Are there any good websites or links to debunk rubbish?

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by Gingerbread Demon, Feb 26, 2022.

  1. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

    Joined:
    May 31, 2015
    Location:
    The Other Realms
    Rubbish as in "we can't go into space what about the van allen belt?" and I'm trying to educate family members on things like this whenever a space story comes up on the news this gets thrown around a lot. Just so sick of the arguments and even things like Voyager and probes, well they can't leave the Earth because they'd have to pass through the belt.

    Why has this rubbish view still survived many debunkings?
     
  2. KamenRiderBlade

    KamenRiderBlade Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2012
    Here are the Lagrange Points (Look Carefully at how far they are)
    [​IMG]

    The Van Allen Radiation Belt extend ONLY:

    Earth's Radius = (6,357-6,378)km x 8 = (50,856 - 51,024)km

    The Moon is 384,400 km away from Earth.

    We EASILY passed through the Van Allen Radiation Belts MULTIPLE times while going to the moon and back.

    We've already had 6x Missions by NASA to the moon.

    The Van Allen Radiation Belt isn't a big deal, they're NUMB NUTS if you think NASA didn't account the Van Allen Radiation belt after discovering it.

    We've already passed through the Van Allen Radiation Belt, and just put appropriate shielding on our space craft.

    So if they can't get it through their thick skulls then I don't know what to say.

    We've already sent countless space craft WAY past the moon, with shielding accounted for the "Van Allen Radiation" Belt.
     
    somebuddyX and think like this.
  3. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

    Joined:
    May 31, 2015
    Location:
    The Other Realms
    Oh I know @KamenRiderBlade I'll get those links down and the diagrams.. Just have this stupid family member that thinks well those darn radiation belts mean we never went into space. I shouldn't have opened my mouth because I said if I ever won a huge Lotto prize I'd like to take a trip into sub orbital space. I mean I know it's a thing, and I know we've been to the Moon and back several times in the years since Neil Armstrong first landed on the Moon. Just so much stuff and he gets all his information from youtubes.

    I mean the internet is a wonderful resource and one of our greatest human inventions but it allows stuff like this to happen and people lap it up as actual fact.
     
    think likes this.
  4. KamenRiderBlade

    KamenRiderBlade Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2012
    They lack proper education and suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

    The first step to fixing it is to admit that their knowledge-base is far weaker than they think it is.

    Honesty & admittance to what they don't know is a good first step.

    Hypothetically, if NASA was lying to the public for over 70 years, they have the best "Secret Agency / Spy Agency" in the world because there's been ZERO-LEAKS of faking all those space missions.

    The reality is , WE DID all those space missions.

    No Spy Agency is that Impenetrable. There will be leaks, just look at the history of "Spy Agencies".

    The reason there has been "ZERO-LEAKS" is because NASA "ACTUALLY DID" all those missions.

    We have countless scientists, astronauts, etc.

    If your relative thinks everybody is in on "The Big Conspiracy", then he's a conspiracy nut who needs to have his brain cleansed of that "Conspiracy BS".

    What next, he thinks "Big-Foot" & "the Loch-Ness Monster" are real?
     
  5. Unicron

    Unicron Boss Monster Mod Moderator

    Joined:
    May 8, 2003
    Location:
    The Crown of the Moon
    I occasionally read Skeptoid for interesting discussion and debunking of myths and stories, though there are minor things about his approach I occasionally nitpick. RationalWiki also has an amusing index of all sorts of craziness.
     
  6. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

    Joined:
    May 31, 2015
    Location:
    The Other Realms
    Funny you mention that I brought those up too last year during covid when we had lockdowns, their house being around the corner yuck. His whole argument was "well if moon landings were real why can't bigfoot and Nessie be real?"
     
  7. KamenRiderBlade

    KamenRiderBlade Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2012
    -_-

    If Nessie were real, we would've found him by now.

    Loch Ness ain't that big, and Nessie is quite big of a creature.

    If BigFoot were real, somebody would've found him, captured him, or shot him by this point.
    The amount of hunters in the American North West, somebody would've seen him through a scope and shot him.
     
    Gingerbread Demon likes this.
  8. Asbo Zaprudder

    Asbo Zaprudder Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2004
    Location:
    Rishi's Sad Madhouse
    Regarding the Van Allen Belts and their dangers, I refer you to Scott Manley.

     
  9. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

    Joined:
    May 31, 2015
    Location:
    The Other Realms
    Yep that's the point I was also trying to make once that was said but failing :brickwall:

    Ooh that's good he's good I'll send him that video
     
  10. publiusr

    publiusr Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 22, 2010
    Location:
    publiusr
    Bad Astronomy/ Cosmoquest.
    JREF’s gone though.
     
  11. danellis

    danellis Captain Captain

    Joined:
    Mar 15, 2010
    Location:
    UK
    Taking up your hypothetical, wouldn't all the talk about it being a conspiracy - the very fact we're having this conversation - mean that there HAD been a leak?

    dJE
     
  12. Asbo Zaprudder

    Asbo Zaprudder Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2004
    Location:
    Rishi's Sad Madhouse
    ^No, because there are a lot of people who just seem to want to use the Internet to ridicule and tear down anything that other, much cleverer people than them achieved in the past. I don't know if this psychosis has a clinical name.

    What are the signs and symptoms of psychosis? (rethink.org)
     
    Last edited: Feb 27, 2022
    Gingerbread Demon likes this.
  13. publiusr

    publiusr Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 22, 2010
    Location:
    publiusr
    Well, kids growing up with Deep Fake—-forget Zelig or Forest Gump—they don’t have to be psychotic to wonder just what is real or who to believe.

    So one of the first things we need to teach kids is photography and how late in the game computer manipulated images came into being.
     
  14. scotpens

    scotpens Professional Geek Premium Member

    Joined:
    Nov 29, 2009
    Location:
    City of the Fallen Angels
    If any of these so-called cryptids were real, there'd have to be a breeding population of at least several hundred individuals to maintain enough genetic diversity to keep the species going. A few of them would surely have been shot or captured by now. And in this age when everyone has a video camera in their pocket, we'd have clear, unmistakable, reliable photographic evidence.

    Oh, and everyone knows Nessie is a she. :)

    Indeed, the technology to fake the moon landings didn't exist in the late 1960s - early '70s. It was easier to actually go to the moon than to fake going to the moon!
     
    Asbo Zaprudder and publiusr like this.
  15. publiusr

    publiusr Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 22, 2010
    Location:
    publiusr
    That might hang up in some young people’s minds in that they will think that manipulating images should be easier than doing something for real.

    Photography gave us microfiche and that gave us circuits later.
     
  16. danellis

    danellis Captain Captain

    Joined:
    Mar 15, 2010
    Location:
    UK
    Photographic manipulation existed long before *computer* photographic manipulation; I can think of specific examples (not necessarily "photo-real," but that's probably because that's not so much the sort of photography I'm into), and have seen 3D photographs taken during the American Civil War.

    dJE
     
  17. Unicron

    Unicron Boss Monster Mod Moderator

    Joined:
    May 8, 2003
    Location:
    The Crown of the Moon
    [​IMG]

    "Did you base the saucer shape on pop culture depictions of aliens, or was that stuff based on your ships? Does the rotational symmetry help with... hey, where are you going?"
     
  18. think

    think About it! Premium Member

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2008
    Location:
    Being Here Now
    https://www.quantamagazine.org/cris...forces-a-rethink-of-what-is-natural-20220301/

    A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws
    For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff.

    In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. Sooner or later, though, facts crop up that clash with the reigning paradigm. Crisis ensues. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. Then incremental progress resumes.

    typical article at this site,.. https://www.quantamagazine.org/
    debunking is possible here maybe ? but the fact the earth is a sphere is a given and not proven here.
     
    Asbo Zaprudder likes this.
  19. shapeshifter

    shapeshifter Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Nov 16, 2007
    Location:
    Land of Illusion
    At first look the site extensively linked below may seem to be advocating junk but a visit to the forum section will dispel those illusions.

    There are believers of all the junk there but they got their hands full with skeptics actively debunking all the cryptid, ufo, and conspiracy theories you can shake a stick at. Every mystery under the Sun is examined in excruciating detail. A lot like Trek is examined here.

    But can the skeptics explain away everything? WOOooooOOO!

    https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/

    https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/

    https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/stories.php

    https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/gallery/

    https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/columnindex.php
     
  20. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

    Joined:
    May 31, 2015
    Location:
    The Other Realms


    Well at least they try.. Full credit to the people trying to debunk nonsense.