So it’s been a week now since time began, what have you been doing since the dawn of time?
Oh you didn’t know; time only began last Thursday.
I know it sounds a bit mental, but can you prove me wrong?
It may seem unbelievable, but can you honestly say that it’s not theoretically possible that everything and everyone you’ve ever known, your memories, possessions and the universe itself didn’t just spontaneously pop into existence this last Thursday?
It may seem unbelievable, but can you honestly say that it’s not theoretically possible that everything and everyone you’ve ever known, your memories, possessions and the universe itself didn’t just spontaneously pop into existence this last Thursday?
You have memories before last Thursday, sure, but how could you prove that all those memories didn’t come into existence in their current state at the time of creation, which was, of course, last Thursday?
This is called “Last Thursdayism” and there’s a group of people who honestly believe that the world came into existence last Thursday.
Those people have taken it a little too seriously, but at it’s core its simply a thought exercise.
Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure, like most people are that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, except these people.
But it’s interesting to think about isn’t it because Last Thursdayism is impossible to prove wrong.
It doesn’t matter what piece of evidence you come up with, no matter how clever or complex it may be, it can simply be explained away by saying “yeah, but that evidence only came into existence last Thursday”.
If the research is to be believed, then roughly 25% of Americans believe that the Apollo 11 moon landings were faked.
Detractors cite apparent evidence such as the American flag was waving in the footage, but how could it do so when there is no wind on the moon?
Apparently the whole thing was filmed in a specially-built sound-stage in Huntsville, Alabama.
All meticulously directed by Stanley Kubrick.
They also filmed the Apollo 12 mission whilst they were at it; well they had paid for the studio time so they didn’t want to waste it.
The low gravity scenes were faked using hidden cables to hoist the actors into the air.
And apparently the film has been slowed down to add to the low-gravity effect, if you speed up the footage by 2.5 times it shows the astronauts walking at a pace that would be normal for Earth’s gravity field.
Conspiracists also argue that no stars are visible in the sky.
Considering that the moon’s atmosphere is nowhere near as thick and viscous and Earth’s it wouldn’t block any light and when standing on the moon, every star should be visible.
NASA’s excuse was simply that the low quality of the photography washes out the stars in the final image.
But some of the photographs taken were of a higher quality, yet there were still no stars and much lower quality images have been taken from Earth that show stars in the sky.
And then there’s this famous image, taken by Apollo 11 astronauts, showing a moon rock, but there’s a letter C imprinted on it, as if it’s a marker for a studio prop, eerie.
Well there you go the moon landing was obviously faked, or was it?
No, just no.
It feels enticingly romantic to believe in a conspiracy theory of this magnitude.
The idea that the US government is hiding such an enormous secret from us seems so much more interesting than the reality that we have created the technology to reach the moon and passed every, scientific, mathematical and biological barrier required to do so.
That should be the real story here, but conspiracy theories are simply “sexier” that physics.
So who am I to definitively say the landings were not faked?
Well an argument should only remain an argument until evidence presents itself on one side or the other, that is absolutely irrefutable, under sufficient scrutiny.
If a piece of evidence cannot be disproven, then we simply must submit to and accept it.
Until a time comes, if it does, when that evidence can be disproven.
What am I talking about?
I’m talking about what Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin left behind, when they visited that lump of rock out in space.
An hour before they finished their final spacewalk on the Moon’s surface, they left a mirror on the ground, but not just any mirror, a retroreflector.
A normal reflector returns any light at an angle exactly equal to the angle the light hit it at.
A retroreflector always returns the light exactly to the source.
You’ll need a megawatt laser, but if you shine a laser powerful enough at the exact spot on the moon where the retroreflector was placed.
And if you were to set up a detector powerful enough to detect the returning photons, you can actually detect the laser being reflected back at planet Earth from the moon.
Nothing in nature has the reflective properties to return a laser all the way back to Earth.
Therefore, there has to be a manmade object on the moon, placed there by somebody.
This experiment has been successfully carried out many times, with the same positive results.
No stars were visible because the astronauts were exposing for the light areas of the frame, the astronauts in the foreground.
If they had have exposed for the blackness of space, the foreground would have been blown out with white.
Dynamic range wasn’t as good back then as it is today, that’s just basic photography.
There’s also the fact that the special effects technology required to fake a moon landing did not exist in 1969, it just didn’t.
Nowadays it would be a breeze, but in a strange irony, in 1969 the human race had invented the technology to travel through outer space and land on foreign bodies yet we didn’t
have the technology to realistically fake it.
CGI wasn’t first used in film until 5 years later in the 1973 film Westworld.
But forget CGI, the fake footage would have had to been shot by Mr Kubrick and co on a high speed film camera, so the footage could then be slowed down by 2.5 times to imitate the Moon’s gravitational field.
But here’s the thing, high speed film cameras didn’t even exist in 1969.
The technology wasn’t there.
It’s one thing shooting film at 30fps, but shooting at 60fps or above is a whole other beast technologically.
To put things into perspective, the 1969 Apollo 11 mission was shot on a 10 fps film camera, that’s how far off the technology was.
NASA may be very smart but they didn’t have technology from the future.
Over six Apollo missions, 382 kilograms of moon rocks, pebbles and soil samples were collected and brought back to Earth.
Totaling 2,200 samples, many of which were distributed to scientists, universities and research centres all over the world, including Russia, yes America gave lunar samples to
their, at the time direct enemy.
Did Russia examine the rocks and announce that they were simply Earth rocks, accusing NASA of not actually going to the moon?
No, and if anyone had a motive to disprove the moon landings it was Russia.
But what about America’s number one conspiracy theory?
That the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.
Polls show that 54% of Americans believe that 9/11 was orchestrated by the American government themselves.
They accuse the government of staging the attacks to provide the grounds for military strikes in the Middle East.
And the conspiracists have a handful of really solid and rather convincing pieces of evidence that supports their theory.
And of course there’s the old “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” chestnut.
Roughly an hour after the two planes hit the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, both towers collapsed in seconds.
But the way in which they collapsed was peculiar, they collapsed inwards and fell straight down in a perfectly vertical fashion, almost as if it was caused by a controlled demolition, using a series of well placed thermite explosives inside the buildings.
Many argue that the temperatures at which jet fuel burns are nowhere near high enough to melt the structural steel beams that kept the towers standing.
Also many eyewitnesses, survivors and emergency services who were in the tower just before it collapsed have reported experiencing explosions seconds before the building fell.
So did the US government plant bombs inside the building beforehand to try and pass off a controlled demolition as the result of a terrorist attack?
Even WTC building 7 which was not hit by a plane, collapsed a few hours after the attack.
The only damage it sustained was from debris falling from the twin towers, yet this small amount of debris somehow managed to level a steel frame structure.
Towers 3, 4, 5 and 6 received far more damage from falling debris, yet their structures remained intact.
In February 2005 a fire started in the Windsor tower in Madrid, Spain, engulfing the entire building in flames.
The fire burnt for 24 hours before it was extinguished, yet it didn’t collapse, it had to be demolished afterwards.
So how come some relatively small office fires brought down WTC 7?
Then there are several other major problems.
America has the largest and one of the most sophisticated air forces in the world, their F-15 fighter jets can fly at a staggering 3,000 km/h.
The maximum speed of the Boeing 757 passenger jets that were hijacked is 980 km/h.
And these huge jumbo jets are not exactly stealthy, they were flying through some of the world’s most restricted airspace, vastly off their original course, for up to and hour and a half.
That kind of behavior doesn’t go unnoticed by air traffic control.
Yet on the day, the F-15 combat jets, capable of striking targets the size of a coin from miles away, using laser guided missiles, failed to intercept and stop any of the four hijacked
planes used in the attacks.
Not only were the fighter jets scrambled far too late but many think that they were actually told to stand down and do nothing, whilst the attacks unfolded, unimpeded by the military.
The first and second attacks on the twin towers happened earlier in the day, but a full one hour and 45 minutes passed between when the first plane hit the first tower and when flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
Many people believe there was ample time for military jets to intercept and shoot down that plane, if they were given the correct orders, at the correct time, which they weren’t.
I mean it’s not as if this third rogue, hijacked plane’s intentions weren’t known, the attack on New York City had been broadcast on every major news station for almost two
hours by this point, so it’s inexcusable for the government and military to let the third attack happen.
But speak to anyone in the world about 9/11 and everybody has their own version of what they believed happened that day and why.
If you want to dive even deeper then the conspiracies get even more far fetched, there’s a large group of people who believe there were no planes that day.
Yes, that’s right no planes, they insist what we all saw hit the second tower on television, was in fact CGI.
I’ll go no further on that.
But for every conspiracist out there, there’s someone willing to argue against them and for every piece of evidence that it was an inside job there’s an equal and opposite piece of evidence suggesting it was a genuine terrorist attack.
I’m not here to try and persuade you one way or the other, there is substantial evidence out there on both sides of the fence and in truth, to this very day, nobody apart from a select few, knows who was behind the tragedies that day.
But what I do find interesting is why so many millions of people do vehemently believe in conspiracy theories.
Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just ignore the shady irregularities and accept what the media tells us?
Or maybe it isn’t, in fact I think it’s quite the opposite.
It’s far easier and more tantilising to believe in stories than the truth.
The truth requires extensive, dedicated research.
Whereas all it takes for us to believe in conspiracies is a few pictures taken in the wrong light or Chinese whispers from a guy who works at the mall, who knows a woman who once dated a man who worked for the CIA.
It’s just easier, not to mention far more interesting.
But what’s the psychology behind this, why do people so readily rebel against authority and are so eager to believe in a good old conspiracy?
Maslow’s Heirachy of Needs was created by Psychologist Abraham Maslow, it depicts the five goals that every human must satisfy to achieve happiness and life satisfaction.
It starts with the most fundamental needs and each level of the pyramid must be satisfied before you can pursue the next level.
Physiological needs are the most important, such as breathing, food, water, sex and sleep.
And next is safety, it says a lot that the most important of our basic needs after sleep, food and drink is safety.
We must feel like we’re not in danger and our brains know it.
Whenever a catastrophe happens our first thought is of our own safety and then the safety of our loved ones.
After the event has passes our brains scramble to try and find a reason, a cause and a perpetrator behind the event.
We are unable to relax until we know the exact people and chain of events that led up to the disaster and that’s because our brains seek comfort and security.
When our brain experiences fear our amygdala is activated which in turn activates the parts of our brain that process information, this is our brain responding to the fear by attempting to figure out why the bad thing happened.
It unnerves our most primitive psychological needs to think that the world is entirely chaotic and random and at any moment something terrible could happen that effects us, outbreak of war, terrorist attack or a leader being assassinated.
The idea that there is no order or structure behind all of this and it is just the random whims of the global machine that is planet Earth, is a truly terrifying thought to most people.
Many people would rather believe that an evil overlord or an omnipotent shady cabal is running the scene, and orchestrating everything like a gigantic theatre play, even if they are lizard men.
It doesn’t matter because it makes us feel secure, and comforted.
There is certainly a morbid security in the knowledge that if something terrible happens at least someone with a modicum of stability is behind it and it’s not just caused by random number generation or a rogue group of religious extremists who can’t be controlled.
And that’s why we believe in conspiracy theories, because it gives us a reason, an outlet to blame things upon, it fulfills our basic need for safety in a really messed up way.
At some point most of us have believed in a conspiracy theory in a casual manner, not really giving it too much thought.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, because some of them have turned out to be correct, we’re not always crazy, remember Watergate and MK-ULTRA?
People sounded crazy believing these things happened, and then the truth was revealed; the people were right all along.
But then there’s the other end of the scale that goes beyond rational-thinking.
We all know of or have encountered at least one “hardcore conspiracy nut” who believes that the world is run by a race of shape-shifting illuminati lizard people who faked the moon
landing and the 9/11 attacks whilst simultaneously hiding a master race of aliens at area 51 and controlling all our minds with chemtrails and fluoride in the water, so they can start a new world order, in which Kanye West is president and we’re all tracked by microscopic computer chips inserted into us via vaccines.
What drives someone to be so certain in these rather outlandish beliefs?
The dangerous thing about strongly believing in a conspiracy theory is that it slowly shuts down your pragmatic thinking.
And information or evidence which contradicts a conspiracy theory can simply be explained as part of the conspiracy.
“Oh so you think they left mirrors on the moon, that’s what they want us to think dude”.
It’s called the backfire effect and it’s the process that when people are given evidence against their strongly-held beliefs they instantly reject the evidence and believe in that thing
more strongly.
Religious people are experts at this, but we won’t go into that.
The more people argue with conspiracy theorists the more strongly they believe their conspiracy, it’s a vicious cycle and research has shown that if you believe in one conspiracy theory you’re significantly more likely to believe in others.
But many conspiracies from history have turned out to be completely true and who knows what document will be leaked tomorrow or the next day, proving a conspiracy to be true that sounded wildly unbelievable.
Curiosity may have killed the cat but all the other cats certainly paid attention.
Thanks for reading.
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