Roundworld Conspiracy: Souls in the System & Conclusion

Part 11 - Souls in the System

Sargent starts this one off with a discussion of a documentary intended to prove that the moon landings were hoaxes. The part that has his attention here is that the Apollo astronauts that the film maker had attempted to interview had refused to swear on the Christian Bible to the truth of their stories.

I don't know about you, but if I had spent years of my life and risked death for a history-making achievement, and years later someone lied to get an interview and accused me of faking the whole thing, asking me to swear to it as though I were on trial, I would be pretty angry. Should Buzz Aldrin have physically assaulted the man? Probably not. Was it an overreaction? Not in my opinion.

And that's it! That's his entire "proof" for this clue. From there he only speculates about how humanity would react to finding out we are in an enclosed world. Of course, as I've said before, he assumes that the only possible explanation for such a system is, basically, God. He assumes that we'd all accept that we're being watched and judged, and that we'd all suddenly behave as though we knew we were being tested. Those are big assumptions, I'd love to see the research behind them. Unfortunately, he doesn't provide any.

So this was yet another so-called "clue" that provides nothing to actually refute, because it fails to provide any evidence. As a consolation prize, here's a grainy video of Neil deGrasse Tyson being interviewed for Joe Rogan's podcast, where Joe seems to be trying to convince Neil to admit it's all fake, or convince him that it is, it's hard to say. Personally, I enjoyed the whole clip, but if you want to skip to discussion of the actual footage, that starts at about five minutes.

Conclusion

So that's it. The transcripts at EnclosedWorld.com show place-holders for two more parts to this series, but as of this writing they have yet to be produced. So, 11 "clues", about two hours of footage, and the closest thing he had to actual evidence relied on a faulty understanding of how GPS works.

I know I shouldn't let my personal opinions show through when I'm discussing scientific ideas, but I can't help but reiterate my stance on this one, and it applies to a lot of anti-scientific thinking. What a lot of these arguments boil down to are basically arrogance and wilful ignorance. The arguer prefers their own narrative, and the experts have been unable to explain the evidence in a sufficiently simplistic way to convince them, therefore the expert must be wrong.

But that's not how reality works. Experts are people who spend their lives studying their fields, finding evidence and formulating explanations to fit the evidence. If you haven't studied that field, of course some of the explanations are going to sound a little far-fetched, but that doesn't mean you get to declare them wrong, it just means you don't understand. If you really want to prove that the world works a different way, you've got to study the science and find hard evidence that contradicts that explanation. Once you have that, you can formulate a new explanation, and if it fits all the evidence better than any previous theory, not only are you going to completely turn the scientific consensus on its head, but you're probably going to get world-wide recognition for doing it. That's how heroes are made in the world of science.

Producing a few amateur videos filled with bad storytelling and misconceptions isn't going to come anywhere close to cutting it.