Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Sunday 8 April 2001, 10:20 PM
Rupert Goodwins' diary
Wednesday
04/04/2001
Flyyyy me to the moooon-ah... oh, 'scuse me. Sunday's silliness is obviously still in the air, as BBC Lancashire is offering an acre of the moon's surface in some sort of competition frippery. You've been able to buy chunks of lunar real estate for a while now, although the legal basis for such transactions has never been entirely clear.
Presumably the 25% of Americans who harbour doubts that the moon landings ever took place will not be partaking of such opportunities. That figure stuns me, even though it came on the back of a Fox TV documentary that purported to examine the claims of a couple of lunatics that Nasa knocked the whole thing up in the back lots of Hollywood studios. It's not even that the documentary was atrocious no matter which way you cut it, showing that integrity is in as short supply in some places as strawberry daiquiris were at Tranquillity Base.
It's that the moon landings in general, and Apollo 11 in particular, were the best documented events of the 20th century. Every second was televised, every detail of the mission was available for scrutiny then and now, and the main participants were and are available for any questions you might have. A billion people witnessed Neil Armstrong fluff his lines... and still, a quarter of the population of the US of A think it might have been a conspiracy. I'd like to see the figures for the UK.
One wonders what standard of proof is required to get through to some people.
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