Today I have been chatting online with Craig Campbell who is
convinced that the moon landings were faked.
I’ve only ever met Craig once when I did an open spot at the Comedy
Store many years ago. In those days I
was so young and green that I thought comedians had acts and just pretended to
talk nonsense on stage. Then I grew up
and discovered that most comedians actually believe the nonsense they speak.
Craig has many opinions that he expresses vociferously on
Facebook chiding those who disagree with him with various terms of low level
verbal abuse. Most of these pass me by
but for some reason I happened to find his statement that the moon landings
were faked to be particularly offensive.
Perhaps because I happen to have seen moon rocks and remember looking at
the data from them as an undergraduate student.
I’m pretty sure it would be hard to fake the carbon dating results and
make them match a geological picture of the formation of the universe.
Never-the-less while journeying to the moon was one
giant leap for mankind belief in the moon landings is one small step of logic
too far for Craig for whom the whole episode must have been a giant conspiracy
concocted for Machiavellian geopolitical purposes which escape me. So I tried questioning him about what
specifically about the moon landings was too big a leap of faith for him …
Presumably he believes in nuclear missiles and ICBMs … the moon rockets were
just similar technology pointed in a different direction.
However, it was like trying to have a logical discussion
with a member of the flat Earth society.
What I did find I could establish is that Craig could believe in
rockets. And he could believe in
satellites. He couldn’t believe that men
could escape from earth however even when I explained that as you go away from
earth the pull of gravity decreases proportional to 1 / (the radius of the
earth)^2 and as there is no friction in space so... once you get going there’s
nothing to stop you so you don’t actually need that much fuel…
He seemed to be able to believe in the shuttle craft but he
couldn’t believe in inter-planetary human travel because of the limitations of
the Van Allen belt even though it’s possible to minimise the radiation absorbed
by astronauts by shielding, travelling quickly and exploiting the fact it is
thinner at the poles. So... while
Craig could believe in robotic space travel (which is presumably how he
explains away the existence of moon rocks) he couldn’t believe in human space
travel. Not even the International Space
Station which is in low orbit and visible with the naked eye.
Still what do I know…? Brianwashed little me… we cannot escape earth's orbit according to Craig... perhaps he is right and we can't...
...or perhaps what he can't accept is that things don't always revolve about him and other celestial bodies can attract human beings. It may seem a pointless argument but really I think what these people can't accept about space travel is it makes their own lives seem insignificant...? Still it's really disturbing that seemingly sane people can be so narrowminded. Yes, laugh now but these are exactly the same people who persecuted Galileo for his championing of heliocentrism ...
To be fair to Craig ... perhaps the larger problem is that only 12 people have actually ever been to the moon (
a third of whom are dead) so it is just about possible to postulate a conspiracy theory that we've never gone and they were all lying.
Perhaps the deeper problem is that we've never returned... Well, either that or his jaded view of the world doesn't allow for the idea of civilisation having achieved things and this is one of civilisation's biggest achievements?
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