It always struck me as a really nice response to anyone being silly about fake landings.
It always struck me as a really nice response to anyone being silly about fake landings.
NOTE: these were taken from lunar orbit, not earth-based telescopes.
(shadow) https://www.space.com/6997-photos-reveal-apollo-11-moon-land...
(large-ish, descent stage, rover tracks) https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/584392main_M...
It's really hard to estimate how long the hardware might last. Obviously there's no air or water, but there will be damage from radiation, temperature cycling, and micrometeorite abrasion.
A wild guess would be a similar timescale - max 100 million years, at which point there will be small anomalous piles of metal dust left, but no visible structure.
(But that's just a guess, and could be way out.)
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.htm...
Given the etymology of that word, that's a deliciously ironic sentence :)
"Fuck you beliefs" are a personal theory of mine. People sometimes assume ridiculous and deliberately provocative "beliefs" as a means of explicit rejection of a social order. The canonical example would be Satanism as a rejection of Christian culture/society. Believing Apollo is a hoax or that the Earth is flat is an explicit rejection of the industrial/scientific/corporate/university complex and its culture. The absurdity of these beliefs adds to their value as acts of protest. The phenomenon can also take the form of refusal to believe something taught by the hated authority. If the belief being refused is actually true and demonstrably so, it becomes a more potent act of protest.
Talk to the people that hold beliefs like the Apollo hoax and scratch the surface and you'll usually find someone who is under-employed in a dead-end job with no future and too much student loan debt. They are adopting an absurdist epistemology in protest of a society that they see as having failed them.
When I see conspiracy theories becoming popular I see a metaphysical and epistemological version of people throwing Molotov cocktails in the street at cops in riot gear under clouds of tear gas. Maybe this is what mass protests and "riots in the street" look like in the Information Age.
Maybe they should do actual protests and "riots in the street" then, instead of trying their best to be tagged as loonies :^).