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« on: November 14, 2020, 03:08:34 AM »
Mark,
I agree with a lot of what you're saying at the start. The reason I came to this site was because the talking heads you find on youtube - on both sides - are, for the most part, intolerable.
I'm curious to learn about different view points and ways of explaining things, so I came here and started asking questions.
I agree that scientific advances are very often too complicated for the general public to digest, and your example of the black hole is completely valid.
I do think you could re evaluate your position on NASA and rockets. Perhaps if you tried to pin down where NASAs capabilities end and the conspiracy begins.
I would also agree that a few pictures, in themselves, do not add much 'proof'. But I would counter that some of the clips of astronauts on the ISS, many of which (like the water wringing video) were pulled from an extended LIVE VIDEO STREAM (sorry for the angry-looking emphasis there), create a significant body of evidence of NASAs capacity to delivery astronauts to orbit. The water- wringing video was part of an extended Q&A session with school children.
The last point I would make is that it might seem like an extraordinary claim, arguing there are currently people in space. And to be fair, it is extraordinary.
When I need to make an argument in science that defies common-held views, I try to dissect it into smaller pieces. As an example, we can definitely send huge rockets up into the air, higher than we can see with our eyes. Videos using significant zoom can track them even further. We know there is no barrier as high up as around 60 km based on live data feeds from weather balloons. Satellites are whirling around the earth at all times, providing us with internet, phone and TV signals, shooting stars can be observed moving in all directions in the night sky, suggesting the lack of a physical barrier between what's above earth and what's further beyond, it also suggests there is relative motion between earth and other things out there. That's my thought process at least. I ask myself what I need to know and what I need to believe for a claim to be true. To me it seems a lot more likely that NASA is pretty good at building rockets than that they have cornered the market on live CGI/augmented reality decades ahead of the best current capabilities.
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