Guess this guy never played orbiter

[Mlesnoski]

No my angry friend, I was being sarcastic.

 

[Messierhunter]

I'm fairly certain that the calls to violence were a joke, but I see your point. Personally, my motivations to debunk them are two fold: I refuse to ignore claims that imply I am a liar, directly or indirectly, no matter how ridiculous the claim. I am also strongly motivated whenever I see someone misuse or misrepresent amateur astronomical data to forward a conspiracy theory - it's irresponsible and it even helped motivate a mass suicide once. Apollo hoax theories strike close to motivation 1 because family members worked directly on the project and spacecraft, so it impugnes what they did.

 

[Mlesnoski]

I'm fairly certain that the calls to violence were a joke, but I see your point. Personally, my motivations to debunk them are two fold: I refuse to ignore claims that imply I am a liar, directly or indirectly, no matter how ridiculous the claim. I am also strongly motivated whenever I see someone misuse or misrepresent amateur astronomical data to forward a conspiracy theory - it's irresponsible and it even helped motivate a mass suicide once. Apollo hoax theories strike close to motivation 1 because family members worked directly on the project and spacecraft, so it impugnes what they did.

Very good point. I agree this is a "close to home" issue for a lot of people.
This does indeed walk a line of "conspiracy theory" and outright deffimation.

 

[Urwumpe]

Suprising you feel this way Herr Heinlein.

It's Urwumpe. Herr Heinlein is my father.

Well, not at all. But so much to polemics. :lol:

As far as I remember, Heinlein also never advocated a right to be stupid.

The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

 

[Andy44]

Heinlein said something like you have no right to life unless you earn it, and use the example of a drowning man who must find to way to survive since nature doesn't respect his right to live.

But (and I hate to disagree with RAH), Heinlein doesn't understand what a "right" is, at least not when he wrote that. A right is a prohibition against all other thinking humans from taking an aggressive move against you. "Nature" is not a thinking being, so it is not capable of caring one way or the other about you and your abstract rights.

To get this back on topic, when I say that a man has a right to believe in and spout off whatever conspiracy nonsense he wants, I am saying that it is wrong for anyone to use force to try and stop him from thinking or saying what he wants.

But you do have a right to argue with him, and a right, almost a duty, to expose his BS for what it is, especially if you are responsible for teaching people.

I'm surprised Heinlein wrote that (I have to go look it up, it's one of the teacher's lectures in Starship Troopers, IIRC), considering his extreme libertarian streak, but I see what he was getting at. I just think he failed to distinguish "rights" from "independence", which are related concepts.

 

[Eagle]

To get this back on topic, when I say that a man has a right to believe in and spout off whatever conspiracy nonsense he wants, I am saying that it is wrong for anyone to use force to try and stop him from thinking or saying what he wants.

Exactly the concept of negative rights. Something that you are not allowed to take from someone else...unless you must act to prevent them from taking the same or greater right away from yourself (by compulsion/force).

Its this entitlement stuff/positive rights that wrecks havoc. The right that you must be able to have something means that it must be taken from someone else.

 

[Ghostrider]

Er...what? Switzerland hasn't been involved in a war since like 1850.

Well, we were more than willing and able to go to war as long as it was a profitable business. The Swiss had a good reputation as soldiers of fortune. Unfortunately we managed to cut ourselves out of the sector.

We can still hire ourselves out to the Vatican, though, although apart from the occasional scuff with the local Carabinieri, the action is sorely lacking and the pay not exactly up to private contractor standards.

 

[Moonwalker]

hahaha, own3d

Not at all. Those conspirators claim that the JAXA moon mission was also fake, and the HD records of the lunar surface are just 3D animations.

Even the Chinese flights are believed to be faked. These days more and more people even claim that manned space flight on the whole is just governmental fake. Nobody ever went into space. It's all just lies. Humans can't travel into space. ...

The internet is almost overloaded with such a kind of crazy people, and so our societies are. No matter what happens, even if Constellation would include a mission to one of the Apollo landing sites in future, those people won't ever stop to claim that it's all a big fake, including Ares flights of course. Their brains simply do not allow rationality. It won't ever stop. It is almost like an incurable disease. That's why I say: do not care about them, do not waste your time.

 

[Pilot7893]

Not at all. Those conspirators claim that the JAXA moon mission was also fake, and the HD records of the lunar surface are just 3D animations.

Even the Chinese flights are believed to be faked. These days more and more people even claim that manned space flight on the whole is just governmental fake. Nobody ever went into space. It's all just lies. Humans can't travel into space. ...

The internet is almost overloaded with such a kind of crazy people, and so our societies are. No matter what happens, even if Constellation would include a mission to one of the Apollo landing sites in future, those people won't ever stop to claim that it's all a big fake, including Ares flights of course. Their brains simply do not allow rationality. It won't ever stop. It is almost like an incurable disease. That's why I say: do not care about them, do not waste your time.

Yes, I once met someone who claimed the moon landing was fake because the sky was too dark. I go "It's space, what did you expect?" He goes "I was expecting the sun to give it at least SOME color." I try explaining how a vacume does not absorb sunlight, but it goes right over his head and he replies "Just because it doesn't absorb sunlight doesn't mean it's gonna be all black."
I reply "Actually, it kinda does." At this, I just drop the argument.

 

[martins]

The fact that the sky is dark is actually not entirely trivial:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

 

[T.Neo]

The fact that the sky is dark is actually not entirely trivial:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

Hmmm.
Interesting.
I'm guessing either that the "backdrop" we see is from a time where there were little or few stars, or that the light that we get from them is so dim by the time that it reaches us we see only a very dark sky.

I think the guy Pilot is talking about assumed that the sun would illuminate the sky on the Moon during the day just like here on Earth.
There are several, very, very simple reasons why this is not so.

 

[Pilot7893]

I think the guy Pilot is talking about assumed that the sun would illuminate the sky on the Moon during the day just like here on Earth.

Yes. I assume he is an Elementary School dropout, if that's even legal.

 

[tblaxland]

The fact that the sky is dark is actually not entirely trivial:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

Actually, the sky is not dark, you just can't perceive it directly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background

 

[Kozak]

The fact that the sky is dark is actually not entirely trivial:

It's easily solved by mathematic analysis method. Just imagine yourself in an infinite cubic grid of point light sources, in a centre of one of the cubes. You've got non-enumerable number of directions total - and just numerable - that is pointing to one on more stars - so the sky will be dark withbright points. That is, there's at least one configuration resembling given conditions. Theorem is proved

Who can refute?

(Consider it a joke - I don't question the OTR/STR)

 

[Hielor]

It's easily solved by mathematic analysis method. Just imagine yourself in an infinite cubic grid of point light sources, in a centre of one of the cubes. You've got non-enumerable number of directions total - and just numerable - that is pointing to one on more stars - so the sky will be dark withbright points. That is, there's at least one configuration resembling given conditions. Theorem is proved

Who can refute?

Except that you have an innumerable number of stars in each of the cardinal directions, and so each of your innumerable number of directions will intersect a star.

Look at it this way: if there is a star at of some width w at each integral coordinate other than the origin (ie, (0,1), (1,0), (1,1) etc), no matter what origin-rooted sight vector you specify I can give you a point on that vector which falls on the "surface" of a "star" (that is, is within w of an integral coordinate other than the origin) regardless of how small w is.

My question is, though: wouldn't the sight vectors which travel further before hitting a star have a lower brightness? so even if there is in fact light coming from that direction, it may be so dim as to appear "black"?

 

[Tommy]

I'm a little suprised that the Wikipedia entry on Olber's Paradox doesn't mention the inverse square law. Crudely put, the intensity of light received from a light source diminish by the square of the distance. A star a few galaxies away would send so few photons to Earth that they would be under the threshold of perception.

 

[Kozak]

Except that you have an innumerable number of stars in each of the cardinal directions, and so each of your innumerable number of directions will intersect a star.

Read again: The number of stars is countable. Not finite. Not uncountable.

 

[Hielor]

Read again: The number of stars is numerable - so is the number of "dead" directions.

The point of Olber's Paradox, as I understand it, is that if the number of stars was innumerable, then the sky wouldn't be black.

The fact that the sky is black can be used as evidence that the number of stars is numerable. You're using the conclusion in the proof.

 

[EtherDragon]

I'm a little suprised that the Wikipedia entry on Olber's Paradox doesn't mention the inverse square law. Crudely put, the intensity of light received from a light source diminish by the square of the distance. A star a few galaxies away would send so few photons to Earth that they would be under the threshold of perception.

Good point. Also consider the quantity of non-emmisive/reflective (ie Dark) matter between stars.

 

[tblaxland]

A star a few galaxies away would send so few photons to Earth that they would be under the threshold of perception.

Yes, but if there are infinitely many of them, they all add up, hence this point (from the article):

If the universe is assumed to contain an infinite number of uniformly distributed luminous stars, then:
1. The collective brightness received from a set of stars at a given distance is independent of that distance;