lunar images:

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn7880

Paxdan,
I cannot resist to excerpt a quote here of your article:
"How radically we have moved away from regulation based on professional analysis of scientific data ...to regulation controlled by the White House and driven by political considerations."

As far as I know, Mr Bush is not New Age, thus he may be easiy followed by the majority. As in the 6th Century...

Or in a way, the two extremes join their efforts to produce the same result, as always in square-thinking.

Ever read the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller?

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fi...n/canticle.html

Every scrap of knowledge we can add to the benefit of human civilization against the darkness of ignorance is not just important, it is vital.

It's true that the complex that had housed the Library was destroyed at the end of the 4th century -- because it contained a major pagan temple, the Serapaeum -- but much of the collection had probably been destroyed earlier, as the crowded site of Alexandria was very susceptible to earthquakes and fires, and a large fire is known to have ravaged the area of the library as early as 48 B.C.E.
What really deprived the Middle Ages of the knowledge of the ancient world, however, was not the accidental or purposeful destruction of central repositories; that would not have mattered much as long as copies of the works contained there were available and continued to be copied. But in the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the amount of copying of religious texts increases, and the proportion of secular texts decreases. Demand for scientific or even literary works of the past had shrunk; public opinion was drawing a line between the Christian present and the pagan past by disregarding the latter. The catastrophic economic collapse of the ancient Mediterranean world, from about the middle of the sixth century, also made the funds for maintaining scriptoria scarce. Consequently there was little room for the copying of luxury books, and copyists concentrated on books that were deemed necessary: psalters, prayer-books, and bibles. The non-Christian or pre-Christian material that survives is a combination of "best-sellers" -- the works that were, for one reason or another, very famous (like Homer , Vergil, Aristotle and Ptolemy); and a number of other works that survived by accident or whim.
The general lesson is that science suffers, not so much when fanatics set out to destroy it, as when people simply cease to care about it. Apathy is a more dangerous weapon than fire.

One has to wonder what course the world would have taken if Christianity had not gotten a foothold?

Televised gladiator fights, anyone?

Probably not. The Roman (and before it, the Greek) set of world-view paradigms did not allow for many avenues of scientific inquiry. Especially in the area of physics. While the Romans and the Greeks before them accomplished great things in terms of practical engineering, they developed them as outgrowths of hands-on materials experience, not from any actual understanding of how the materials are put together.

Therefore, the Romans never developed technology beyond a certain level, even though they had the time and energy and resources to do so. Without the massive shift in world-view paradigms that occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and into the beginning of the Renaissance, there would never have been an Industrial Revolution.

The same thing happened in China, where the very foundation of their world-view did not allow modeling of physical systems, because the Chinese believed that every system has a spiritual element that cannot be modeled. If you believe it is not possible, or not ever useful, to construct a model of a system we see in the real world, you'll never go down the path of the sciences.

So, while Christianity may have subdued some forms of art and literature, and the Roman way of looking at technology, it did not stop Roman techological development. Romans did that themselves -- their technology was as mature as they were ever going to make it prior to the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

-the other Doug

I think you're right that there was a gap between theoretical and practical sciences, which was generally unbridged except by the occasional genius (like Archimedes). Otherwise the two had little to do with each other, practical sciences proceeding by a combination of tradition with trial and error.

In the theoretical sciences, the whole concept of a theoretical science was pretty much lost in the Latin West (because with the decline of learning, the Greek originals were inaccessible even to the literate), and became not much more than repetition in the Greek East; it was left for the Arabs, who conquered much of the Hellenic world in the 7th century, to build upon Greek theoretical ideas. These ideas eventually reentered the Latin West through Spain later in the Middle Ages.

The progress of the practical sciences was fitful and depended upon local economic prosperity. In some areas, such as architecture and certain forms of military technology, it continued to advance, though slowly. The Byzantine Empire never regressed beyond the Roman level, though the area of its influence was much more limited. In Western Europe, some of the useful arts which required an empire-sized economic unit to uphold them fell into disuse.

But by the 10th or 11th century, Western Europe had come to behave as an integrated economic unit despite being divided into many small states (and the existence of an international - mostly clerical - intelligentsia did much to bring this about) and conditions began to progress beyond the Roman level once again. This, even though the concept of theoretical science was not reintroduced to Western Europe until the 12th century, and did not get much beyond Aristotle -- who was taken as an absolute authority -- until the end of the 16th century, when experimental science reemerges.

Exactly. What you'll note here is that spiritual beliefs (i.e., beliefs that must be taken on faith, that do not stand the scrutiny of scientific investigation) are what have, historically, kept civilizations from developing what we know as the scientific method. And, indeed, there is a discontinuity between a method that requires you to discard beliefs when they are disproven, and a set of beliefs that require you to *never* require proof of them.

And while my own spiritual beliefs tend toward the pagan, I am first and foremost a scientific rationalist. Which means that my spiritual beliefs are a subset of my world-view, not the whole set.

I'm a strong believer in spirituality. But I'm a stronger believer in scientific rationalism. And, as someone who chooses to learn from history (and not just ignore it when it conflicts with my preferred world-view), it seems clear to me that when non-rational world-views (i.e., most faith-based systems) are encouraged to take over your entire world-view, you lose the ability to question beliefs that are at best incorrect and at worst devastating dead-ends when it comes to developing useful technology.

Is it any wonder why this growing popular anti-science movement, based as it is on a backlash from those who want to dismiss science because it doesn't fit their faith-based world views, seems so threatening to me? And seeing what Richard has written, I'm not the only one with serious concerns.

-the other Doug

I cant stop myself, since the thread caught my interest. And I must agree with several here that it was a set of unusual circumstances in Europe that made possible the technological revolution. Not christianity itself, but a set of small competing city states where the close and intense competition became the engine for rapid developement, so yes, I think thats why we had a 'false start' on this kind of developement in ancient Greece.

The knowledge and thinking of the Greek philosophers were almost forgotten but by 'borrowing' it back in a refined form from the Arab world who had made some refinement to the astronomy, bookkeeping and calculus. With banking and bookeeping from Genua, we got on the path of creating plants for manufacture mostly weapons and armor at first.
We tend to forget that factorys and mass production of things (like cloth and in sawmills, shipyards are another example) all this existed long before there were any advanced machinery, and it was comptition that had the early industry looking for more efficient means to compete.
Overall I dont think religion helped all this along the slightest, its often stated that it provided 'a common cause for protecting Europe' against the marauding Arab Jihad and Viking warriors. But overloking the fact that those people were mostly into trade, and only as much part time pirates as beforementioned fleets from Genua. Well the bottom line are that I think all this only can have happened in Europe with all the small competing city states, and nowhere else.

Three Apollo programs on The History Channel this weekend:

Saturday, August 27 at 8 p.m. ET - "Save Our History -- Apollo: The Race Against Time"

What remains of the spacecraft designed to propel American astronauts to the
moon? How are they being saved for future generations?


Sunday, August 28 at 9 p.m. - "Beyond the Moon: Failure is not an Option 2"

This two-hour sequel to "Failure Is Not an Option" tells the story of America's
post-Apollo space program, from the point of view of the engineers of Mission Control.

Through their experiences, we get a firsthand look at life inside Mission Control, as
these driven engineers continue to push the boundaries of space flight from 1972 into the new century.


Apollo 13 on Saturday at 9 pm and Sunday at 6 and 11 pm ET

Film based on the true story of the ill-fated Apollo 13 moon mission. Since America had already achieved its lunar goal of landing on the moon, little interest existed in 1970 when Apollo 13 launched--until these words shook the national psyche: "Houston, we have a problem."

Stranded 205,000 miles from Earth, astronauts Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) battle to survive. Directed by Ron Howard, with Gary Sinise and Ed Harris. (1995) TVPG cc


http://www.historychannel.com/

Perhaps some day if the human race grows up enough, we will have a "religion" and spiritual attitude like the one Carl Sagan described here:

"In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than out prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."

- Pale Blue Dot, Random House, New York, 1994, page 52

http://members.aol.com/pantheism0/atheists.htm


And there is some fascinating discussion on his Cosmist views here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Carl_Sagan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ann_Druyan

other Doug:

The answer is to carefully read the Holy Words of the Blessed Pratchett, and seek out one's own Small Gods.

Oook?

Bob Shaw

Amen, Brutha.

What remains of the spacecraft designed to propel American astronauts to the
moon? How are they being saved for future generations?

Speaking of libraries and artifacts, I think the biggest collections of Apollo related hardware are in Houston, Washington DC, and Cape Canaveral and other NASA centers. A fair amount of stuff was sent to the Kansas 'Cosmosphere' museum. By the time the majority of people no longer believe we went to the Moon, when those who remember are dead, the artifacts will increase in importance in establishing the objective reality of Apollo.
The problem is having them in 'target' cities, where they get destroyed in wars and catastriphes.
Rome housed many art treasures looted from Greece, which perished along with much of the city in a series of large fires. Constantinople had a great collection of remaining treasures from the ancient world, including the statue of Zeus removed from it's temple in Olympia, one of the wonders of the world. These were housed in a palace which burned down destroying everything inside.
The collection of artifacts in one place in a major city is thus the last stage of their existance.
The Cosmosphere collection will ultimately be the longest surviving collection of space hardware, and other collections should consider moving to that region, especially great works of art. This goes for London, Paris, and other 'jewel' cities.
Assuming we never return to the Moon (I won't believe it's going to happen until the landers are actually being built) we will be asking an increasingly greater degree of suspension of disbelief from future generations that such a miracle was once possible. One day being able to reach Low Earth orbit could look like going to the Moon appears to us!

Don

Oook. Definitely.

-the other Doug

Phiewwwww!
Great contributions all! I did not expected to launch a discution on the role of religions in science, just taking some examples in History on how thing worked. I will try to bring some bits of answers, not reply in details.






DDavis, if one day we come to a point (I hope not) where science and space exploration will be only past history, so what you call artifacts of the Apollo missions will be what in religion we name relics: very moving remnant and testimonies of marvelous past events... And if there is still an anti-science movement, they will say that the artifacts where fabricated.


ljk4-1 I much appreciated your quotes of Carl Sagan, that I did not knew before. This, together with Dvandorn reply, could lead to a scientific approach of spirituality. This is a far-reached and largely encompassing topic, and I brough my stone on my personnal site http://www.shedrupling.org, where interested people could continue the debate (Doug, I do not know if you will allow such a discution, which is far of the topic, but really interesting for the topic. So excuse me if I give my personnal URL).





Dvandorn I really share your point of view about spirituality, that we must pass over the state of dogmatic belief. Today one of the major stakes in religions is preciselly the responsible criticism of the secondary dogma, to arrive to a state of appropriated spirituality rather than blind dogmas. This is really interesting, and many works are going on about religion history, questionning the reality of historical facts, social or neurological effects of spirital practices, etc.
But this is really valuable if we do not lose the real basis of spirituality (for instance compassion, the basis of Christianism). And for a scientifically cultivated mind, this arises real challenges: for instance in a path such as Mahayanan buddhism, being really persuaded that miracles are possible is a necessary ingredient for success. And there is something like that in pagans too, as far as I know, for instance the idea of spirits of places.






Then David and Dvandorn had a really interesting discution on how things were going on in the 6th Century, when "christian' ignorance prevailed over antic "science". I just add somme comments:

-If antic science did not surpassed its level, it is because they did not had what we call today the scientific method. They were doing science exactly the same way others were doing religion: dogma and beliefs. There was even a Greek "epistemological principle" as what once somethings seems logical, it does not need to be proven! It is Galileo who unlocked the situation, with experimental science. It happened only once in the history of mankind. But it could have happened if antiquity if it had not regressed.

-I call anybody not to confuse the CONTENT of religions (such as Jesus's call for loving each others like brothers) and how religions were made (as dogmatic and normalizing opression systems). It is really two very different things, and confusing them is the root of many evils today (Look in USSR). But, in antic times, the same dogmatic way of thinking also prevailed in science, like dvandorn commented, and it is why antic science did not surpassed the level of what was immediatelly checkable in an antique workshop.

-the statement "Catholics destroyed antic science" is a shortcut. There was really forbiddings, persecutions and destructions, but things evolved in a much complex way. Like David explained, there was a whole context, mainly of economy depression in the 6the century. But is this context really unrelated to the prevalent fundamentalist power and ideas? Even when there was no intentionnal destruction of past artifacts and culture, the fact is that it was deemed a much lower value, and lost from lack of care.

-David says interesting thing about the evolution of sciences, which relies on the available technology needed, the later relying on the economy wealth available. For instance the mechanical calculator was invented in the 17th century by Pascal, with the technos available at this time; but economically useable machines appeared only in the 20th century. The computer was invented in the 19th century by Lord Babbage, but only vacuum tubes made it feasible, and only integrated circuits made it economically affordable for everybody. And very large machines like the cyclotrons can be built only by societies with a large and wealthy industrial network. And one of the main ideological stakes of the Apollo program was to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist economy over the communist economy... Perhaps the failure of the later is a pain for everybody who tries to promote economy systems based on altruism rather than on competition.


At last thank you all for expressing such interesting and varied points of view, and even conflicting points of views while keeping courteous and constructive.

This whole thread reminds me of the joke about the guy who was dissatisfied with his service at a restaurant, and made his complaints loud and long to everyone within earshot. The maitre'd comes out, talks to the man, replaces every dish with one done *exactly* to the customer's specifications, and generally is the compleat host, making sure that everything is now perfect.

"Is everything now satisfactory?" the maitre'd asked.

"Yeah," grumbled the guy, "except... I was happier with my complaint!"

As long as people are happier with their complaint than with having their complaints satisfied, it will be a challenging world in which to live -- especially if you have a habit of *thinking* and - even more dangerous - questioning "what everyone knows."

Please recall the words of someone who knew a little something about Mankind's striving: "...Mankind is more disposed to suffer what evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." (Extra credit for those who can identify the writer and the document.) Also, note the correlation of that statement to my earlier comments about the scientific method, and having the courage to leave behind those theories that have been disproven by factual, empirical evidence and thereby "abolishing the forms" to which we have become accustomed.

It sickens me to *death* that there are people out there who refuse to believe that Mankind has realized one of its fondest dreams -- to walk the surface of another *world*. That people can be motivated to give their energies and their beliefs to *denying* such a colossal achievement -- that people would prefer to believe that it must have been faked, in some tawdry scam.

How dysfunctional do you have to be to insist that something as *wonderful* as this could never have happened, must have been a hoax, as if the very possibility of it actually having happened is some kind of *threat* to them?

And what kind of Tomorrow can we expect in a world in which a significant percentage of the people *are* that dysfunctional?

-the other Doug

!!!

can say nothing but agree with you