Re:A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO exped...
by NoMAD76 on Saturday August 13, 2022 @02:51AM
(#32447516)
Sadly they will just yell louder "It's photoshoped!"
Re:A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO exped...
by anigbrowl on Saturday August 13, 2022 @03:34AM
(#32447708)
Doesn't matter. You just swamp them with volume. The thing about mis/disinformation is that it moves to fill voids, not unlike gas rushing into a vacuum; falsehoods have a first mover advantage because it takes less time to make something up than to report it accurately. But if you're generating interesting content on the regular, conspiracy stuff gets sidelined.
A simpler example again than a rover would just be installing a camera on the Moon that points back at Earth and beaming a high-res whole planet image in real time. The lack of imagination in existing space projects is just deplorable. If you want a bigger science budget, a planetary selfie stick will pay off in spades. Flat earth people will dry up and blow away after a year of people being able to look at the planet they live on and see weather patterns, wildfires etc.
You do make a good point about conspiracy types, but I don't think it's necessarily his responsibility to educate everyone out of that. The best way to let the air out of that particular balloon is to send a small rover to the moon and land it near the original Apollo site, and then just drive it around beaming back pictures of stuff on the moon and attractive hi-res pics of Earth on a daily basis.
Does it break any new scientific ground? Nope. Will it do wonders for public awareness of/engagement with science? Hell yes.