I’ve been reading a lot about Apollo lately – the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 is almost upon us – and of course the Moon is in my thoughts anyway with the advent of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter now snapping away as it circles our cosmic neighbor.
I’ve done some interviews about this, and been asked about it endlessly: will the LRO’s incredibly high-resolution images of the lunar surface, including, eventually, the Apollo landing sites, finally quell the lunacy of the Moon Hoax believers?
That would be nice, but obviously it won’t. If they don’t believe the thousands of pictures and video taken from the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts themselves, why would they believe further NASA evidence? And besides, these true believers don’t live in an evidence-based world. They live in fantasy; it’s the only way they can be shown solid proof their claims are wrong and yet still cleave to them.
I could go into details, but happily the Cumbrian Sky blog already makes these points pretty well.
As for me, I will be happy to sit back and reminisce about Apollo, look over the new LRO imagery, and think about the future of space exploration with some optimism (and fight for the progress to be done rationally!), all the while ignoring the ignorant bleatings of the Apollo deniers. Sixty years from now, when people are celebrating the centenary of the first human to set foot on another world, I think the Hoax will be so long dead and gone that they won’t even know enough to ask, “Sibrel who?”
That’s a future I can look forward to.
