I'm just old enough to remember when conspiracy theories were fun speculation, rather than dystopian reality.
My favorite one is that the moon landing was staged, but not because it never happened. Rather, it was staged because the film got messed up by the radiation belt and NASA really wanted the PR boost from people getting to see it.
This theory let's you acknowledge some of the weirdness surrounding obviously doctored photos and the missing original footage, without requiring you to believe the Moon Landing itself never happened.
Yeah, as a student of coding systems and cryptography I know that all of those photos were taken by ancient CCDs and, by the REST of the tech that existed at the time (eg Voyager). There was no way they could stream live SD video even in black an white from the moon to earth with 1969 technology. Stills, yes, not video.
Reed Solomon Coding didn't even exist yet. Digital media was never gonna happen until there was a way to prevent the likely immediate bit rot that happens on most storage and transmission systems due to errors caused by ambient radiation and faulty components and who knows what else, poor circuit designs with faults that noise it up and make things drop out.
Think about all those recordings of radio chatter out to space people.
Like a long distance telephone made from the edges of the Amazon or something, to Vladivostok.
How could they put reasonably clear TV encoded video signal analog across that giant space when we still didn't have live football? cough.
Nontechnical people are easy to persuade and/or console with things like "well it was such new tech". Yeah, and that's just more evidence pointing towards it being a clown show.
Saying "it never happened" is not the same as "what we saw on TV and printed in the newspapers and magazines was doctored with early versions of software along the lines of Deluxe Paint and Photoshop.
I mean, it wasn't until the mid 70s we had our first extremely big budget scifi movie with manually, and convincingly removed dollies under the hovercraft of Star Wars, and the light sabres. Or the extremely well painted matte backgrounds of Endor a few years later in The Return of the Jedi.
And I'm supposed to believe in all of this they landed on the moon and the guys who did it came back and didn't die of cancer a year later, and that none of the stuff said to be of the events wasn't faked because of the top secret classified bad things that actually happened to the astronauts up there. Why did we not go back? It's been 50 years.
People are so credulous it's sad.
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