What is he driving at?

[twik]

There is a poster on the BAUT forums who is putting forward a very strange proposition - that "visible" light cannot be seen outside of an atmosphere (or, at least, the ionosphere). He seems very cagey about explaining *why* NASA and the entire astronomical community is covering this up. I sense that he's trying the old "I'm just asking questions," hoping that people will agree with his initial proposal, then turn and yell "AHA! Then conspiracy X must be true!"

He says he accepts that men landed on the Moon (presumably provided with artificial lighting), but is sliding off into hoaxer territory with some of his recent comments. For some reason, he thinks it's significant that some pictures of the Moon show different colorations. I know many people frequent both boards, and I was wondering if anyone has an idea of where, exactly, he is trying to go with this?

Can he be planning, for example, to have us agree that the astronauts carried lighting setups with them, and then insist that if that's so, how can we be sure it wasn't staged on earth with the same artificial lighting? Or does he just assume that every little discrepancy he thinks he sees indicates someone is pulling a fast one, with no main theory tying it together?

[Abaddon]

Seems to me, he is simply trying to slide in sly redefinitions so as to achieve his "Gotcha" moment.

It remains unclear which particular flavour of cool aid he wants, but given the thrust, and some of his comments, I would guess he is a moon hoaxer.

[Trebor]

Probably Aliens.

[sts60]

No, he says he believes men walked on the Moon.  I think he just didn't think about the implications of his idea - at all.  When all the lunar photos were pointed out, including photos taken from lunar orbit, suddenly the Moon's ionosphere was important, despite the fact that the Moon's entire atmosphere masses about ten tons.  When images from deep-space craft were shown, then it was unfair that all that fancy equipment was used - he insisted on using "regular digital cameras", despite the fact that some star tracker images came from equipment less capable than a good amateur's photographic gear.  Ironically, he admitted the MOC used on Mars Global Surveyor (and Mars Observer) was a "regular camera" - only to have it pointed out to him it was a line imager, not like a consumer camera.

He's just enamored of his "theory", even though it makes no sense at all.  I don't think he's deliberately trolling; he just doesn't want to give it up, and thus is busy diving into minutiae on angle this and camera that.  He also started waving his hands frantically when it was pointed out that the astronauts attested to seeing stars during translunar and trans-Earth cruise.

[ka9q]

There is a poster on the BAUT forums who is putting forward a very strange proposition - that "visible" light cannot be seen outside of an atmosphere (or, at least, the ionosphere).

This is just off-the-wall bizarre. There's a lot of vacuum between us and the sun. How do we see sunlight?

In a certain sense, though, he's right -- if "seen" implies not a camera but a sentient human being perceiving it with his own eyes. Our eyes cannot (long) withstand exposure to vacuum, so even an astronaut looking at the moon from an Apollo capsule is seeing it through an atmosphere, that between his eyes and the capsule window. 

[gillianren]

The short answer appears to be "magic."

[sts60]

Well, that ended badly.

After his "mechanism" was shredded for not even getting the basic nature of EM radiation correct, and being full of self-contradictions, and having most of his specific factual claims proven wrong, and having dozens of space-based images of the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the planets, moons of the planets, asteroids, and stars produced - all of which were impossible  according to his idea - he started retreating into ever more bizarre conspiracies, then came out with this assignment for everyone questioning him:

With all the images of little specs of light, and some of planets being put forward for explanation, I'm willing to reply to those, IF the poster provides some information. It is too time consuming to dig into each one.
Provide the source for the images, the camera used, the make and number of the CCD sensor, a diagram of the overall internal layout, a description or diagram of the optics, and in particular, the profile of the lenses with all available values for diameter, curvature(s), the position of the gratings, the grating pitch, and the cross section, with angles, of the grooves...

That got him a wrist-slap and the thread was closed.  I can't say I disagree with the moderation.  But I was interested to see if he'd try to back up his claim of "gratings" on the Space Shuttle windshield after I pointed out I've been in different Orbiters and seen no such thing, never mind that all the documentation showed that. 

Gratings, as seen from the quote above, seem to be his new, for want of a better term, woobie.  Apparently everything needs them to downshift, cubically repolarize, and phase-renoberate (with anti-heave compensation) the X-ray plane waves.  Typically, he claimed the Shuttle needed this to see the stars properly, even though it operates within the ionosphere, in which he claims you can see stars.  He never really thought about the implications of any of his claims; he just hurled whatever he could lay his hands on in a desperate effort to hold off his inquisitors.

ETA: fixed line breaks in the quote.  That was another very annoying thing he did - evidently he composes his posts in a text editor, then pastes them in to the forum window, leaving in
the line breaks that make his posts
irregularly
formatted and thus a pain to read and even
worse
to reply to.

[twik]

Actually, I kind of like it. It turns his posts into some sort of stream-of-consciousness poetry. Not great for quoting, though.

I think that thread should be preserved as a classic conspiracy thread model, though. It started out so small - "Hey, how come no one ever took a picture of a conjunction from the ISS?". At the end, it was, "YOU have to provide ME with every single technical detail on every point of contention, even though I'm the one with the weird theory. Oh, and what about ancient astronauts? Huh? What about THEM?"

It's like a checklist of logical fallacies.

[Kiwi]

It's like a checklist of logical fallacies.

Which, sadly, means absolutely nothing to many hoax-believers.

[cjameshuff]

The post that got the thread killed was typical of his response to contrary evidence...shift the goal posts to exclude it. Earlier in the thread, he kept insisting on evidence in the form of photos taken from the ISS with consumer cameras, with documentation proving they weren't taken from within Earth's ionosphere...after it had been pointed out that the ISS never left Earth's ionosphere.

I do somewhat wish the thread had lasted long enough for him to try explaining what exactly he thought diffraction gratings did, but I doubt we'd have gotten a meaningful response anyway. He persisted in his muddled nonsense about plane waves and transverse waves despite being corrected multiple times (he apparently was much happier with the notion that they were distinct types of waves, the former being invisible to the eye for some reason). The grating nonsense is just another instance of a pattern of spinning some complicated explanation for something a bit of research would provide a simple explanation (or a host of possible simple explanations) for, and concluding that his convoluted scheme is the only possible answer.

As for what he was driving at, a lot of the technobabble he started throwing around toward the end was almost identical to that he was using in an earlier thread about parallax (the "a revolution in astronomy" one that claimed galaxies were actually solar systems, the stars other planets circling the sun, etc). He was given similarly indisputable evidence showing his ideas were completely wrong in that thread, and had a similar response. IIRC, he ultimately just "wasn't convinced" we could, for example, tell the difference between a globular cluster light years away and one the distance of Pluto with parallax (yes, the paper he was referencing claimed some globular star clusters were closer than Pluto). He never actually said what he was after, but it was almost as if he was ultimately trying to argue for a universe much younger than the commonly accepted ages...

[twik]

I'm not sure he was ultimately heading towards Young Earth Creationism. The "ancient astronauts" line doesn't usually appear in those sorts of arguments, because the Young Earth theory would give the astronauts themselves no time to develop a higher civilization.

I suspect he's one of the "what the bleep do we know?" types - if it's against the mainstream, it must be true.

[cjameshuff]

I'm not sure he was ultimately heading towards Young Earth Creationism. The "ancient astronauts" line doesn't usually appear in those sorts of arguments, because the Young Earth theory would give the astronauts themselves no time to develop a higher civilization.

I suspect he's one of the "what the bleep do we know?" types - if it's against the mainstream, it must be true.

Well, he never mentioned ancient astronauts that I know of (though it could have been stuck in there somewhere), but ancient advanced now-lost civilizations are right out of the Bible (the Tower of Babel).

I admit I may be trying to hard to find a reason for him to be so attached to those ideas where in fact there was none, but in a previous thread, which included the same vague handwaving about Compton shifting, boundary layers, and other generally weird ideas about optics and stars, he was absolutely determined to find some way for the universe to be vastly smaller...I don't mean just a few decimal orders of magnitude smaller, "galaxies are actually other solar systems" smaller.

In this thread, he was adamant that the powers that be were hiding something...if taken at face value, that stars emit UV and x-rays that are shifted into the visible range by free electrons in the ionosphere and near the surface of the moon. He refused to say why there would be a vast and pointless conspiracy to hide an unusual bit of trivia about space travel, which together with his previous thread makes me think he was really driving at a conspiracy to hide the nature and origin of the universe...the usual conspiracy by anti-Christian forces to cast doubt on revealed truth, etc.

[ineluki]

I was wondering if anyone has an idea of where, exactly, he is trying to go with this?
Or does he just assume that every little discrepancy he thinks he sees indicates someone is pulling a fast one, with no main theory tying it together?

As usual it is hard to know what someone in a forum really thinks, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had no idea where he is going with his claims other than the rather unoriginal drivel of "the government is evil, and science is wrong".

[twik]

I agree, it's hard without further evidence from Solon to figure out what he was trying to achieve. He was pulling a very common conspiracist stunt of holding his cards very close, apparently waiting to spring his trap, whatever that was going to be. But even the Tower of Babel is unlikely to have required that the stones be cut by "energy beams", so I was suspecting he had gotten into ancient astronauts, rather than ancient advanced civilizations.

[cjameshuff]

Well, I've seen claims the Ark of the Covenant was some kind of nuclear-powered food machine, and that the descriptions of various people ascending into the heavens are actually descriptions of them leaving on flying saucers. So people building simple stone structures with energy beams aren't necessarily excluded.

But mainly, it's the only rationale I can come up with for his strange attraction (heh) to the idea that stars and such were objects in the solar system, not light years away. (He kept going on about errors in parallax measurements, never addressing little issues like the fact that if there was anything to those claims, the parallax would be obvious to the naked eye, with constellations drastically changing shape over the course of a year.)