'Pluto Truthers' Are Pretty Sure That the NASA New Horizons Mission Was Faked 321
MarkWhittington writes: Forget about Apollo moon landing hoax theories. That is so 20th Century. Gizmodo reported that the "Pluto Truthers" have followed the astonishing images being sent back by NASA's New Horizons probe and have come to the conclusion that they are faked. After all, if the space agency could fake the entire moon landing, it would be child's play to fake a robotic probe to the edge of the Solar System.
Is anything true? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Dealing with deniers objectively (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, but the problem with arguing against conspiracy theory is that "a vast conspiracy is hiding all the truth so no one can find it" is inherently unfalsifiable, which makes scientific argument (i.e. presenting evidence that falsifies the proposition) pretty useless.
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Re: Is anything true? (Score:2)
You forgot "everything is permitted "
But.... (Score:3)
But but.... WHY??
Re:But.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of the Paypal link in the video description.
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That's a good answer. What I meant, though, was why would NASA bother to fake a mission to Pluto?
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Re:But.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny how they don't claim the US military faked a bunch of wars too seeing as how NASA's funding is around 40 times less.
Really, cause I heard quite a few people complaining about fake weapons of mass destruction..
Re:But.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not an interesting story (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look around you'll find wackos of every kind. Unless there's a lot of these attention-desperate people, why should we be interested in this?
Re:Not an interesting story (Score:5, Insightful)
These people are only after attention, and by putting this story on slashdot, we've given them exactly what they wanted. No sane person seriously believes this or gives it even the least bit of credibility. Oh, and it's not really even funny either, if that was the angle - it's just sad. I'm not even going to bother reading the article, because I don't want to contribute any advertising traffic.
My summary: Still plenty of attention-seeking morons in the world. News at 11.
"Never heard of you." (Score:2)
These people are only after attention, and by putting this story on slashdot, we've given them exactly what they wanted.
If you aren't a card-carrying geek Slashdot isn't even a blip on your radar.
These guys are after bigger game.
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Slashdot is barely a blip on anyone's radar these days.
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They said we'd hit Peak Attention-Seeking-Moron in 2007. We've proven them wrong. The fools, the poor, mad fools.
Re:Not an interesting story (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look around you'll find wackos of every kind.
Some of them are trolls, I'll bet, just out to make mischief. But I personally know three people who are officially diagnosed with schizophrenia, and talking to them is sometimes illuminating, albeit extremely frustrating. Their world view is just too different to relate to.
Delusional thinking isn't just for full blown schizophrenics, either. One woman I used to work with (and I thought was normal) told me one day about her encounter with a UFO and it's alien occupants. Wow, I did not expect that from her.
When I was a very young kid, I either had visual hallucinations or maybe I was dreaming and only thought I was awake, but my experience was that I saw some really weird stuff. Stuff that can't possibly be true, so I can't exclude myself from the delusional category, either. Thankfully nothing like that has happened since.
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This is interesting because it represents one thing more than any other, the main stream media meme of inventing issues to draw the public's eyes to watch associated advertising. Truth is these lies are a whole lot less damaging than the similar style of lies told in main stream media to garner attention and generate profits. So why don't those conspiracy sites tell the same lies as main stream media, because that space is already occupied by more skilled and far more expansive organisations, forcing those
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Because This Is Slashdot - and how can we feel superior without our daily Two Minute Hate?
"Truthers" don't believe in *air* (Score:5, Insightful)
"Truther" conspiracy nuts don't believe in *anything* they can't see, feel, hear, or touch themselves. They probably think the very *existence* of Pluto is a lie.
You can make people go to school, but you can't force them to become educated. :(
Re:"Truthers" don't believe in *air* (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I think "truthers" are just very lonely and insecure people who are trying to boost their own egos through claiming to have "secret" or "superior" knowledge to the rest of the world. Kind of sad, really.
Re:"Truthers" don't believe in *air* (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Truthers" don't believe in *air* (Score:5, Informative)
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The reasons the buildings collapsed the way they did (catastrophically) was due to American capitalism
No skyscraper in the world will survive that load of flaming jet fuel (the airplane impact itself was nowhere near enough to bring the building down).
But, since you seem to love communist engineering let's remember the The Banqiao Reservoir Dam Failure, [engineeringfailures.org] likely the most deadly engineering failure in history: 62 dams broke, 170,000+ died as a result, 11 million left homeless.
After years of studying the incident, researchers concluded that it was the design of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and the other reservoirs, along with the principles pertaining to the containment of the river, which should be blamed for the failure and subsequent calamity. While many pointed fingers at the weather forecast all those years ago, researchers are citing that the tragedy was man-made and not entirely a natural disaster.
During the late 1950s, scientists warned that any given reservoir`s flood control was being ignored and that the irrigation functions of those reservoirs were overemphasized during the heat of the construction frenzy. It has been estimated that China continues to have 87,000 reservoirs across the nation that were built during this low standard construction era and most of these have fallen into serious disrepair. On top of sub-par construction standards, the country also lacked any early warning system as well as an evacuation plan that could have saved lives.
Yeah, sure, keep preaching the evils of capitalism.
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Most are not, partly because the risk is low and partly because many were built when aircraft were smaller.
The WTC was designed and partly built before the first Boeing 747 flew.
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Building 7 free falling without being hit by an airplane because of office furniture on fire? Seriously?
For serious. Any building will collapse if left to burn long enough. Building 7 would seem normal if we didn't have public fire departments everywhere.
the buildings came down by controlled demolition,
You, controlled flight of an airplane into a building, demolishing it. Can't argue with that.
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Conspiring the Conspiracy Theory (Score:2)
Hey, look over there! SHINY STUFF!
Sure, there are some dipshits in the world but that percentage is so small that they should never every get any coverage by anyone.. Yet here we have 4 different (semi) reputable sources repeating someone's nonsense.
My theory is as good as theirs by the way, and historically more plausible.
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"Truther" conspiracy nuts don't believe in *anything* they can't see, feel, hear, or touch themselves.
Troofers believe in a whole bunch of things they can't see, feel, hear. (and they probably touch themselves way too much).
Gang stalking, alien probing and abductions, the hollow moon and the secret moon bases, people living beneath the Arctic ice mass, chemtrails, remote mind control, shape-shifting lizard people, alien visitors from outer space, the English royal family eating babies, astrology, tarot, crystal healing, past lives, Deepak Chopra telling the truth, fairies (not the gay kind), angels, ghosts,
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I have met people who are educated beyond the level of their intelligence. So I think the better sound bite is: an educated idiot is still an idiot.
Truther? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Truther? (Score:5, Funny)
Sept 12, 2001.
Re:Truther? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a self applied name. Someone called them crackpots and they called themselves 9/11 truthers. Now truther is an anachronism for crackpot by their own doing.
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At what point did Americans substitute the word "truther" for "crackpot"?
Sept 12, 2001.
100% correct. a tried and true tactic of the mainstream media and those who cling to it is to denigrate the handful of legitimate issues and questions being raised by diluting the discussion with tons of nonsense, highlighting the most ridiculous people, organizations, and theories, offering them up to all get viewed as being one and the same, coming from the same crowd of people, and possessing the same level of veracity.
on 9/11 3 steel-framed skyscrapers demolished themselves in mid-air, coming down thro
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They had to switch from conspiracy theorist when so many horrible things turned out to be true... CT came after crackpot and was then followed by truther...
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At what point did Americans substitute the word "truther" for "crackpot"?
About the same time geeks became a "good thing" and we stopped paying a nickel to see them at side shows?
And it's troofer, not "truther". [sigh] Just shows you're part of the conspiracy, or a sheeple.
Re: Truther? (Score:2)
I like the name because many of the problems in this world come from people thinking they know the truth when all they know is what they were taught to believe.
My favorite are the jupiter comparisons (Score:2)
Of course they fail to mention that Jupiter is 250 million times larger than Pluto.
Playstation 3D graphics (Score:2)
As reported, the probe sent had the same processor as the PlayStation. They used the 3D graphics capability to create images of Pluto and Charon in CGI.
Q.E.D.
Study it out, sheeple!
Just goes to show ... (Score:2)
Stupid is as stupid does (Score:2)
Follow the signals (Score:2)
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We can in fact go back, but we don't because of the Nazi base up there.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.... [bibliotecapleyades.net]
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How would you fake a radio signal going behind the moon and coming back ?
Uh...how about you put it in a rocket going around the Moon?
One thing I've never really heard from the Moon landing conspiracy theorists is what missions were faked? There were plenty of missions to the Moon, both manned and unmanned. The Apollo program did some manned missions in Earth orbit (Apollo 7 and 9, I believe). Were those faked? Apollo 8 and 10 actually went to the Moon. Were those faked? What about the Surveyor missions, which landed probes on the Moon?
Assuming we could actually get rockets
The Pluto mission is a diversion (Score:2)
to distract us from the Invasion of Texas now going on ("Jade Helm 15")
The REAL mystery (Score:2)
The real mystery is why these few drooling idiots get any attention whatsoever. FFS go cover a high school science fair or even a rural county fair -- they would be more interesting and the people far more appealing.
Nuts (Score:3)
Why would anyone give this any attention. They best deserve to be ignored and forgotten.
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Alas, they need to be refuted first. Then ignored and (hopefully) forgotten.
These people won't go away. The counter-argument to their nonsense needs to be on the record.
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Wow. That's almost as crazy (Score:2)
as the 911 truthers.
There's only one planet in the solar system. (Score:3)
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So you can't feel, hear, see or touch them then their existence must be a lie? http://idle.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
By that logic you don't exist either :-)
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That makes sense. NASA is faking the Pluto Truther movement to discredit anyone who points out the huge flaws in their fake Pluto photos.
Follow the money, sheeple!
Re:Of course (Score:5, Funny)
OR, the glitch a weekish before the rendezvous was the point where the graphic design and emulation teams would have to be brought in. THAT's what happened! It's just that the probe was unrecoverable from a software glitch!
Or, you know, it actually went as fucking planned.
Smaller than our moon from about 80x distance (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Smaller than our moon from about 80x distance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Smaller than our moon from about 80x distance (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are we paying any attention to these people at all? To do so only encourages.
On that note I am done reading this discussion, a few comments in. I advise the same to everybody else.
Slashdot: there are more interesting stories to post than junk like this.
Re: Smaller than our moon from about 80x distance (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are we paying any attention to these people at all? To do so only encourages.
Leaving their claims unchallenged encourages them as well. Or worse, it encourages others to be deceived and to embrace their crackpot theories.
Sadly, somebody needs to address the unsustainable claims made by these nutters. It's tedious, but essential. Refute the error, assert the truth. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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We can't cure stupid. Yet.
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We can't cure stupid. Yet.
Oh, sure we can! Why, the cure was just posted yesterday! [slashdot.org]
Re: Smaller than our moon from about 80x distance (Score:5, Funny)
On that note I am done reading this discussion, a few comments in. I advise the same to everybody else.
Clearly you are a shill, hired by NASA, as part of the conspiracy to silence those of us not afraid to speak the truth. Pluto IS a **PLANET**, and this probe didn't go there. Look how bright the images are. There is no way a **PLANET** 7.5B km from the sun could be so bright. And the shadows are all wrong.
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You were trying to be funny, right? Your comment about how bright the images are is a joke on those that don't understand exposures and apertures... correct?
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I Imagine the probe also only would have a limit range of zoom and would be optimised for shots during the flyby, not from far far away.
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It got you to give Dice clicks now didn't it.
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Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Presumably the same "area 51" nutters?
Worse than that. A few hundred of the more extreme 'truthers' even deny that Pluto is a planet.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
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It isn't a planet, you moron
And A is no longer a vowel, and North is no longer a direction! [youtube.com]
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Re: WTF? (Score:3)
For thousands of years mass and weight were considered the same thing. In common English they are still conflated... in fact weight is more commonly used to describe mass than mass is ! Think of weight loss programs... visiting orbit is the most effective weight loss program we have. But scientists have different definitions. The common English mistake originated because on earth weight and mass is directly correlated but that's only because we defined the early units of mass by measuring weight on earth.
Re: WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
I suspect that you have missed the point entirely: silentcoder made the correct distinction between "mass" (an inherent property that depends on the number of atoms etc. in an object and that is independent of where the object is) and its "weight", which in physics terms means the force exerted by that object on something, which is the mass times the local acceleration.
Thus a person with a mass of 80kg standing on the Earth exerts a force due to gravity pulling them down onto the surface, i.e. 80 kg x 9.8 m/s2 = 784 Newtons. But for all sorts of obvious reasons, we just use the shorthand version to say that the person "weighs" 80 kg.
On the Moon, their mass would be the same, because they'd have the same number of atoms in their body. But they'd exert much less force on the surface, because the gravity on the Moon is only 1/6th of that on the Earth. So, they would weigh less. It's at that point that the shorthand way of talking about weight becomes useless.
Take the person and stick them infinitely far from any gravitating body and there would be no acceleration and thus no force, so the person would be weightless, but not massless (same number of atoms still).
Of course, in low Earth orbit, you're right in pointing out that the Earth's gravitational acceleration has not diminished much. However, while you're falling freely towards the surface of the Earth under that acceleration, the spacecraft you're in is falling out from underneath you at the same rate, so you don't exert a net force on it. Thus you're effectively weightless.
(If you're both falling freely towards the Earth, why don't you hit it at some point? Because you're flying sideways at such a high speed that the Earth's surface curves away from underneath you at just the same speed as you're falling towards it, so you never hit.)
But here's another thing. Under general relativity, gravity is much better thought of as a curvature of spacetime and it turns out that the motion of even massless objects (photons) is affected by that curvature (think Einstein, Eddington, etc.). Indeed, given a very strong gravitational field / very high spacetime curvature, e.g. around a black hole, photons can go into orbit. This is because while they don't have any mass, they do have energy.
So, in a more correct general relativistic setting, even your basic assertion that "to be able to orbit, you must have weight/mass" is wrong.
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No it doesn't.
Just because energy is on one side of the equation and mass on the other, that doesn't mean they are the same thing. There is an equivalence between them in the same that a certain amount of mass can be converted into a certain amount of energy (and vice versa), but it doesn't mean that they are the same.
And this equation is specific to the situation where the object with mass isn't moving (which is why E in this case is called the "rest mass energy"). More generally in special relativi
Re: WTF? (Score:2)
I simply refuse to stop calling Pluto a planet
why?
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Here is the thing, other than your dog and perhaps your cat and some farm animals, not a goddamn thing in this universe CARES what people call it.
If you have a mythical being known as "significant other" he or she may care what they are called.
But that's it. What humans call Pluto and whether we consider it a planet, a mini Planet or a bowl of yogurt are of no consequence whatsoever to that world. It. Doesn't. Fucking. Care.
So if IT doesn't care, don't you go getting your panties (purchased for research
Re:we prefer Little Planet (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course it's arbitrary, it's a definition, all definitions are arbitrary. No one really wants to memorize dozens of names of mostly tiny objects when they're in science class learning about the solar system, especially when a bunch of them don't even have decent names, but some alphanumeric designation. So we limit the list to the ones that are large enough to be of real interest. Before, we thought it was sufficient to make the cutoff line be whether they had enough gravity to become mostly spherical. Now we find out that there's a bunch of bodies that meet that definition. So we change the definition to exclude those, and call those merely "dwarf planets". But Pluto isn't big enough to make the cut, so it gets grouped in with the other dwarfs.
So take your pick, do you want 8 "planets" and a bunch of "dwarf planets", or do you want dozens of "planets" to memorize the names of, most of them being little more than big asteroids?
And stop complaining about it being arbitrary. If you defined "planet" to be anything that orbits the Sun, there's countless objects that do that, including who knows how many in the asteroid belt, plus far more in the Kuiper Belt. So the previous definition was arbitrary too, because no one wanted to group Saturn, Jupiter, or even Earth in with a bunch of asteroids just because of their orbits.
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Regardless, Pluto remains a planet.
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Except for the fact that it's not. The definition changed, it lost planetary status.
Even so, Pluto is still a planet.
It cannot be unplaneted.
"And yet it planets." - Galileo
"Madness? This! Is! Planet!" - Leonidas I
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This is the correct answer. Since we can "define" whatever the fuck we want, we could have simply let Pluto stay defined as one of the 9 "original" or "classical" planets and been done with it.
I think it's really a classical rock planet...
That might be fine, if not for Ceres (Score:3)
The statu
Re:we prefer Little Planet (Score:5, Interesting)
There are, and always have been, only seven planets: Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These are the Wanderers, known from the times before astronomy, before science, before even written history. Redefining "planet" in any other way is a corruption of the original concept: that some visible celestial bodies wander through the sky in predictable ways.
Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus did not make the cut: they are invisible without telescopes. Earth didn't make the cut either, since this one is unique for other reasons. Moon comes before Sun since its effects are much greater: look at the tides.
And that's the truth. Blpphlt.
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Truth: Uranus is (sometimes) visible with the naked eye.
Source: http://www.space.com/22983-see-planet-uranus-night-sky.html [space.com]
Yes, I've read that it's sometimes visible. However, few people will admit to staring at Uranus.
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The size of Pluto has been continuously revised downwards since it was discovered and considered the same size as Mercury (it's bright for its size). Just like Ceres lost its planet designation when it was better measured and it was realized it was one of many objects orbiting in the asteroid belt, so has Pluto.
I really don't understand why it matters, Pluto is still Pluto and lots of things we learned in school turned out to be different then we were taught.
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Re:Me, I'm a "Pluto Truthers are just an AI" (Score:2)
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But they can be harmful. For example, I've become convinced that Trump became obsessed years ago with conspiracy theories and he's now running for president on that...
Please don't confuse mentally handicapped individuals with those suffering from Reality Impairment.
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I think it more likely that Trump discovered "tards will be tards", figured out some ways to capitalize on that, and, since he is clearly without ethical encumbrances, is taking advantage of the Republican idjits to push his own agenda fast, far, and furiously.
He is a masterful tard manipulator. That's dangerous.
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That's what THEY want you to do. Medicate so that you can no longer sense what they're up to. Big Pharma is in on this as well.
(Yes of course I am kidding. Or am I?)
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Actually it's a preemptive operation from NASA to discredit the real Pluto-truthers before they rise up.