In honor of my stay in the United States, I thought I would share a blog I read by Jules Stark about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. If I’m being honest, I’ve always been a little bit of a space nerd. I just find the idea of space and everything that’s out there absolutely fascinating, so I was super excited to read Jules’ post. The whole conspiracy theory with the Apollo 11 moon landing is whether or not it ever really happened. It seems crazy that something that went down in history could actually be a hoax, but there are lots of different arguments that point fingers to both sides.
Jules starts by giving some background to Apollo 11. For those of you who don’t know, this all started with the “space race between the US and the Soviet Union. Basically, it was a race to see which country could make it to the moon first. Since then, there has been a plethora of accusations that the US never actually made it to the moon, and its all a hoax. As I said before, I believe that the Apollo 11 moon landing did indeed happen, but Jules brings up some examples of why people believed it was all a hoax.
Jules talks about scientist, Bill Kaysing, and how he thought the odds of a successful moon landing were only at 0.01%. He even continues to say how he thought it would be easier to fake it under heavy surveillance, than making it to the moon. After a small amount of research, its safe to say that his claim is false, but it opens up a conversation about how to learn the truth amid numerous claims.
Another accusation made by the public, is that the photo documentation looks suspicious. Whether it has to do with the shadows or any other minute details in the pictures, they have lent themselves to be quite the detectives. A good rebuttal to this suspicion is that technology is always changing. The technology used to snap these photos are less advanced then the devices we use now. The outdated technology could have easily left strange marks that led to suspicion of the real event.
I really liked the point that Jules made about not making a decision based off of one opinion. No matter how compelling the argument is, it’s not enough to come to a well thought-out conclusion. She compared scientific lab experiments to investigations, and I thought it was a really solid simile. When you do an experiment, you do it over and over again to get a consistent result, and the same should go for investigation. “This ensures that the results are not due to an error in the method or some fluke, but rather a reproducible trend.”.
Around the World with Jess 