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Offline WellRoundedIndividual

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  • Proverbs 13:20 is extremely relevant today.
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Oh it is very likely that they were able to determine the failure. Its rather simple, actually. When attending college for engineering, you take a course on failure analysis. You are able to determine with some probability the mode of failure on all sorts of stuff. As long as you know the material of the objects at hand, and you are intelligent enough to look up the properties of said material in an engineering handbook, such as Young's modulus. You can then analyze which object failed first based on material properties, dimensions of the object, and inspecting the failure site (the point on the object where it tore, etc). Probable cause of failure means that the sequence of events that lead to the failure are not completely certain so there are more than just one mitigating factor that led to the failure and therefore the most likely of the culprits is therefore determined to be the cause of failure.

Please refrain from talking about failure analysis if you don't understand the principles behind it.
BobLawBlah.

SeaCritique

Agreed. In the same way that it's a big leap from a seven year old boy making a paper plane to an A380 flying hundreds of people around the world with every seat having an entertainment system with a wide selection of movies, TV, games and music. Comfortable seats and bathrooms, hot food. On board Wi-fi. Flat beds and showers in business class.
That is a big leap, but like most advances in technology it was made as a series of "small steps for man", not one "giant leap for mankind".

I think we, first, need to quantify a "big leap."

The space race was initially motivated by political one-upmanship. But because of that they'd have surely been very keen to call the other side out of they could show the other side was faking it. It's notable that neither side did. What is to gain from ongoing things like the ISS? What is to gain from a permanent base at the South Pole? Or from people keep climbing Everest. As a species there's something in us which wants to explore, wants to learn more.

No, because doing so would've negatively-impacted morale. Both sides -- the two atomic superpowers -- would've been failures had they called each other out.

The ISS, in lieu of "Moon missions" and other, more publicized "rocket launches," is a symbol of hope. It's good for morale that, high above us in the sky, a small-from-here light can be seen by third-graders at summer camps everywhere passing over head with astronauts and scientists from different countries. That's how the story goes.

The permanent base at the South Pole is likely investigating into the Ice Wall and, perhaps, what lies beyond it. Maybe the scientists stationed there don't even realize Antarctica is an Ice Wall due to easy access points and misinformation.

I don't see what Everest has to do with anything, but yes, people have a natural inclination to be curious and explore.
« Last Edit: March 15, 2019, 02:00:47 PM by SeaCritique »

There was a paragraph before the one you quoted:

"The most commonly accepted explanation of this is that the space agencies of the world are involved in a conspiracy faking space travel and exploration. This likely began during the Cold War's 'Space Race', in which the USSR and USA were obsessed with beating each other into space to the point that each faked their accomplishments in an attempt to keep pace with the other's supposed achievements. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the conspiracy is most likely motivated by greed rather than political gains, and using only some of their funding to continue to fake space travel saves a lot of money to embezzle for themselves."

Personally, I doubt the validity of any space program.

My 8th graders have determined that you are using the Burden of Proof logical fallacy.  It must be very convenient to scream CONSPIRACY, when you have NO supporting evidence.  Just saying Conspiracy is evidence of nothing.

SeaCritique

My 8th graders have determined that you are using the Burden of Proof logical fallacy.  It must be very convenient to scream CONSPIRACY, when you have NO supporting evidence.  Just saying Conspiracy is evidence of nothing.

I disagree with their assessment of the burden of proof.

Huh, no supporting evidence? Start here. For a supposed teacher, you sure are bad at performing research. As well, I'd recommend dropping the combative tone -- that is, assuming you actually want us to respond to you. Either that or you just want to put us down.
« Last Edit: March 16, 2019, 02:41:16 AM by SeaCritique »

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Offline AATW

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My 8th graders have determined that you are using the Burden of Proof logical fallacy.
I humbly disagree with your 8th graders.
NASA are claiming they have landed on the moon. It’s a pretty extraordinary claim and the burden of proof is on them.
BUT, what SeaCritique is doing is operating in the sceptical context. More info here:

http://theconversation.com/how-to-reason-with-flat-earthers-it-may-not-help-though-95160

How do we know they went to the moon?
Well, 12 astronauts walked on the moon, most of them are still alive and none have ever confessed to fakery.
Ok, but they all could be lying as could all the people in mission control etc (although I guess those people could have been fooled, they might not have had to be “in on it”.)
But the whole thing is all on film, we have countless photos, hours of film footage of the Apollo missions.
But those could all be fake (you then get into sub arguments about shadow angles, flapping flags etc).
But they brought back lots of samples of moon rock.
Those could be from anywhere (from what I understand the rocks being on the moon and so in a vacuum for billions of years does actually make them distinct from earth rock, but that’s beyond my knowledge)
But the Russians were tracking them and they never called the Americans out on the fakery.
Maybe they were fooled too, or they knew that exposing the US would implicate themselves and their own fake space programs.
We could go on and on. The amateurs who tracked the Apollo missions, the fact Australia relayed signals to the moon, that recent missions launched by other counties have produced photos at high enough resolutions to see the original landing sites - the tracks of the lunar rover are clearly visible.
Every piece of evidence can be dismissed as fake or wrong or whatever.
If you operate in the sceptical context then you can refuse to believe anything which doesn’t fit your world view. FE does this with the moon landings and have to extend it to satellites and all space travel despite the number of people, countries and private countries involved and the fact that the technologies which use satellites demonstrably work.
The FE trick is to operate in this context selectively. Notice how things which purport to show a flat earth are accepted unquestioningly, when things do not it’s back to the sceptical context and the burden of proof is turned up to a level impossible to satisfy.

So while I do thing NASA has the burden of proof, they have more than met it to any reasonable strandard. If you call any evidence which doesn’t fit your world view wrong or fake then you can dismiss anything. For some people that’s easier than changing their beliefs.
Tom: "Claiming incredulity is a pretty bad argument. Calling it "insane" or "ridiculous" is not a good argument at all."

TFES Wiki Occam's Razor page, by Tom: "What's the simplest explanation; that NASA has successfully designed and invented never before seen rocket technologies from scratch which can accelerate 100 tons of matter to an escape velocity of 7 miles per second"