My mom threw me for a loop today by revealing she believes the moon landing was a hoax, and that the subsequent death of all those people on the shuttle (including a school teacher) was done to make the public stop their cries of "let's go to the moon again!" The reason she thinks it's a hoax is because, in her words, we didn't have the technology at the time. The tv was playing daily "demos" of what the landing would look like that were identical to the supposed "actual landing" they saw when the pilots "got back." And, here's the great part, there's a radiation field surrounding the earth that prevents anyone from flying to the moon, or to any other planet/bodies past that field. She knows about the field because one of the first astronauts got retina burns when he encountered it (or something like that). The field is why, according to her, all the manned flights remain in close orbit to the earth - they can't go past a certain point so all the planetary exploration is done by remote.
Consider that my mother is one of the smartest people I know, book smart and world smart. She's usually the one to assure me there's no conspiracy behind the oil war, global warming, and creationists. I can't debunk what she remembers about the moon landing because I wasn't there - I didn't see the things on television she saw, or the technology they had then, and she gives a good argument for *why* the US would stage such a thing.
But that radiation field kills me. With our current technology there's no way we wouldn't be able to design some shield/suit to withstand even the strongest radiation (even if the field *did* exist, which it doesn't). Tell me how to debunk that without appealing to common sense alone. The FlatEarthers were using that field as proof that man never "circled" the earth in space, it's that old of a myth. It's as bad as the invisible ocean circling the planet's atmosphere that God opened up to flood the world in Genesis (literal creationist dogma takes the book verbatim). Clearly common sense doesn't work as "proof" with these people. My mom says she's willing to disbelieve the 'field' part if I can give her some evidence that it doesn't exist, or that we'd be able to get past it if it did exist. As it is, her theory means every manned flight we've ever done a few miles past the planet is a hoax. ^^'
Conspiracy theories are fun, but the really OT ones are just annoying. Any creationists on this site? Do you believe the dinosaurs died because they didn't fit on the ark? How about Planet X, did it just decide to skip us in 2003? Or are we all skeptics here?
