I enjoy how moon-landing deniers will use the van Allen belts as a reason for why the astronauts could not have made it to the moon because of radiation exposure. Like, you don't believe NASA that they went to the moon, but you believe NASA that the van Allen belts exist?
People live in regions far more radioactive than the van Allen belts for far longer than the amount of time the Apollo and Artemis astronauts spent travelling through.
Strictly speaking, their existence was verified by Sputnik 2 (though the Soviets only released data on it after the fact, corroborating data from Explorer 1), so if you have a highly _specific_ conspiracy theory, around NASA rather than space stuff in general, that _could_ still work, I suppose?
No, because the Soviets have to in on faking the moon landing. They were also landing a spacecraft at the same time as the landings. To fake the moon landing you'd also have to fake the entire cold war.
Wouldn't it be great for the US and the USSR if most of the cold war was fake?
Both sides get a great boogie man to denounce. Save a bunch of money on arms if they're mostly fake. Once you learn about the Van Allen Belt, you call over on the red phone and say hey guys, we know we can't send people, but think about the ratings? Maybe we send you a case of Pepsi and we're good?
What if large wars are coordinated by the rulers of opposing sides with the purpose of killing off as many of their own young men as possible - thus reducing the threat of an uprising?
It's disappointingly difficult to get a positive case for what happened from deniers, that attempts to explain these things. Very eager to tell you what didn't happen, though.
You just need to look at the Facebook comments on any official NASA post about Artemis to see depressingly many of them. Some are joking or trolling, I’m sure, but I don’t think all.
I haven't been actively looking for them, but a friend sent me something about the launch tower escape zipline/gondolas and how that somehow indicated something fraudulent. He is not a denier, but works with one and is always asking me to refute that person's claims.
Oh because the astronauts were “really” on the escape zip lines instead of in the rocket?
How would they do the zero gravity during the live streams? They have to actually be in space, not even the zero-G parabolic airplane sim can maintain zero gravity for as long as their live streams have been.
I’ve heard people claim you can’t leave Low Earth Orbit due to the Van Allen radiation belts, but most Apollo deniers still believe low earth orbit is possible and reasonable. If they did fake Artemis II, it would have to be that the astronauts actually launched into LEO, and just didn’t really leave.
If your friend is trying to "cure" the denier, then it might be helpful for them to learn some of the tactics for reaching/deprogramming cult members. One that might be helpful is "street epistemology".
That's a bit too much to ask of these folks, I'm afraid, but I did boil it down for him by saying that the real question is understanding why he is inclined to believe its a hoax, rather than trying to pile up evidence in front of him. I suppose that's what "street epistemology" is, though. Nice to have shorthand terms for these ideas.
I also included a thought experiment for him:
Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?
(I wonder if there is a sociological shorthand term for this?)
> Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?
"The participating flat Earthers all admitted that the midnight sun was a real phenomenon. The larger flat Earth community has largely rejected the results and accused the participants, including the flat Earthers, of having faked the expedition and of being part of a larger conspiracy to promote the spherical Earth model."
The Final Experiment (https://www.the-final-experiment.com/) essentially did this by inviting "prominent" flat earthers to Antarctica to witness 24 hours of daylight. Very few did, but they are now shunned by the true flat earthers.
Church/religion. Flat-earthers believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible which dictates that the earth is flat.
When I was doing my student teaching, one of the teachers in my department was a creationist, but he didn’t seem to have read Genesis 1 at all because when I asked him about the firmament in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, he had no idea what I was talking about. At least the flat-earthers know enough scripture to follow their dogma all the way to its absurd endpoint.
"Flat Earth"[0] is more like a cult[1]. One introduces a significant barrier to entry. New members learn the approved vocabulary/jargon that identifies "in group" and "out group" people. Outsiders tend to reject new members[2]. New members tend to stay due to the "sunken cost" fallacy. The high barrier to entry and cost of leaving (losing your community - because you will be shunned for doing so) prevents people from leaving or associating with people who have left.
2 - This is why religions such as Jehovah's Witnesses require members to proselytize (including going door-to-door) because outsiders are so adverse to the members that the other insiders remark things like "those outsiders are so depraved, that's why you can only be with 'true believers' like us".
> the real question is understanding why he is inclined to believe its a hoax, rather than trying to pile up evidence in front of him
This is one of the primary techniques of SE. People are open to answering questions and with some skill with Socratic questioning, you can get results. Dumping data just causes cult/hoax members to feel threatened because you're attacking some core beliefs and they will try very hard to avoid losing a sense of self value[0].
Notes:
0 - "What I believe is wrong" -> "I am wrong" -> "I am a bad person".
I'm not disputing that conspiracy theorists tend to lack rigor but there is a full spectrum of positions between "space is fake" and "one specific extraordinary achievement with high incentive to fake it is fake".
There's indeed a full spectrum of positions in this case, but they are all worthless in the sense that they add nothing to someone's understanding of reality.
You know some people grow up in untrustworthy environments and auto didact their way to something like first principles thinking and depending on things shaking out you might only believe what you've personally seen with your own eyes. And well, earth looks pretty flat in daily life.
