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Fellow Motteizans, what are your small scale conspiracy theories? I'm not talking grand narratives here. What minor, apolitical conspiracy theories do you explain to the next table at a diner.
For myself, I think at least some large portion of lottery drawings are not random. I base this belief on the fact that of repeat lottery winners, a suspicious number of them are math professors.
I'm not entirely serious, but I am enthusiastic about moon landing conspiracy theories. If nothing else, I enjoy challenging friends on whether they've actually thought about just how weird the official story is and how many weird things have happened since.
I am a firm believer that many major sporting events have been rigged and that the leagues do everything they can to keep this quiet. If you can watch this game or this game and come away feeling like someone wasn't trying to get a desired result, I don't know what to tell you.
Damn, that's good bait. Okay: I guess I haven't thought about it? The thing that most people seemed to think was weirdest was "we sent people all the way to the moon but then we couldn't get back for half a century", but we made it all the way to the moon as fast as possible by spending as much money as possible, hundreds of billions of dollars inflation-adjusted, with NASA funding then cut by 2/3rds once "we won the Space Race" had been demonstrated. We tried to switch to a cheaper launch vehicle design (but not a cheaper procurement strategy...) afterward, we failed, sunk cost fallacy kept that failure on our backs for decades, and now here we are.
My favorite space conspiracy is the Lost Cosmonauts theory, Heinlein version. "Ha ha we already put a man in space oh wait the retrorockets screwed up did we mention it was just a test dummy" sounds so much like an inept coverup of a death. If there actually had been a coverup I'd have expected some documents/details/myths to have been leaked in post-Soviet Russia, though, along with the N-1 failures and the more salacious retellings of Komarov's death.
This is, of course, kind of weird, but not nearly as weird as it being such a solved problem that we were sending golf equipment along for the ride! Or that moon rocks keep turning out to be fakes, or that we lost all of the telemetry data, or that everyone working on the Artemis Program keeps using verbiage that strongly implies that we have no idea how a ton of this is supposed to work. Of course, flipping through any of the conspiracy sites will provide a whole bunch more that's very weird. I don't really think it's a hoax, but I do think it's pretty weird that the people that are working on the current project don't really seem all that confident that going to the moon is something they can actually do. But really, my main question for friends is why they have such a high degree of confidence on something that they've really never even given a moment's thought to. Even though I think it's above the board, I still get a weird tingling when I notice how hard the Artemis Program is to pull off, but the Boomers tell me that when they were kids, they just grabbed some calculators and went right up for some casual golfing.
I think it's important to remember how complex manned spaceflight is and how chronically little attention is paid to end-to-end documentation. In fact, a big part of me thinks that utterly "complete" documentation is impossible because latent knowledge is so pervasive that sometimes you don't even realize you're using it as part of a step-by-step process. Furthermore, documentation outside of end user focused documentation is more about thinking through problems than a totally exhaustive record what what happened when and why for what reasons.
An interesting thought experiment I like to run with my developer friends; think of the most complex yet elegant piece of software you can think of...maybe the Linux kernel? Could Linux Torvals (or anyone) rebuild it from scratch so that its roughly functionally the same ... probably. Would the structure of the code be anything like it is .... probably not.
NASA engineers definitely know, remember (in an institutional sense), and appreciate the broad strokes of slinging a rocket at the moon, but its day one for all the details again.
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