The Technology Is Just Not Ready to Fake Another Moon Landing

The first moon landing occurred in 1969. Now that we want to return to the moon, many are wondering: why can’t we do it, decades and decades later, since technology has advanced so much since then? Shouldn’t this be… easy?

It’s natural to ask those questions if you don’t understand how technology works.

Sure, space exploration technology has advanced, and space exploration faking technology has advanced. But home entertainment, personal computing, and communication technologies have advanced faster. Given these conditions, we may be decades away from being able to fake another moon landing.

In 1969, pretty much everyone had a TV in their house: a wooden box that weighed a hundred pounds and had a tiny, often black-and-white screen that showed grainy, blurry images from a total of three channels accessed through an antenna that would fail if vibrations from walking through the living room budged it a fraction of a millimeter. We hadn’t yet invented a home television that could reliably show a 60-minute episode of Bonanza without blowing a valve and forcing America’s dads to risk electrocution by opening the back of the set and repairing it with a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of gin in the other.

Yet with this technology, we “put a man on the moon.”

If we tried another “moon landing” shown on today’s high-def large-screen televisions, no one would believe the crap videos that the gullible rubes with their garbage TVs counted as evidence of a moon landing five decades ago.

In 1969, the computer mouse was a big wooden block with a little red joystick sticking out one end. But nobody had one in their house, because no one had a computer in their house, because computers at the time were massive and required an advanced degree in computer science to operate. If a young person had doubts about something, they could venture to ask their parents, who would respond, “Of course the goddamn moon landing was real. We saw it on our giant 21-inch Zenith TV. Now fetch me my cigarettes and gin.” No one could google anything. In fact, in 1969, we were still two years away from a proto-internet successfully transmitting information between two remote computers. That didn’t happen until 1971.

Yet in 1969, we “put a man on the moon.”

If you think it seems difficult to send people to the moon on a rocket ship without the technology to transfer information between computers, you’re right. It was impossible. But having that technology available to everyone makes it even more difficult to “send people to the moon” today: everyone has a tiny, powerful computer in their pocket. Any dope can instantly send all their friends a message reading, “Dude LMFAO do you think maybe this moon landing is fake?” With so much computing power dispersed across the population, allowing people to cross-check and verify information in real time, a moon landing would be almost impossible to fake.

We simply do not have the technology for a “moon landing” today: Moon landing fake technology has not kept pace with moon landing fake-detecting technology.

In the year 2025, if we wanted to “put a person on the moon,” we’d need completely different technology. Either we’d need regular people to have much worse entertainment and computer technology, or we’d need space exploration organizations to have much better space exploration faking technology.

But I still believe, in this century, we’ll “send astronauts to the moon” again. With any luck, sooner rather than later, climate change will have so devastated the Earth that we’ll need to restrict everyone’s access to energy-draining devices. They’ll no longer be able to judge the veracity of moon landings on their crystal-clear big-screen TVs, and they’ll no longer be able to share their dumb but maybe accurate conspiracy theories on their computers and phones.

Then, when they hear about our new “moon landing” on their tallow-powered transistor radios, they’ll believe in it, and humanity can unite under the hope that one day “space exploration” will allow us to start all over again on Mars.