Episode 22: Flat Out Lies
Froggieās 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 ālizard people?ā
By asking these three questions you can usually rule out most popular conspiracy theories.
First, people cannot keep their yaps shut. Itās just human nature.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, āThree may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.ā 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 doesnāt 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.
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 itās 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. Itās literally impossible to create a light source that accurately simulates the Sunās parallel rays. Theyād 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. Itās probably not even feasible today.
The best lasers back then were big and honkinā. 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. Ā
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 arrayā¦ this impossible parallel lighting thingamajig would cost more than the entire 1969 budget of NASA.
Orrrrā¦ 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 Pixarās render farm 29 hours to finish a single frame of the movie. Pixarās supercomputer has 55,000 CPU cores processing these images.
In 1995, Pixarās 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.
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.
Sooooā¦. 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 difficultā¦ 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 theyād 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 Iām saying isā¦ we went to the damn moon, okay?
I donāt have much to say about them. Other than 12 million Americans genuinely believe shape-shifting reptiles control our government. Which is impossible because Trumpās shade of orange cannot be produced in nature. No organic being could change their hue to match Cheeto levels of orangitude.
