How Do We Know the Moon Landing Happened?

(Continuing the thought.)

A quick brain-storming of "How do I know?"

* Events transmitted by video by hoards of people who have a sincere interest in the event are basically trustworthy.
* When there are society-wide efforts, the multi-person apparatus is trustworthy.
* When things are in line with science, and unquestioned by science, they are basically trustworthy.

One pattern is multiplicity: How many different people are reporting the thing?

Another pattern is size: How many people are involved in the thing? Probably 1,000s of scientists, and in larger aggregate, including foundational work (manufacturing, base research, component part design,) probably includes some 100,000's, if not a million people.

So ripples from the activity make it across all these different vehicles.

Then there is the neurology, and then there is the social trust.

It is possible that as an event gains sufficient size, then the social trust involved establishes solid lines rather than dotted lines. People somehow intuit and recognize that they do not need to guess: They just know. This may be connected with what people call "signals of authenticity."

For example, if someone reports, "Hey, my dad worked on the shuttle," then that is a signal of authenticity. If someone reports, "Hey, my dad is a scientist, and he trusts these people and they take their work very seriously," then that is a signal of authenticity.

I would factor in also practical understanding that we garner from our own lives -- working in solid organizations (and encountering "doubters" outside, questioning our every move,) -- working in relationships (and having had a "doubter" question our characters every inch along the way, convinced that our intentions are evil,) -- and even, in some cases, having tried to "pull one over" on people, and having seen how difficult it can be (Lincoln: "You can fool some people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all of the time") -- I think it develops into a sense that recognizes just how impossibly huge an effort to, say, fake the moon landings would have to be, and how the sheer size of that endeavor would clearly blow up the effort. That is: If you have a secret service military of 1,000,000 people who are trying to be really clever and do all these things to dupe all these people, as required by the conspiracy, -- then there is just no way of hiding it, save by extraordinary crazy conspiracy theory (for example: "What if there were super-computers from the future present in the past, and they were producing holograms of all the different people?").

So the idea is to take all these ideas about: "How do we know?", reasons ranging from the material (physical evidence, film footage, seeing the equipment on the telescope today,) to the intellectual ("how many people would it take to carry out a conspiracy like this?",) and then you have a way of explaining your line of confidence that will be difficult for reasonable people to shake.

Unreasonable people -- people who do not have or will not exercise the capacity to reason -- well, you just can't do anything to convince them; Your task there is mainly (then) to calm them down, address basic questions about trust, to develop some basic confidence in their powers and their mind, so that they can then find a stable place of reason to reason from.

Let's see...

So these people shoot a science fiction movie, and never realize that the moon landing footage going over the air is the same as what they themselves filmed?

Somehow, all of them missed it?

Now -- did they film this before the landing, or during the landing?

Because if they did it beforehand, how do they handle all the communications with mission control?

That is -- mission control asks questions from Earth, and gets responses from space -- so: How was that worked out? Was mission control prompted exactly what to say, when?

So now you have not only politicians, astronauts, and a film crew, but also mission control in on the hoax.

OK -- what about all those other scientists and engineers in mission control? People in organizations aren't there for no reason: They're there for questions, answers, emergencies, and so on. What do they do when their interactions with the people on the phone don't match? They ask a question, but the guy with the phone doesn't address it at all, because he's following a script. And they look at him, and he just shrugs, and says something totally non-sequiter?

So now we have to put more of the organization, the entire mission control room, into the hoax fold.

Now, the spaceships are being tracked, in terms of position. There's all the electronics, readouts, boards being updated, etc.,.

Where's the spaceship, if it's not on the moon? Is it orbiting the Earth still? Is it orbiting the moon? Where's it parked?

So, you've got to conceal wherever it's really parked, and you have to run an operation to make sure that it's really okay. I mean, it's no use if the astronauts all come back dead, right? Because of some situation in space, right? So is there a shadow NASA, that's running all the real ops for the position of the spacecraft, and crew support, etc.,. ..? Or are the astronauts just abandoned up there, not really in communication with anyone on the ground?

How many people make up the shadow organization?

When they need up-to-date information on some part of the ship, or some figure, or some detail on how some piece of machinery works, or whatever support question astronauts have -- how do they phone in to the real NASA ground support crew, or the real people who worked on the ship? Are they getting phone calls from who knows where, and just answering them willy nilly? Or perhaps there is a whole section of NASA that runs shadow wiring, and taps it in?

Do you see how it's just logistically enormous to pull off a hoax of this type?

Just look at all the various roles it takes to get a spaceship up in the air, supported, and then in return. Look at how huge the infrastructure is. You have to hide this massive altercation, from buildings, with staff, with janitors, with all sorts of things. You have to write hardware and software architectures that have all these switches in them.

It's insanely huge.

Let's go back to the film crew. How are they silenced? Or did they just never notice, in their entire life, that "hey, we filmed the moon landing" ..?

Who cooked all the books on voice protocol for them?

And what about the mission to put the mirror on the moon -- when was that coordinated, and what launch mission had that surreptitiously put into it? And how were all those people kept silent?

Take any part of this, and you see how extraordinarily expensive it all would be: economically, politically, tactically, and even morally, to pull off.

Millions of people. Conspiracy kept perfectly under wraps.

Insanity.