PAUL CORNISH
Paul Cornish
In March 2019 I gave a talk for the Reading branch of the British Science Association on the subject of the science of superheroes. It's a subject that's been covered a great deal elsewhere and so I wanted to approach it from a different angle. I decided to focus on the science behind some lesser known superheroes. I chose to discuss The Whizzer, Chunk, Matter Eater Lad, and the Red Bee. I looked at their powers and origin stories and tried to find parallels in real world science. I've adapted my talk into a four part article. This part is about The Red Bee.
The Red Bee first appeared in Hit Comics #1 (1940). His name is Richard Raleigh, an assistant district attorney who decides to dress up in a puffy shirt and fight crime using bees! Red Bee uses lots of trained bees to fight Nazis and gangsters, but his favourite bee is called Michael. Michael lives in Red Bee’s hollow belt buckle and will only come out for special missions. The character starred in 24 issues of Hit Comics before fading into obscurity. He was brought back in the pages of All Star Squadron in the early ‘80s, only to be killed off straight away. Let’s talk about Michael. Surely bees hang about together in huge swarms and inhabit hives - they don’t sit on their own in some bloke’s belt buckle? Well, there are in fact certain types of bees that do prefer a solitary existence. For example, there is a type of bee found in the UK called Osmia bicornis, or more commonly, the red mason bee! Red mason bees are usually found in gardens and parks. They nest in existing holes or cavities, such as mortar joints, window frames, or dead wood, and prefer holes in sunny south facing locations. It’s not a massive stretch to believe that Richard Raleigh could have tempted such a bee into his belt buckle, provided he was thrusting his hips towards the sun. Michael is probably a female, as male mason bees tend to hang around the nests where they first hatched from their cocoon, waiting to have sex, before dying soon after the deed is done. That’s very much what the kids call a “big mood” for me. When the females have chosen a place to make their nest they harvest mud which they use to seal up their nest cells, allowing their young to safely develop, keeping them warm over winter. Red Bee’s belt buckle would probably be full of mud. Once Michael has been released from her mucky belt buckle, she may be more useful in distracting criminals than actually hurting them. Red mason bees don’t sting unless they’re threatened. The venom in a female red mason bee’s sting is similar to the venom of a honeybee sting, but the red mason bee sting contains fewer barbs than that of a honeybee. This could explain why the red mason bee’s sting does not penetrate human skin. While Michael wouldn’t make much of a weapon, the Red Bee’s other bees could potentially be a tenacious foe for any criminal that crossed their path. Africanised “killer” bees from Central America have been known to chase a person into water and then patiently wait for them to resurface before stinging them. These bees can recognise the chemical scent of the breath of their target as air bubbles break the surface of the water. Honeybees in the UK are less aggressive but are still known to be pretty tenacious. In 2016 a grandmother from West Wales returned from her shopping to find a swarm of over 20,000 bees covering the back of her car. She called some local beekeepers, who were able to remove the bees and she returned home. Over 24 hours later, outside her home she found the bees had returned to the car! The beekeepers theorised that the queen bee may have become trapped somewhere in the car. So bees could potentially be an effective weapon against anyone who provoked them, but how could the Red Bee control them? How could he make sure the bees attacked the gangsters and not him? Smoke can be used to make bees docile, but dopey bees might not be much use in the war against crime. Is there an alternative? The answer is smells! A queen bee secretes a combination of chemical scents in order to communicate with the worker bees. The queen’s scent can help control swarming, it can inhibit the development of ovaries in the worker bees, and it can tell the workers whether a queen has mated or not. The queen’s scent can also give workers the cue to gather around the queen and form her own little entourage, or retinue to look after her. In 2007 researchers in the University of Otago found that a queen bee can manipulate worker bee’s behaviour by releasing a pheromone that blocks aversive learning in young bees. This means that the queen can stop her offspring from learning from bad experiences. This is necessary because being exposed to a chemical scent that stops you from growing ovaries can be pretty unpleasant for a worker bee. By preventing the young bees from developing aversive memories against her odour the queen is ensuring that they will continue to tend her. Basically, she smells bad but she makes the other bees forget how bad she smells. If The Red Bee could harness these chemical scents, perhaps he could use them to convince a colony of bees that he was their queen! If they ever decided that they didn’t like the life of a crime fighter, he could make them forget that decision! A real life Red Bee would perhaps be, not a man in a domino mask and a puffy shirt, but a stinky, insect drag queen, armed with water pistols full of bee sweat! But being a queen bee is not all it’s cracked up to be. When a queen bee gets too old to give off the right smells they are replaced by the workers in a procedure known as "supersedure". The workers rear a replacement queen and when the new one is ready the workers will kill the old one in a gruesome fashion. The workers cluster tightly around her, “balling” her until she becomes so hot she dies. If the Red Bee is a man who would be queen he must ensure he never runs out of scent, lest he is balled to death by his insect minions! References: https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/redmasonbee/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmia_bicornis https://beeinformed.org/2012/12/07/queen-pheromones/ https://www.sciencealert.com/queen-bees-control-with-scent https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070719/full/news070716-14.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/24/swarm-of-bees-follow-grandmothers-car-for-over-24-hours-attempti/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee#Supersedure Many thanks to insect experts Jade Hailes and Antonia Forster.
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In March 2019 I gave a talk for the Reading branch of the British Science Association on the subject of the science of superheroes. It's a subject that's been covered a great deal elsewhere and so I wanted to approach it from a different angle. I decided to focus on the science behind some lesser known superheroes. I chose to discuss The Whizzer, Chunk, Matter Eater Lad, and the Red Bee. I looked at their powers and origin stories and tried to find parallels in real world science. I've adapted my talk into a four part article. This part is about Matter Eater Lad.
Matter Eater Lad first appeared in Adventure Comics #303 (1962). In the 30th Century, Tenzil Kem was sent from the planet Bismoll to represent his home world in the Legion of Superheroes. On Bismoll microbes had made all food inedible, and so the Bismollians evolved the ability to eat all matter. Matter Eater Lad can eat any amount of any substance at super-speed. Writers have struggled to find anything for Matter Eater Lad to do over the years – there’s only so many times you can have a character escape a cage by eating the bars. As a result he is often written out of the stories by being drafted into his home planet’s political system. It’s a literal case of “I have to go now, my planet needs me!” When I first started to consider how Tenzil’s powers might work in real life I thought I might find the answers with goats! Like a lot of people I was under the impression that goats could eat the shirt off your back if they wanted to. Could Matter Eater Lad be a kind of human goat? In actual fact, no he couldn’t be. The idea that goats can eat anything is a myth. Goats are in fact incredibly picky eaters. The idea that they’ll eat anything comes from the fact they are browsers. They will root through their potential meals to find whatever they think will give them the most nutrition, even if it means digging around in rubbish. A goat may well rip the shirt off your back and have a chew on it but they would probably spit it out after a while once they’d decided there was no goodness to be had from it. Matter Eater Lad may not be a goat-man, but there is another member of the animal kingdom who echoes his abilities. Crocodilians, a group which includes alligators and crocodile, are far from picky eaters. Crocodiles eat fish, amphibians, crustaceans, molluscs, birds, reptiles, and mammals, and even smaller crocodiles. Certain types of crocodile have been known to eat, sharks, wild boar, big cats, elephants, and hippos. Young alligators and crocodiles have been observed eating up to 23% of their bodyweight in the lab in just one sitting. That’s like a 70 kilogram (or 11 stone) person eating a 17 kilogram (or 3 stone) turkey in one meal. There have even been seeds found in their poo, suggesting that they also eat fruit! They can and will eat anything and they don’t leave leftovers. If you're feeling particularly brave type "Crocodile eating" into Youtube for some examples. Crocodiles have evolved sharp teeth for piercing and holding onto flesh, and powerful muscles to close the jaws and hold them shut. They have the strongest bite of any animal. But it’s their hearts and their stomachs that really make them such successful eaters. Crocodiles have the most acidic stomach of any vertebrate. It can close off a part of its heart on the right side and use a part of its heart on the left side to flush blood loaded with carbon dioxide from its muscles directly to its stomach. This makes its blood supply extra acidic, which in turn makes it much easier for the stomach lining to secrete more stomach acid to quickly dissolve a lot of flesh and bone. Crocodiles’ stomachs are also divided up into two sections. The first section is a muscular pocket where the crocodiles keep any rocks that they might eat. All the hard bits of their prey tend to remain in this area of the stomach for a few days at a time. Once the bones are thoroughly crushed, they transfer over to the next section of the stomach to finish up the digestion process. This process, combined with the acidity of the stomach, means that every single part of the crocodiles’ prey gets digested, including bones, horns, scales and hooves. Matter Eater Lad could well be a sort of grotesque crocodile-man, if he actually existed. It’s worth remembering though, since crocodiles get so much from their prey, they don’t need to eat as often as other animals. Crocodiles usually eat about once a week, although they have been known, in extreme situations, to live off their own tissue for up to three years. If Matter Eater Lad was a human crocodile, you’d have to hope that he hadn’t eaten recently if you expected him to free you from a cage by eating the bars. Or on second thoughts maybe it would be better if he had eaten recently, just in case you started to look particularly tasty to him. References: https://www.wideopenpets.com/goats-eat-everything/ https://animals.mom.me/can-crocodiles-digest-bones-10786.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile https://www.livescience.com/2259-crikey-crocs-digest-animals.html https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13285-super-size-me-alligators-reveal-digestive-trick/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNTMfax5Q5w https://www.care2.com/causes/4-animals-who-can-live-without-food-for-more-than-a-year.html In March 2019 I gave a talk for the Reading branch of the British Science Association on the subject of the science of superheroes. It's a subject that's been covered a great deal elsewhere and so I wanted to approach it from a different angle. I decided to focus on the science behind some lesser known superheroes. I chose to discuss The Whizzer, Chunk, Matter Eater Lad, and the Red Bee. I looked at their powers and origin stories and tried to find parallels in real world science. I've adapted my talk into a four part article. This part is about Chunk. First appearing in Flash #9 (1988), Chester Runk was a scientist who created a matter transmitting machine. The first time Runk activated the machine it imploded and he became merged with it. Runk was now Chunk, the human black hole! Chunk has the ability to teleport objects and people into another universe – a dead universe! He needs to continue feeding himself 47 times his own mass in dense materials to avoid permanently imploding into that dead universe. When the Flash first encountered him, Chunk was a villain, stealing diamonds to prevent himself from imploding, and trapping anyone who offended him in the dead universe. These included his therapist, a woman who turned him down for a date, a man who had cut him off in his car, and even a man whose shirt Chunk had taken a dislike to. Eventually Chunk released his captives and became good friends with the Flash. Chunk started a waste disposal business and became a millionaire. He was a regular member of the Flash’s supporting cast for a while until the writers lost interest in him and just stopped mentioning him. But what would a human black hole actually be like? A black hole is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area. The result is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Scientists can’t see black holes but they can see how the strong gravity affects the stars and gas around the black hole. Also, when a black hole and a star are close together, high-energy light is made. This kind of light cannot be seen with human eyes. Scientists use satellites and space telescopes to see this light. Black holes can be big or small. Scientists think the smallest black holes are as small as just one atom but have the mass of a large mountain. So theoretically Chunk could carry a black hole around inside him, but he’d have to be pretty damn strong to move about. Another kind of black hole is called "stellar." Its mass can be up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun. Stellar black holes are made when the centre of a very big star collapses. When this happens, it causes a supernova - an exploding star that blasts part of the star into space. Chunk is depicted as a kind of big, walking Hoover, sucking people and objects into himself, but in actual fact objects have to get fairly close to a black hole to get sucked in. For example, if our sun was suddenly replaced by a black hole of similar mass, the planets would still continue to orbit as normal, they’d just be really cold and dark. In order to get sucked into a black hole you would have to pass the event horizon – the point at which escape becomes impossible, even for light! So if Chunk was a particularly powerful human black hole he would look more like a huge sphere of darkness, waddling around the place. This sphere would be surrounded by a flattened band of spinning matter called an accretion disc. An accretion disc is material, such as gas, dust and other stellar debris that has come close to a black hole but not quite fallen into it. Due to the extreme gravity around a black hole, an object in its gravitational field experiences a slowing down of time, relative to observers outside the field. This is known as gravitational time dilation. A distant observer would see an object falling into a black hole appear to slow down and fade, approaching but never quite reaching the event horizon. Finally, at a point just before it reaches the event horizon, it becomes so dim that it can no longer be seen. Perhaps Chunk would be surrounded by fading statues? Once you were past the event horizon it’s really brown trousers time. The Flash could probably escape the event horizon as he can move faster than light, but you wouldn’t be so fortunate. You’d get torn apart as you were sucked towards the singularity, your body getting stretched and squeezed at the same time. This process is known as spaghettification. A singularity is the centre of a black hole, where the gravitational field becomes infinite! Chunk has been described as a living singularity. When you reached the singularity, you’d be crushed to infinite density and your mass would be added to the total of the black hole. But that’s only true of certain kinds of black holes. There are other kinds of black holes, charged, or rotating black holes, where it would be theoretically possible to avoid the singularity and pass through a wormhole into a different part of spacetime! We’re now talking about Einstein-Rosen bridges, and these might seem familiar if you’ve seen Thor Ragnarok! Yes, Chunk could be a walking Devil’s Anus! According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity a massive object like a star, creates a distortion in the surface of spacetime that we experience as gravity. Imagine putting a bowling ball in the centre of a trampoline. The ball would press down into the fabric, causing a dip. A marble rolled around the edge would spiral inward toward the bowling ball, pulled in much the same way that the gravity of a planet pulls at rocks in space. According to Einstein and Nathan Rosen, if an object has an even greater mass, like a black hole for example, it could great a "dip" so great that it creates a pathway to another part of space time! A shortcut or wormhole across time and space! If Chunk’s mass created an Einstein Rosen bridge, maybe it would be possible for him to transport people and objects somewhere else, although it would be to another time and place in our universe rather than to a dead universe. Of course, anything that entered his event horizon would still be spaghettified, so Flash would be left with the gruesome task of retrieving the noodle shaped remains of Chunk's victims from another part of spacetime! References: https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/black-holes/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Event_horizon https://www.space.com/20881-wormholes.html https://www.space.com/17661-theory-general-relativity.html Many thanks to astrophysics experts Lee Pullen and Aimae Wood. In March 2019 I gave a talk for the Reading branch of the British Science Association on the subject of the science of superheroes. It's a subject that's been covered a great deal elsewhere and so I wanted to approach it from a different angle. I decided to focus on the science behind some lesser known superheroes. I chose to discuss The Whizzer, Chunk, Matter Eater Lad, and the Red Bee. I looked at their powers and origin stories and tried to find parallels in real world science. I've adapted my talk into a four part article. This part is about The Whizzer.
In the 1940s, The Whizzer was Timely Comics' super-fast answer to The Flash. He first appeared in USA Comics #1 (1941). Robert Frank was bitten by a cobra while on a trip to Africa with his father, Dr. Emil Frank. To save Robert’s life, Emil did what any caring responsible, scientist dad would do. He transfused the blood of a mongoose into his son’s body. Luckily this granted Robert the gift of super speed! He found he could run at speeds of up to 100mph, create cyclones by running in circles, and could run up walls and across water. He of course, used these gifts to fight crime. If the Whizzer sounds familiar to you it may be because a version of the character appeared in the second season of Jessica Jones. This Robert Frank was radically different from his comic book counterpart, although Netflix provided a little nod to his roots, by giving him a pet mongoose. Robert Frank was the subject of xenotransfusion - the transfer of blood from one species into the veins of another. But how plausible is the idea that humans can take on the characteristics of animals through the transfusion of their blood? Well, very plausible, if you happen to be a scientist from the 17th Century. On June 15th 1667 a French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denys performed the first documented blood transfusion on a human. Denys bled a feverish 15 year old boy with leeches before treating him with a transfusion of lamb’s blood. The idea was that the calm, gentle nature of the lamb would be transferred to the boy. The boy survived, although this was probably only because Denys had transfused so little of the lamb’s blood into him. Denys had further success performing the same experiment again on a butcher. It wasn’t until he performed it on a third subject that he got into trouble. Antoine Mauroy was a mentally ill man, well known in Paris for terrifying the locals with his antics. Denys and his colleagues thought they might be able to cure Mauroy by replacing his “bad” blood with the “pure” blood of a calf. Mauroy was picked up off the street and forced to take part in the experiment against his will. Denys performed the experiment in the presence of a group of rich aristocrats whose hobbies included witnessing new and risky scientific procedures. The experiment was performed a second time and appeared to actually have a positive effect on Mauroy. According to science writer Pete Moore, there was a reason for Mauroy’s positive reaction to the transfusion that was peculiar to him. He had syphilis. Mauroy’s white blood cells attacked the unfamiliar blood in much the same way as they would attack a disease. This caused a raging fever. Fever is a known treatment of tertiary syphilis. Two and a half centuries later, Julius Wagner-Jauregg would receive the Nobel Prize for treating syphilis by deliberately infecting patients with malaria. Denys had accidentally treated Mauroy’s syphilis! After the second transfusion Mauroy went back to his debauched ways. His wife begged Denys to perform the procedure again, which he did. This time Mauroy died and Denys found himself on trial for murder. You might be thinking “Serves the silly bugger right! This is what happens when you go injecting people full of cow’s blood”. But it wasn’t as cut and dried as it might have first seemed. It was later found that Mauroy had actually died of arsenic poisoning. Denys was let off the hook, and Mauroy’s wife was found guilty of poisoning his soup. It would seem that, in a plot worthy of Columbo, Mrs Mauroy had grown tired of her husband’s debauched antics and saw Denys’s experiments as a convenient scapegoat for his murder! Other historians have argued that Mrs Mauroy herself was a scapegoat and that enemies of the experiment murdered Mauroy in a successful effort to get the icky and ungodly practice of blood transfusion banned in Europe. Either way, it just goes to show that if you are going to practice risky, untested medical procedures then make sure you’re not performing them on a complete prat who everybody's trying to kill. These days we know a lot more about the risks of blood transfusion. We know that even humans are not universally transfusion-compatible. Humans are divided into blood groups that determine who can receive blood from whom without suffering a severe immune reaction that can be fatal. That’s because our immune system senses molecules on the surface of red blood cells and reacts aggressively to red blood cells that don’t have the right kind of surface molecules. This is why when we receive blood transfusions our blood group has to match the donor blood. Our blood must have the same kind of surface molecules on its red blood cells as the cells in the donor blood. These blood groups are not just limited to humans. They are also found in our close relatives in the animal kingdom, especially other primates. Theoretically you could receive a blood transfusion from a gorilla or a chimpanzee, if you shared the same blood group. You might wonder why we aren’t all getting monkey blood on the NHS. Well, there are still minor differences between the blood of humans, and apes, and we don’t know what effects these differences would have. Also, great apes are endangered and they’re not exactly easy to come by. So, is there an animal alternative? And is it a mongoose!? Xenotransfusion research is currently focusing on pigs rather than apes, and it’s not just because there’s bloody loads of pigs around the place. Pig’s blood is quite similar to human blood. Our red blood cells are about the same size and have the same life span as a pig’s red blood cells. There are other similarities too, such as the structure of the haemoglobin – the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body. Pigs could also be genetically modified to produce red blood cells that are equivalent to human type O negative. O Negative blood cells are called “universal” meaning they can be transfused to almost any patient in need. O Negative blood is what patients are given when they need an emergency transfusion and there’s no time to figure out the patient’s blood type. You might be asking yourself “Yeah, but what about the poor pigs?” Rest assured that if we were to use pigs for blood transfusions there would be no need for them to come to any harm. Only 10% of the pig’s blood volume would be used each time, leaving the pig in need of nothing more than a biscuit and lie down. Due to the fact that kind humans are still willing to donate blood, and also due to advances in both the storing of blood and in getting what we need from it, it’s unlikely that any of us will be receiving pig’s blood transfusions any time soon. Even if we did however, the process unfortunately would not grant us the strength, speed, and agility of a pig. References: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/04/04/thicker-than-water/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4729204/Blood-not-spilt-in-vain.html https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/350-years-ago-doctor-performed-first-human-blood-transfusion-sheep-was-involved-180963631/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/01/25/ape-human-pig-human-blood-donations-xenotransfusions-work/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenotransfusion https://thebloodconnection.org/about-blood/blood-education/blood-types/o-negative/ The Science of Obscure Superheroes8/29/2021 In March 2019 I gave a talk for the Reading branch of the British Science Association on the subject of the science of superheroes. It's a subject that's been covered a great deal elsewhere and so I wanted to approach it from a different angle. I decided to focus on the science behind some lesser known superheroes. I chose to discuss The Whizzer, Chunk, Matter Eater Lad, and the Red Bee. I looked at their powers and origin stories and tried to find parallels in real world science. I've adapted my talk into a four part article.
Here are links to all four parts, and also the "reading list" I made for attendees of the talk. The Science of Obscure Superheroes Part One: The Whizzer The Science of Obscure Superheroes Part Two: Chunk The Science of Obscure Superheroes Part Three: Matter Eater Lad The Science of Obscure Superheroes Part Four: The Red Bee The Science of Obscure Superheroes: Reading List Here are the illustrations I created for the talk: Written 17th July 2019 The Apollo programme was developed with the objective of landing humans on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth. Apollo 11 was the first mission to achieve this on the 20th July 1969. In total 12 people have walked on the Moon, the last being the Apollo 17 astronauts on the 14th December 1972. Thanks to the Apollo missions we have a wealth of information from the Moon, including photos, video footage, and rock samples. But what if it was all a load of rubbish? Fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, some people are still arguing that NASA’s Apollo programme was an elaborate façade and that the Moon Landings were fake. What follows is some of the more common arguments made by conspiracy theorists and some of the reasons why I think their arguments just don’t hold water. One Giant Vegas Party for Mankind One of the earliest Moon landing conspiracy theorists was Bill Kaysing, author of We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle (1976). According to Kaysing, the engines of Saturn V (the rocket that got the Apollo missions to the Moon) were “totally unreliable” so smaller, weaker but more reliable rocket engines were stashed inside Saturn V’s engines. In 1969 the public were shown the astronauts entering the Apollo spacecraft but they actually snuck out with a high speed elevator. The rocket blasted off and Apollo was placed in a parking orbit. Meanwhile the astronauts were living it up in Las Vegas with a bunch of showgirls, pausing their debauchery only briefly so they could fake the moonwalk on a film set. They were then flown to Hawaii where they were dropped off in the Apollo Command Module in order to get picked up again for their heroic return. On what authority does Kaysing make these claims? Well, from 1956-1963 he was a senior technical writer, a service analyst, a service engineer, and a publications analyst for Rocketdyne, the company that built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. Sounds quite impressive. But bear in mind that he had no knowledge of rockets or technical writing when he got the job, only a BA in English. Still, he did say that even before 1969 he had, in his words "a hunch, an intuition, ... a true conviction" that no one was going to the Moon. Kaysing’s hunch was enough to inspire a long line of moon landing conspiracy theorists. For the love of God why? Why would NASA want to fake the moon landings? There are three main reasons generally provided by conspiracy theorists. i) The Space Race – The USA wanted to beat their Cold War Rivals, the Soviet Union to the Moon to prove their superiority. ii) NASA funding – NASA wanted to avoid humiliation and justify the money they’d been given and not be known as the stupid gits that failed to deliver on JFK’s promise to put a man on the Moon before the end of the ‘60s. iii) The Vietnam War – The USA wanted to distract America and the world from its involvement in the Vietnam War. Let’s examine these motives one by one. i) If it was a hoax Russia would have noticed and frankly wouldn’t have been able to shut up about it. Bart Sibrel has argued "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep space craft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly cancelled." Nothing about this statement is true. The Soviet Union had been sending unmanned spacecraft to the Moon since 1959 and had deep space tracking facilities since 1962. Also, the cancellation of the Apollo missions wasn’t abrupt. It had been announced in 1970, two years before the last mission. Bart Sibrel by the way, is the man who got punched by Buzz Aldrin while trying to get him to swear on the Bible that the Moon landings were real. ii) If NASA had indeed wanted to avoid humiliation and scrutiny they did a pretty crappy job of it in 1967, when the crew of Apollo 1 were tragically killed in a flash fire on the command module launch pad, leading to NASA’s upper management team being questioned by the Senate and House of Representatives space oversight committees. iii) As mentioned earlier, the Apollo missions didn’t suddenly end as soon as the Vietnam War ended. The cancellation of the missions was announced in 1970, and one of the main reasons for this was because NASA’s budget had been cut to pay for the Vietnam War! Bloody huge! The most compelling argument against the Moon landings being fake is what aerospace engineer Jay Windley describes as a question of scale. NASA doesn’t build spaceships all by itself, it hires private companies to do it for them. It stands to reason that all conspiracy theories asserting that no lunar landing took place must argue that faking the lunar landing was easier than actually accomplishing it, otherwise why bother faking it. But how easy would faking such a thing actually be when you take into account the number of independent contractors that would have been involved. Windley has identified three hypothetical scenarios that would had to have occurred: the Huge Conspiracy Scenario, the Absolute Minimum Scenario, and the Need-To-Know Scenario. Huge Conspiracy In this scenario NASA did not have the necessary technology to go to the Moon and so all the private companies who were contracted by NASA to contribute to this technology must have been paid to do nothing. Their big NASA contract would have been announced in order to keep their shareholders happy and then they would have sat on their arses for a few years. All the employees of these companies who would presumably be expecting to get cracking on this big new job they’d just been awarded, would be urged to keep quiet. That’s a lot of people keeping their mouth shut. At the height of the Apollo project almost half a million people were working on it. Yet in over thirty years, not one of these half million people has come forward with incontestable evidence to say they were part of the conspiracy. Were they all paid off? Even presuming half a million people could be bought off, why aren’t we seeing hundreds of thousands of suspiciously wealthy retired engineers all over America today, living in mansions and driving sports cars? It’s possible they could have been threatened with retribution from a NASA ninja-death squad, but there’s no evidence of this. And it’s amazing that there’s been no death bed confessions in the past fifty years. Absolute Minimum Perhaps then only a few unscrupulous types at the top were in on the conspiracy and most people working on the Apollo missions thought they were working on the real thing? In that case we’d have to believe that all the engineers employed by these private companies believed they were really contributing to an actual lunar mission. As far as they’re concerned they’ve been paid to solve the problems inherent in sending people to the Moon. If so, why would they sign off on materials and devices that they knew didn’t work. If this was the case then NASA would have been provided with a bunch of stuff for their fake Moon mission that was actually capable of sending people to the Moon. So, why would they still want to fake it? Need-to-Know Couldn’t the truth be somewhere in between? Perhaps only the people who really needed to know were in on it. That would logically still have involved the managers of the private companies contracted and, given their technical knowhow, many of the engineers. We’re still talking about a heck of a lot of people. The problem with the idea of a Moon landing conspiracy, argues Windley, is that “you have to buy off enough of the work force in order to produce convincing hardware without producing working hardware. In short, there is no middle of this road. Either you produce real hardware, or you have a very large conspiracy with no leaks after thirty years…. The moral: if you want to perpetrate a hoax, don't have it catered.” Directed by Stanley Kubrick Mary Bennett and David S. Percy have argued that many of the people who worked on the “hoax” did in fact blow the whistle, but they did so by subtly hiding errors in the Moon landing that were so egregious that they would eventually unravel the whole thing. A similar theory involving whistle blowing with hidden clues involves filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and his 1980 film, The Shining. According to this theory Stanley Kubrick filmed the Apollo 11 landing on a film set after being chosen for this task due to the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, Bennett and Percy argue that Kubrick, along with Arthur C. Clarke, were involved in the conspiracy before 2001 was released in 1968, and that 2001 was made to manage the public's expectations of what they were to see in 1969 when the “hoax” was carried out. Apparently, the guilt proved too much for Kubrick, and in 1980 he released a film that contained his veiled confession, The Shining. These clues include:
Moon Robot! One might wonder why whistle blowers felt the need for such subtlety, given that they were up against evidence as compelling as actual photographs. And we’re not just talking about the photos taken by the Apollo astronauts. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a NASA robotic spacecraft launched in 2009 and currently orbiting the Moon. It has provided us with photographs of the Apollo landing sites. For example, here’s the Apollo 11 landing site. Don’t just take NASA’s word for it
Plenty of parties not involved with NASA have been able to verify NASA’s claims. Earlier I mentioned that the Soviet Union had monitored the Apollo missions. Other countries have also encountered evidence of the success of Apollo. In 2008 the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) SELENE lunar probe provided us with a three-dimensional reconstructed photo that matched the terrain of an Apollo 15 photo taken from the surface. In 2009, India's lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 recorded evidence of disturbed soil around the Apollo 15 landing site and tracks of the lunar rovers. Planetary scientists who are unaffiliated with NASA have studied the Moon rock brought back by Apollo and confirmed their age and origin. They have been used to identify lunar meteorites collected from Antartica. The rocks returned by Apollo have also been found to be very close in composition to samples returned by the independent Soviet Luna programme. Apollo astronauts left a bunch of mirrors on the Moon called laser ranging retro-reflectors, or LRRRs. These mirrors have been used as targets for Earth based tracking lasers. Photons reflected back to Earth by the LRRRs have been detected. The NASA-independent Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, McDonald, Apache Point, and Haleakalā observatories regularly use the Apollo LRRR. So, were they fake? When one considers what a monumental feat the Moon Landings really were its perhaps not surprising that people have their doubts. In an era of fake news perhaps cynicism is healthy? But sometimes people aren’t trying to catch you out. Sometimes things aren’t too good to be true. Sometimes real life is just cool. Occasions where real people get together and accomplish something genuinely amazing are rare. But that’s all the more reason to celebrate them. So yes, the human race is full of liars and cheats and people who abuse their power. But let’s give credit where it’s due. We made it to the Moon. Bibliography/Further Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/ (James V. Scotti, astronomer) http://www.clavius.org/ (Jay Windley, aerospace engineer) https://lightsinthedark.com/2014/05/22/no-the-moon-landings-werent-faked-and-heres-how-you-can-tell/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OROlF8zB9z0&feature=youtu.be David S. Percy & Mary Bennet DARK MOON : Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (1999) Articles for We the Curious8/29/2021 Are black holes dangerous?
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