The Naked Listener's Weblog

28⁰C/83⁰F, cloudy with some rain patches

This ain’t a post on astronomy.

Is this is even real?

The better question should be, how do we know if YOU are even real?

We know it’s real because we can see more or less the same thing nearly every night almost anywhere. For centuries.

We know it’s real because the bigger the telescope used and the further away from light pollution we are, the more detail we can see.

We also know it’s real because we can measure the different wavelengths of light and other electromagnetic radiation (and their changes over time), so we know things are in motion and changing in time.

Yet for all we know, all this can be a simulation — so if this isn’t real, neither are we.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

|-o-|

Option A:—

Look up the night sky with the naked eye. You’ll see some bright stars and maybe the Milky Way as well.

(You might also see a policeman peering down at you, asking what the heck you’re doing lying down on your back looking up the night sky in the middle of the street. Show him this post.)

Look through a $100 telescope. The area of view is obviously smaller, but the view is better. You can resolve some distant stars and the blurry shapes of some galaxies.

Your local university’s $15 million observatory telescope the size of a small lorry can image the exact same view. It can pick out details and structures in the same galatic area, like the fainter little stars.

Your smug $1.5 billion telescope on a mountaintop or in the desert in dry’sa’bone Devoidistan can resolve the exact same view. It spots the distant galaxies as little fuzzes.

You can blow $10+ billion on a space telescope floating at a Lagrange point in space and — bada-bing-bada-boom! — you’re seeing all those galaxies impossible to see with the naked eye.

Option B:—

It ain’t real. It’s make-believe. The Earth is flat. The moon landings in 1969 were CGI, done by Stanley Kubrick. The Earth is just 6,000 years old, done by Guinness-powered arithmetic. It’s all a ploy by NASA, the National Insecurity Agency, the CIA, Wall Street, Micro$haft, etc, to disguise or hide the real shape of the world from us. They’re playing us for absolute fools. Question everything. Ask me no questions, and I will tell you no lies.

:>o<:

(via Pixabay)

If you take Option B, you’re stupid. Really.

The plain simple fact is, yes, it is real.

What isn’t 100% definitively ‘real’ are the explanations and models about the finer details of those celestial bodies and their ‘behaviour.’

This is because those models and explanations are based on currently available data.

So every time a newer, bigger, better telescope or imaging system is invented, we get to see more and better detail — and every piece of new data goes to update the models and explanations. Examine the data in detail, and you might uncover an insight.

What doesn’t happen is the scientists get a new telescope and goes, “Oh, that entire galaxy doesn’t exist. Sod it. It’s not that important anyway. *snorg*”

Radical re-evaluations like that have always been rare. And they’re increasingly unlikely to happen in future, considering the overall pace of technological advancement.

|-o-|

(via alongthewaytj)

“I’ve been looking at the Moon with my trusty United Slaves Navy 10×50 long-distance binoculars. I can’t see the American flag anywhere even at maximum magnification. The moon landings had to be a hoax.”

Have you tried taking the lens caps off, luv?

What you’re seeing is … you’re at the furthest point away from basic cognitive ability and imagination.

A person with perfect 20/20 vision can see up to 48 kilometres (or 31 miles) with bare eyeballs. That’s roughly the distance between Dover (England) and Calais (France).

With 10×50 binoculars (10× magnification, 50mm focal length), that person can see up to 480 km (300 miles), but no object details beyond 160 km (99–100 miles). These binoculars are the handheld types for birdwatching, sailing, and peeping toms.

The Moon is 390,000 km (or 239,000 miles) away from Earth — nearly a quarter of a million miles.

Come bloody on, my old son.

Your Walmart, Tesco, Asda, Argos, China Emporium, navy, army, airforce or special-forces binos are physically incapable of resolving a small object like a flag at that distance.

Just buy a home astronomy telescope, bruv.

The Information Superhighway — sorry, I meant the Internet — has loads of published orbital data like coordinates, tracks, times, dates, colour charts and so on for all kinds of aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, asteroids, planets, stars and whatnot. You can easily find out the exact time down to the second when the International Spaz Station will traverse the sky as a reasonably bright dot of light above your grimey little location.

:>o<:

I can easily see the deep field with my naked eye (Wikipedia; documentary video, 29:47 mins).

That alone proves these Option B people are basically off their rockers.

I’ve seen Andromeda (the galaxy, not the girl from Greece) with my own eyes through a telescope with a 1-foot (30 cm) mirror. I trust that a telescope with an 8-foot (244 cm) mirror, no atmosphere to fight through, and years’ worth of time to point into the void (the deep field) can see a hundred or more galaxies.

The stuff in the night sky — they’re all real. Only that we can’t travel over there. It’s common knowledge that we don’t have FTL (faster-than-light) spacecraft yet. We still don’t have the flying cars promised to us — no pressure, mate.

Have you ever seen or taken a photo through a 5-inch peeping-tom telescope of the ISS flying across the sky in front of the moon?

Congratulations, Mr Satellites-Are-Not-Real. You’re even lower down the intellectual totem pole than the average 4channer, Redditor or Chaturbate user.

You can choose to believe or disbelieve what NASA tells you. The choice is yours.

You can choose to view that we’re all in a simulation too. But know that each layer further down the simulation doesn’t have the same fidelity as the layers above it.

So if it were a simulation, then don’t be surprised (or disappointed) that it may well be running on some galactic kid’s computing equivalent of a kitchen toaster, done for some pointless galactic school project.

|-o-|

Satellites tracked (via universetoday)

People who deny the basic elements of reality (like claiming the ISS or satellites don’t exist, the Earth is flat, CGI moon landings, etc) are some of the most ignorant, brain-damaged and hostile morons on the planet.

We recognise their tired lines:—

“You shamed me into changing my mind, but there’s no new information except ad hominem and appeals to authority.”

Srsly? What are YOU bringing to the table other than the exact same thing?

“What is NASA using all that helium for?”

All space agencies use massive amounts of helium. So do chipmakers. Almost all is used as liquid helium coolant to prevent ambient or background temperature from blinding or frying ultra-sensitive, super-expensive instrumentation or sensors. A small proportion is for launching weather or spy balloons. Helium isn’t used for cryostorage of sperm or eggs. Liquid nitrogen is. Go figure.

“So many things going on, but I have to ask just one extra question: Are satellites in fact balloons?”

No, they’e not. Because satellites are not manufactured as balloons. And balloons can’t ever behave the way seen in satellites. Three reasons:—

#1 — Balloons cannot physically do the orbital speeds to circumnavigate Earth every 90 or 100 minutes like satellites normally do. We’re talking at least 7.8 metres per second. That’s 28,000 kmph or 17,000 mph for a 90-minute orbit at 200 km altitude.

#2 — The maximum altitude for balloons is just 53 km (33 miles or 176,000 feet, finally achieved by balloon BS 13-08 in 2013) due to the fact that maximum lift is a function of volume and density. The higher the altitude, the thinner the atmosphere, and therefore the less lift the balloon has. All satellites operate higher than 160 km (99 miles) above Earth:—

• Low Earth Orbit (LEO), the commonest orbit level, altitude 160–2,000 km (99–1,243 miles) at orbital speed 7.8 m/sec (or 28,000 kmph or 17,000 mph).
• Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), altitude 2,000–36,000 km (1,200–22,400 miles)
• Geostationary Orbit (GEO), altitude 35,786 km (22,236 miles) at 3.07 km/sec (or 11,300 kmph or 7,000 mph)

#3 — The altitude of a satellite is rather easy to determine. It’s just basic trigonometry and manual observation from several ground points. But we’re in the 21st century now, so space agencies and companies use radar — because radar is helluva lot CHEAPER and can simultaneously track thousands of space objects orbiting 100 to 26,000 km above Earth.

I smoke Marlboros fags. You smoke poppycock.

“Why does the moon and the ISS lit up?”

Because of the sun. The moon, the planets, the asteroids, the satellites and the ISS all reflect (bounce off) the light from the sun. They don’t lit up. Only the stars light up. Our eyes and telescopes capture that reflected light. That’s how vision works, pal. Ask your primary school for a refund.

“Why can we see the ISS unaided? That should be impossible, given its stated size and altitude.”

So bloody well stop lying that we could see it unaided.

Sometimes we could see the ISS and some LEO satellites as little dots of light flitting across the sky. But this happens only at certain times, certain locations, and under perfectly clear weather conditions.

And the ISS or the satellite isn’t “lit up.” It’s just light from the sun reflecting off those great big glassy solar panels or some polished metal part. This is also why the best time for seeing satellites is either just after sunset or just before sunrise — when the object itself is still in sunlight and we’re in relative darkness. When they go into the Earth’s shadow, you can’t see them.

:>o<:

Lots of these Option B people have Oppositional Defiance Disorder — a mental health condition whereby they have to be contrarians in society.

It’s a disruptive, impulse-control disorder with a pattern of angry or irritable moods, argumentative or defiant behaviour, and/or vindictiveness. Around 3% of the world population have ODD. It often combines with conspiracy thinking and a mild form of megalomania (now termed narcissism).

In other words, these are the “Why-Won’t-You-Let-Me-Be-Right-This-Time” people.

Okay. I identify myself as correct — why won’t you affirm my position, then?

There’s some really fascinating psychology behind it. It’s quite sad too.

In the world of education, ODD is grouped under the general heading of resistant learners. These are the bane of school systems anywhere. Resistant learners are not special-needs schoolchildren (clearly), but their general conduct and attitudes result in high wastage of educational time and resources at the expense of regular schoolchildren.

Of course, some people are merely scientifically illiterate and don’t understand.

These people are all open books for grifters. That bloke who died in a steam-powered rocket launch several years ago was playing the Flat Earthers. He himself didn’t believe the Earth was flat. He just wanted to build crazy machines for kicks. But the Flatsos were happy to give him money because he specifically promised to “prove the Earth is flat once and for all” for them.

Sometimes I enjoy explaining somewhat complex stuff about societies around the world, especially to the young ones. I tell them it’s really good for overall thinking and learning to know how to present information to people who seem to have no contextual perception or understanding of reality — the kind of people who seem to have been brought up on “Game of Moans,” “Bravefart,” “Twatlight” or deadweight crap like them.

When you believe the misdirections (never mind lies) that some groups tell you, that creates a simulation in your head about reality.

You can choose to listen or not listen to what NASA says. But what is it that you believe, mate?

Lundi le 16 juin 2025

P.S. Did you notice the Star Wars emoticons for the TIE and the X-Wing fighters as subheads? *snorg*

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© thenakedlistener, 24 June 2025. All images via 4chan unless otherwise indicated.