it’s what they would have wanted

happy moonwalk day

happy anniversary

i'll reblog this on the anniversary of the moon landing also because buzz earned it

The actual moon trip in A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune), 1902, directed by Georges Méliès.

SURPRISE. I HAVE MORE. 🚀🌕

10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.

AAAND WE HAVE LIFTOFF!

HAPPY MOON LANDING DAY!!!

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!

It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.

The weirdest guy I ever met in a church was this boy who referred to “Buzz Aldrin and his husband” going to the moon. I was completely baffled, and when I asked if he’d misspoken, he got really angry and accused me of being deliberately ignorant of the facts. It turned out that he was somehow comvinced that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were married. It took five Wikipedia articles to convince him otherwise.

That is the best moon-related conspiracy theory I've EVER heard.

maybe the real moon landing was the husbands we found along the way

It’s not a conspiracy; he’s just an unwitting survivor of the Bearenstein Universe, wherein homophobia never caught on as a sociopolitical ideology in post-classical Europe and Buzz&Neil Aldrin-Armstrong WERE married, which merged with our own sometime in the late 90s u_u u_u

Episode 22: Flat Out Lies

Froggie’s Rules for Ruling Out Unruly Conspiracy Theories

Rule the First: Does this conspiracy require a large group of people to keep a secret for their entire lives?

Rule the Second: Does this conspiracy require hypercompetence in order to succeed?

Rule the Third: Does this conspiracy involve using the phrase “lizard people?”

By asking these three questions you can usually rule out most popular conspiracy theories.

First, people cannot keep their yaps shut. It’s just human nature.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” An Oxford mathematician ran the numbers and found the longest the 411.000 NASA employees could keep the moon landing secret would be 3 years and 8 months.

Second, many conspiracies require a level of competence only seen in movies. Most actual conspiracies that are revealed usually have a colorful cast of characters. A bunch of dumb people who did dumb things that helped them get caught. Like, say, keeping a recording of people discussing a secret payoff to a porn star.

So conspiracy theorists believe that the really juicy conspiracies are perpetrated by brilliant masterminds. They think there is top secret technology being used. Most estimates say that top secret tech is maybe 10 years ahead. But for many conspiracy theories, these top secret government programs would probably need to be a century ahead. They assume hypercompetence that just doesn’t exist.

Humans are capable of amazing things. From towering structures that kiss the sky, to an SR-71 Blackbird that can travel 2200 miles per hour at 80,000 feet in the air, to telescopes that can peer deep into the universe.

Or going to the moon.

In 1969, we had the ability to get people to the moon. However, we did not have the capability to fake the moon landing. That might sound backwards, but it’s true.

The technology and engineering involved in faking the moon landing would actually be harder to create and more expensive than just going to the dang moon.

A simple example would be the long parallel shadows of the astronauts.

The Sun is 93,000,000 miles away. It’s literally impossible to create a light source that accurately simulates the Sun’s parallel rays. They’d need to put a light much closer to the subjects in the photo. This would cause the shadows to diverge and no longer be parallel.

The only theorized way to create this effect would be to assemble an apparatus with literally millions of lasers all bunched together as close as pixels on your TV screen.

This was just not feasible in 1969. It’s probably not even feasible today.

The best lasers back then were big and honkin’. Making it impossible to assemble a million of them into some kind of an array that would fit into a soundstage. They were also reddish-orange in color. Which means the photos would look something like this.  

And even if there was some hypercompetent 1960s lighting engineer that could miniaturize millions of lasers, make them white in color, and arrange them into a massive array… this impossible parallel lighting thingamajig would cost more than the entire 1969 budget of NASA.

Orrrr… there would need to be a hypercompetent computer scientist that could create a system that could render photorealistic computer generated images. Some kind of old school CGI.

Keep in mind that for Monsters University, it took Pixar’s render farm 29 hours to finish a single frame of the movie. Pixar’s supercomputer has 55,000 CPU cores processing these images.

In 1995, Pixar’s render farm had the computing power of half an iPhone.

For Toy Story, they had to create much simpler animation that was not photorealistic. The entirety of CGI in Jurassic Park amounted to 4 minutes and took 10 days to render.

NASA went to the moon 6 times and recorded hours of footage and took hundreds of photographs. So how could they render all of that footage?

The most advanced supercomputer in 1971 could do 1 billion instructions per second.

That sounds impressive!

And at the time, it was impressive!

However, an iPhone can do 3 times that now. And the most advanced supercomputer of today can do 200 quadrillion calculations per second.

Soooo…. 1000000000 vs 200000000000000000.

The point is, if you started to render a single photorealistic frame in 1969 it would not be finished yet.

Making matters even more difficult… all of the footage from the moon is on film. Film can be analyzed microscopically. You can see the grain even at high magnification. Which means they’d have to figure out a way to transfer the CG images to film without pixels. Or render it at 1 kajillian megapixel resolution so the pixels are so small they are indistinguishable from grain.

What I’m saying is… we went to the damn moon, okay?

Lastly, lizard people.

I don’t have much to say about them. Other than 12 million Americans genuinely believe shape-shifting reptiles control our government. Which is impossible because Trump’s shade of orange cannot be produced in nature. No organic being could change their hue to match Cheeto levels of orangitude.