Nvidia Sinks Moon Landing Hoax Using Virtual Light 275
schwit1 writes Using its new top-shelf graphics processing unit, Nvidia tackles one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in American history: the veracity of the 1969 to 1972 Apollo moon landings. From the article: "'Global illumination is the hardest task to solve as a game company,' Scott Herkelman, Nvidia's GeForce general manager, said in an interview. 'Virtual point lights don't do a bad job when the environment stays the same, but a game developer has to fake shadows, fake reflections...it's a labor-intensive process.' So when a Nvidia research engineer used the company's new dynamic lighting techniques to show off a side-by-side comparison between an Apollo 11 photo and a GeForce-powered re-creation, the company knew it had a novel demo on its hands. 'We're going to debunk one of the biggest conspiracies in the world,' Herkelman said."
Well, that's how they faked them to begin with (Score:5, Funny)
nVidia technology fell into the past through a wormhole.
Luckily it was properly static-bagged, because it actually went back to 1912 and had to be stored until a computer could be developed to interface to it
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Problem is, technology fast enough to talk to a PCI-Express card wasn't generally available in the 60's. Or 70's. Or probably even 80's. Even with supercomputers of the age.
More likely, nVidia has a wormhole through which they took orders for images to fake, then sent them back into the past.
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No wormholes were necessary, they just used chains of thiotimoline [wikipedia.org] reactions.
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Had to be that - didn't you see the comparison between the real and the generated? That looked a bit TOO close, and we know the second image was faked, so the first one must be too.
PROOF (Score:5, Funny)
That Nvidia is in on the hoax!!!1!!one!!!!
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Screw you. I thought it was funny.
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:^D
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No, they demonstrated that the conspiracy theorists claims that the photograph was fake because there wasn't enough illumination given the position of the sun and lunar module are incorrect. The additional "light source" is the reflection off Armstrong's suit, and not some sound stage. The claim is "there's no possible way this could have happened", and they showed one plausible way, thus negating the assertion.
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I'd mod you up if I had points.
Yes, it is a publicity stunt, and yes, it won't convince people who are invested in the conspiracy theory, and yes, it does not prove the original photo was authentic. But as you said, it does give a plausible explanation for the lighting in the original photo.
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Nonsense? Followers?
These are a bunch of people who debunk claims of supernatural phenomenon which are either:
1) Magic undocumented things, which nobody has been able to prove yet, and for which no physical laws would apply
2) Active scams and hoaxes
Are you suggesting there is some dishonesty in Randi's willingness to give you $10 million dollars if you can give repeatable evidence under contro
pfft. (Score:5, Funny)
as any TRUE audiophile will tell you, the highest-quality fake historic events from the 1960s were done with vacuum tube technology.
high-end graphics card swill lacks the warmth and nuance of a true conspiracy.
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Also, they lack $100 wooden screws to hold the card in for hi-fi magnetic resonance.
Not gonna matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not gonna matter (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just advertising anyway... nVidia doesn't care either.
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True. They are still looking for big foot. LOL!!!
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even if you were to fly them up there, they would find some way to disbelieve it.
If we did that, I think they'd have better stuff to do than create conspiracy theories. Like figure out how to get back for one.
Modern moon surveys prove it was faked (Score:5, Funny)
Look, all you have to do is look at the stills from the recent lunar orbters when taken over several orbits in differing light. You can *clearly* see the remains of the sound stage rigging they left there when they lifted off. None of that stuff was necessary for the landing - they just shot the video with faked effects right there and came back leaving all the video gear. You can't argue with that.
Re:Not gonna matter (Score:5, Insightful)
The best "Proof" I have heard is this.
The Moon landings happened at the height of the cold war. Russian had the ability (and the desire) to monitor the whole thing.
IF a disaster happened you would be assured that Russian would have been broadcasting it quicker than the Americans would have.
IF the moon landings were faked, the Russians would have been there too shouting it out loud and clear for the world to hear, it would have been a huge propaganda coup.
However, to this day nothing has been heard from Russia about the landing being faked.
And the loonies will next say that the Russians were in on the whole thing. The two countries, by engaging in a fake "space race", were able to funnel bazillions of rubles and dollars into their military-industrial complexes, which provided a great way to skim off money^W^W^Wmodernize their economies. And if you ask for proof, they'll say that Obama and Putin are cooperating over the whole Ukraine thing, again for money. And that "isn't it a strange coincidence that since we haven't gone to war over the Ukraine, ebola has suddenly gotten out of control?"
In Soviet Russia, Conspiracy Theorists Moon YOU!
I thought this was long ago debunked (Score:2)
Aren't there still those mirrors on the moon [wikipedia.org] they set up that are reflecting laser light?
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A-ha!
The nVidia rendering surely didn't take the reflection of these mirrors into account when rendering this "proof"!
It is a hoax! q.e.d.
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yep, you could do it with a college HeNe laser and a laptop. (worn that t-shirt, even had the idiot start screaming that I was about to blow up the moon when I fired the laser! (yeah, that bit on TBBT when Penny's BF expressed concern about the safety of the planet and the wisdom of firing a great green laser at the Moon, that shit happens, man)).
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So, your assertion is that either:
1) A retro-reflector naturally formed, is perfectly aligned, and we stumbled on it without having been there and have been able to use it for decades in experiments
2) Aliens placed it on the moon, and we've somehow discovered it's there (again, without having been there), and that it's properly aligned, and have been using it for lunar ranging experiments for the last 45 years or so
You're either good at humor, or terrible at science.
Because the ONLY way there is a retro-r
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This has been debunked dozens, if not hundreds, of times in many different ways. The problem is that the Moon landing conspiracy folks ignore when they're debunked or hand wave it away as just being "part of the conspiracy." You can't actually prove them wrong in their eyes so they'll continue to parrot the same, long-ago debunked "reasons why the Moon landings were faked" while the rest of us groan "not THIS again."
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Unfortunately (er, fortunately?) the Soviets put the same laser reflectors on their unmanned rovers. Conspiracy theorist offer this as "proof" that the reflectors used during the Apollo missions were actually placed there by unmanned missions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
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Aren't there still those mirrors on the moon [wikipedia.org] they set up that are reflecting laser light?
Denier: "It was fake. They used (wait for it) MIRRORS!"
Both deniers and haters have two characteristics in common
If a lot of them sound more than a bit pa
Nvidia sold out. (Score:2)
You can't sink a conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is the same phenomenon that keeps people sending money to the Nigerian scammers. When you've sent $10,000 to the scammers you have two choices:
a) Admit that you were tricked and you've lost $10,000
b) Keep believing that this is real and that this $1,000 you are sending will finally unleash millions of dollars on you.
The deeper you get in, the harder it is to escape by picking A. Conspiracy theorists are very deep (mentally, not monetarily).
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You forgot young earth creationists, probably the most popular conspiracy theory around. Evolution, geology, paleoclimatology, dendrochronology, astronomy, radiocarbon dating, fossil record and probably a dozen other sciences I forget all a hoax. A false flag operation by either god himself as a test of faith or the devil playing tricks, you don't have to go to the 1% nutters - who mostly lack sanity - to find total rejection of evidence, science and logic.
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Yup. They have a special mindset. Reminds me of a podcast of This American Life I heard a few months back:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge
If you listen to Act Three, you hear this in full effect. Bob Berenz the electrician is CONVINCED he has found a problem with the understanding of physics and anyone who tries to prove otherwise is not paying attention to what he says, "doesn't get it" or is in on maintaining the "big science" status quo. The reality
A I recall (Score:5, Funny)
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That event was arguably better than the Eagle landing itself.
That was one medium punch for a man, one giant leap for troll riddance.
What some vids don't show is that Bart kept following and harassing him multiple times before the punch. Buzz would walk somewhere else to avoid him, and Bart would soon follow, sticking the Bible in his face and taunting him. If you didn't see the whole thing, it may look like Buzz was unreasonable. It shows that video
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What some vids don't show is that Bart kept following and harassing him multiple times before the punch. Buzz would walk somewhere else to avoid him, and Bart would soon follow, sticking the Bible in his face and taunting him. If you didn't see the whole thing, it may look like Buzz was unreasonable. It shows that video evidence can strip out context if not complete.
There is actually more to the story than even that. Very soon after it happened, the little fuck sent out his video, in which he challenges Aldrin to swear to the truth of the moon landing, and BOOM, Aldrin punches him. But there were bystanders who also recorded the incident, and all their videos had the little fuck yelling "YOU'R A LIAR AND A COWARD AND", and BOOM, Aldrin punches him. In other words, the little fuck actually edited the video and changed what he was saying in a pathetic attempt to make Ald
I've almost given up on debunking (Score:5, Insightful)
I've almost given up on debunking conspiracy theories. Those who believe in them, BELIEVE in them. It's like trying to debunk somebody's religion.
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The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.
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Interesting indeed. They condense the conspiracy mindset into "motivated skepticism". I have recently thought of it as "jumping the gun gone full tard". I think we all jump to conclusions or fill in the blanks sometimes. The conspiracist, IMHO, just takes normal gun-jumping and blank-filling to the extreme. They hold to the positions into which they've jumped, latch onto jumps made by others, and turn it into a whole new culture. I also can't believe that a certain amount of pride doesn't come in. Te
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I've almost given up on debunking conspiracy theories. Those who believe in them, BELIEVE in them. It's like trying to debunk somebody's religion.
I find they eventually come around to "you're part of the conspiracy..."
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scoreboard (Score:4, Insightful)
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Plus they were afraid that if they exposed the U.S.'s fake moon landing, the U.S. would expose their fake Sputnik. ;-)
Sleight of hand (Score:2)
nVidia clearly wants to distract attention from the true flaw - shadows. Everyone knows there are no shadows in a vacuum.
Maybe this should be posted in alt.folklore.urban?
After all, trolling /. is only slightly harder than rec.org.mensa
Is it healthy or unhealthy for society to have ... (Score:2)
I'm just wondering if when a society has conspiracy theorists speaking out freely, the 'tin hat' crowd, is that the sign of a healthy society or not.
It's bad I suppose when conspiracy theorists are flat out wrong, but would a repressive government try to silence them or do repressive governments only bother suppressing people who are telling the Truth?
Does it do harm in that when somebody really finds something bad going on people will tend to disbelieve them because of all the flakos (sort of like crying w
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If you're talking about the Moon landing conspiracy theorists, it doesn't do much harm. Other conspiracy theorists, though can cause harm. For example, the "vaccines cause autism" folks have convinces a lot of people to skip vaccinations for fear of giving their child autism. Enough people are skipping the vaccinations that herd immunity is breaking down and we're seeing outbreaks of disease. These diseases are hurting and even killing people.* So, yes, some conspiracy theorists are harmless but others
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Stupid (Score:2)
Anyone who takes this seriously is too stupid to take seriously.
It proves the conspiracy theorists right (sort of) (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, the real lede is buried pretty deeply in the article. The light on that particular photo IS anomalous. It sounds as if the conspiracy theorists were right about that, and that's kind of astute.
What's interesting is the resolution of the anomaly: it's light reflected off Neil Armstrong himself. Or rather, his large, bright-white suit. The NVidia guys showed that it reflects enough light to account for the lighting in the picture. If you don't include it, the lighting is off. I think that's pretty cool.
This doesn't, of course, settle anything for the conspiracy nuts, and I fully expect this to prove only that the NASA guys were wily bastards. And that sucks, because it sounds as if the brain power they're applying might well have turned up something more interesting if it weren't fixated on achieving a delusional result.
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Yes, NASA put a lot of effort into making the details perfect enough to remain convincing over four decades later. Maybe it would have been easier to put a man on the moon!
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I'm not sure conspiracy theorists ever got that far in their reasoning. It's always seemed to be enough for them that Aldrin is lit at all, because as we all know, light doesn't reflect in a vacuum. Or it only reflects once. Or something.
Does not matter (Score:2)
Whatever the issue - moon landing, anti-vaxers, Kenyan President. climate change... the deniers will deny.
Science will not change their minds. Evidence will not change their minds. Nothing will.
Ignore them and move on.
I know one... (Score:3)
By the way, he's also into water divining... but that doesn't always work, for some reason. Now, there's a thing...
(Americans - the moon landings were among your finest achievements. In my opinion, history and the human race in general owes you a debt).
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Unfortunately, each one that gets knocked down on its face means it's statistically more likely that the debunkers are right and the theorists wrong. We can go to infinity, but after ten or even 5 assertions wiped out with only basic experimentation, the chances of you having been right in the first place go beyond minuscule.
Scientific principle starts with "here's a hypothesis, does it fit the facts?" and goes BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD whenever any element of it is wrong. Conspiracy theorists just keep on pounding ignoring all their previous incorrect assertions until people get bored dealing with them and then "Ah ha! They won't answer!".
If you were wrong about the shadows, and the film, and the radioactivity, and this, that and the other? Chances are you're wrong about all the other minor crap too. And to prove otherwise requires more than just "it's obvious" or flaws are "too numerous to list".
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:4, Insightful)
"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Exactly. It's essentially whack-a-mole but with paranoid and stupid people.
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All we need is a really big hammer.
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"But what about the..." is a never-ending argument between conspiracy theorists and debunkers.
Exactly. It's essentially whack-a-mole but with paranoid and stupid people.
Absolutely! It's obvious that we went to the moon because that is where we met Aliens for the first time!!!
Re:ya'll a bunch of lazy slobs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually Neil Armstrong never punched anybody he was always known to be a real gentleman and always seemed to live to a very high standard.
Buzz Aldrin is the one that punched the idiot Lunar Loon.
Frankly I am really torn over who, out of the two I admire most.
BTW Adam Curry should never been seen or heard from again in the tech community IMHO.
Re:ya'll a bunch of lazy slobs! (Score:5, Funny)
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Let's all be honest Armstrong should be the ultimate tech poster boy. After walking on the Moon he became a college professor.
Re:ya'll a bunch of lazy slobs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ya'll a bunch of lazy slobs! (Score:5, Funny)
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BTW Adam Curry should never been seen or heard from again in the tech community IMHO.
He's a radio personality and an MTV VJ. What do you expect?
He is, especially with his latest partner John C., far too entertaining to be banned from the "tech community" - even when there are no new phones (and, thus, no "tech news").
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
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What is every idiots answer? "You never know."
Yea they will never know anything of worth.
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
I see conspiracy theorists as an example of believing in a very unlikely scenario to boost your ego.
Suppose for a second that the Moon landing was faked. The level of conspiracy needed to do this and fool most of the people (including the Russians who would have called us out on it had we obviously been filming on a sound stage) would have been massive. You'd need engineers, scientists, government workers, astronauts, etc. All of them dedicated to pretending that we went to the Moon when we didn't. This would have to be a VERY well organized conspiracy. (Which alone should debunk this theory. Government is too inept to pull something like this off.)
Now, your normal person buys into the "faked Moon landing", but you are special. You are more intelligent and perceptive than they are. You see through the conspiracy and spot the flaws. In fact, you are so brilliant that the flaws seem stupidly obvious to you - which only elevates you more above the sheeple who buy the official story.
Of course, this also makes it nearly impossible to have a conspiracy theorist admit that he's been debunked. To admit this, the conspiracy theorist must lower his mental image of himself from "stands tall above all those stupid masses" to "actually a bit below those masses." This is unacceptable so any proof that the conspiracy theorist is wrong is rationalized away as being a) planted by the conspiracy to trick the foolish, b) irrelevant enough to ignore completely, or c) not proof debunking $MOVED_GOAL_POST.
You could load the conspiracy theorists into a rocket, send them to the moon, and they would still claim it was all faked just to preserve their mental image of themselves.
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(including the Russians who would have called us out on it had we obviously been filming on a sound stage
FWIW, most Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that Soviets were in on the scam, either because they were bribed (a common theme claims food shipments were the bribe, thereby "explaining" why the USSR didn't have any more devastating famines),
Re: There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
So, the government is too inept to pull off a hoax of this magnitude, but actually performing the real feat was within its scope of capabilities?
They still had to build the giant rocket and land something on the moon in order for the telemetry to work. So they had all the complexity of building Saturn V and the Apollo stack but in addition they had to seamlessly pull off the greatest hoax in history with the greatest concentration of pedantic nerd geniuses in the world watching.
Apollo succeeded in spite of its failures. The Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 explosion. Apollo 12's repeated lightning strikes and then the astronauts destroying their only video camera, etc etc. All with thousands of experts watching over them. Going back to the various cluster-fucks during Mercury and Gemini when they were trying to learn EVAs and later docking; but they could keep trying until they got it right. And once it was done, it was done. It didn't matter if new people came in and went through the archives, didn't matter if people looked at the hardware. There was nothing to hide.
A giant conspiracy to fake the moon landings had to get everything right the first time, with a skeleton crew, and it was not only vulnerable to a single major leak or screw-up at the time, it has continued to be vulnerable for 50 years. The hoaxers can never stop the cover-up.
For example, the LRO imaged the Apollo landing sites [nasa.gov], showing tracks and vehicles. Was that faked? A brand new cover-up during the LRO program, adding a whole new conspiracy they had to seamlessly pull of under the noses of the LRO science team, and then keep secret forever.
And each layer of cover-up adds more things to go wrong, more people able to leak now or in the future. With every single person involved, every astronaut and technician, knowing that they are sitting on the greatest secret in history. It just needs one person, diagnosed with terminal cancer, conscience, or greed, to say, "Fuck it..."
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The idea that you can topple the prima causa by attacking the conclusions is n
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Unfortunately, each one that gets knocked down on its face means it's statistically more likely that the debunkers are right and the theorists wrong. We can go to infinity, but after ten or even 5 assertions wiped out with only basic experimentation, the chances of you having been right in the first place go beyond minuscule.
The problem is that conspiracy nuts don't understand statistics, or science. They are always asking for "proof" or "certainty" and in the the face of its lack they default to their own crazy idea.
But knowledge is not certain: it can always be updated in the face of new (possibly currently-unimaginable) evidence. So science, which creates knowledge, cannot create certainty of any kind. Not even falsification is certain, and people who ask for certainty are like alchemists of old, who rejected mere chemistry
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You get the same thing with the anti-vaccine folks who either move their goal posts constantly as to why "vaccines cause autism" (mercury, # of shots, mysterious unnamed "toxins") despite tons of studies proving that this isn't true. They've taken to claiming that they are pro-vaccine but simply want all vaccines removed from the market until they are 100% safe with no side effects. If we required this of all medicine, we would need to recall every single medical treatment there is. They don't seem to un
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
Obligatory plug: my wife was the final segment of the 2008 Mythbusters episode that explored that myth, she bounces a laser off the moon shot through a 3.5 meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory. There are five retroreflectors on the moon, three from Apollo and two on Russian Lunokhod rovers, and there's a clear signal difference between hitting a reflector and bouncing off the bare lunar surface. I also did a ten minute video on this program at waynewestphotography dot com.
Of course, this just means that some incredible hackers were able to fool the software that my wife uses to show different results while the laser is shining, depending upon where the laser is pointed. The Apollo laser reflectors were aimed specifically at the Earth, the Russian ones are quasi-random as there was no way to know where the rovers' batteries would fail, so their final orientation is not known and produces a noticeably weaker signal.
Take 2:That's one small step for _A_ man, one g... (Score:3)
Moon landing take 2: Ok Neil, but this time you need to say, "One step for A man... one giant leap for mankind." Don't flub your line or "One small step fur man" will be in the history books.
911 Conspiracy take 2: The first take was Ok but we need to swap out the Saudis and Egyptian hijackers. You guys are supposed to be our allies. Can we get at least one Iranian, Iraqi or Afghani hijackers? How the heck are we gonna start a war? How about a North Korean?
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Informative)
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uh... no you couldn't, the angular resolution of even the largest telescopes coupled with elementary physics would prove that.
The best you could ever hope for is catching a shadow on the terminator straight across the centreline of a pixel.
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Funny)
uh... no you couldn't, the angular resolution of even the largest telescopes coupled with elementary physics would prove that.
And even if we could, say via a flyby with a satellite or some futuristic hubble 2.0... the only people who could afford such a 'telescope' would clearly be in on the hoax, so you can't trust them.
The only solution is to take the hoaxers and send them to the moon to see it first hand with their own eyes. Something I am entirely in favor of.
If that doesn't convince them, fine, this wasn't really for them, it was for me. And I was satisfied the minute they were out of earths orbit and don't see any reason why we should bring them back.
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Pitch it as a reality show ("Utopia: Moon") and you can probably get funding :)
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The Moon Landing deniers will be forced to live on a crashed rocket on the Moon. Naturally, they will deny that they are on the Moon. As they accept that they are actually on the Moon, they'll be kicked off of Utopia: Moon (sent via rocket back to Earth). The last one to deny he/she is on the Moon wins!*
* First prize is absolute proof that you are on the Moon via the opening of an air lock.
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If you want to help fight the conspirationists, it would help if you could stop using bullshit arguments.
http://curious.astro.cornell.e... [cornell.edu]
You'd need a 25m telescope to see the lander base being represented by 1 pixel.
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, this old idiocy? Even during the first moon landing when I was only 5 I heard Walter Cronkite explain about the stiff wires holding the flag out.
Dude, you are dumber than a 5 year old.
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And there is tension and torsion in the metal frame that holds up the flag, because with (as you mention) no breeze, they needed something else to hold it out. Because of the tension and torsion, the supporting arm vibrated a little at first, like a spring, and that makes waves in the flag material. They'll fade out eventually from friction, but if you already have the shot, well, there they are.
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And there is tension and torsion in the metal frame that holds up the flag, because with (as you mention) no breeze, they needed something else to hold it out. Because of the tension and torsion, the supporting arm vibrated a little at first, like a spring, and that makes waves in the flag material.
In fact, if you've ever done the high-school physics experiment where you generate a standing wave in a tray of water... If you compare the motion of the flag in the video to a flag fluttering in the breeze vs a standing wave, it's blindingly obvious that what you're watching in the video of the flag on the moon is a standing wave. The two motions are quite different and easy to tell apart.
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What's amazing to me is that you believe an indoor breeze can fly a flag.
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In addition to all the above, how does "a photograph" show fluttering?
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You photoshop it, of course.
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Funny)
An animated GIF?
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In addition to all the above, how does "a photograph" show fluttering?
Well, there's actually video; the conspiracy dumbass either misspoke when he called it a photograph, or he's actually seen a still photo with wrinkles in the flag and assumed it was fluttering. Either way, there's video, and the flag is obviously not "fluttering in the breeze" in any normal way--in fact, if you know what a standing wave looks like, that's exactly what it's doing in the video...
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gr8 b8 m8! Caught some fish with that one!
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Note: just pointing out the flaw in the argument, not participating in the hoaxer camp.
Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
Go ahead. List them. I guarantee you there is an answer to every single one of them that doesn't involve a worldwide conspiracy.
Conspiracies do happen. But if you want to prove one happened, you need to a) identify all the conspirators, and b) identify their goal. If you just handwave the former as "oh, it was the government" or invent or co-opt some secret society that ran it, you're not doing an investigation, you're creating a cult. If you just handwave the latter as "oh, it was to prove that they had control of the planet" or some other vague goal, your rantings have no more weight than the average paranoid schizophrenics. Specific members. Specific goals. Can you do that?
Conspiracies that actually happened can easily meet those. The Gunpowder Plot? We know every member of the conspiracy, and their goals, while unlikely to be achieved, were realistic and real. Same for dozens, even hundreds of other actual conspiracies, from the Reichstag Burning to everyday criminal plots.
If you agree that those two conditions must be met to even consider a conspiracy theory plausible, I can disprove the Moon Hoax Theories right here, right now. Two words: Soviet Union.
They had the tech to put stuff into space (we're still using it). They launched probe after probe to the Moon. They had the means to monitor our launches and our communications (during Apollo 13, they made a gesture of ordering their people off any frequencies near the NASA ones, to prevent any interference). In short, if it were faked, the Soviets would have known. Why, then, would they have remained silent? Unless they were "in" on the conspiracy, they would not have.
What possible conspiracy could have counted both sides of the Cold War among their conspirators? What possible goal could they have had that would have justified it not just to the Americans, but to their mortal enemies? The purpose of the conspiracy, as most tell it, was to cheat at the space race and win it for America. Why would the USSR go along with it? What did they gain from it that was worth so much of a loss?
I can come up with nothing that can explain Soviet participation in this conspiracy. And so I am forced to conclude that the initial premise was wrong - the moon landings happened, as supported by literal tons of evidence.
Interestingly, if you theorize that Soviets started to spread lies and misinformation that the Apollo landings were faked, to reduce American prestige and regain their own, you can easily meet both the two conditions I had for a plausible conspiracy theory. They had the means - it's simple propaganda, through word-of-mouth. Get it started and the paranoid will parrot it for you. They had the motivation, obviously enough. This isn't proof that it did happen that way, of course, but it's a much more plausible theory than the one you subscribe to.
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Myself, I don't believe that WWII ever happened. I mean seriously, I'm supposed to believe radar, jet aircraft, computers, encryption, proximity fuzes, voice encryption and nuclear bombs were all invented in less than a decade?
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Pretty much all the lighting aspects can explained by someone who has a background in photography. Some of them are just basic sense. For example, you can't see stars in the photos because of light exposure. It's why you can't see stars in the daylight here on Earth. It's why visible light telescopes are located away from cities. Other aspects can be explained away with someone with knowledge about the subject.
Hoaxers also seem to disregards factors like budget and logistics and like to twist things. Today
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It's why you can't see stars in the daylight here on Earth.
Is it? I thought it was because the daylight completely drowns out the miniscule amount of light from the stars, not that the exposure is way off.
You could have opened the shutter or extended the exposure on the Moon and seen some stars, but you couldn't do that during daytime on Earth.
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...but I agree that there are numerous other bizarre factors that may point to conspiracy...
No, there are not. None whatsoever. All of the "other bizarre factors" are equally as ridiculous.
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Like the aliens that Armstrong saw?
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Please, provide a few of those "bizarre factors". Your own listing, and not a link to a time cube site, please. It would be interesting to see what it takes to convince you.
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And they did a pretty thorough job too, going through most of the major conspiracy allegations one-by-one.
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Almost. He discovers the shadow which is in the recording, then has the computer extrapolate the shape of the object that cast the shadow.