Ridicule them until they leave? Don't really feel like wasting my time on any more than that.

of course they are sore losers

> This is all CG.

Reminds me of the classic - It is true that Spielberg filmed the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he wanted to shoot on location.

Ya, but eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building. Its all good fun until people start to die. We laugh as soveriegn citizens are yanked from thier cars. Harder to watch are the vids of them pulling guns on police.

Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.

> a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc

Yeah, because this is high-school curriculum.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-lig...

> with absolute certainty

It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.

I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance".

Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.

For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.

However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.

If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.

This planetary reclassification was not the first.

When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)

However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.

Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.

> ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.

Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty.

Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.

Your argument is against large generalizations and straw man arguments, and to prove it, you.. use a generalization and straw man argument?

Do you believe in Antarctica?

They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.

Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?

Im curious, so the rocket definitely took off, where did it go?