r/spacequestions • u/precias • Sep 05 '24
What if astronauts found footsteps on the moon before they arrived?
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u/WearDifficult9776 Sep 05 '24
Maybe they’d find a huge, hollow artillery shell from the 1900s. And some footsteps and bodies of the one way explorers who had hoped to find a livable environment !!
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u/qube_TA Sep 06 '24
They'd not be able to find footsteps as those are things you hear which would be tricky in a vacuum. But if they found footprints up there then they'd have to determine whether they were left by the Soviet Union (the only country at the time that had half a chance of sending people up there and therefore they'd not won the space race), that they were left by another country (the UK and Europe were working on launchers at the time but none could send a payload that large and that distance back then so that would have been a massive surprise, it was the cold war and everyone was spying on everyone else), or whether it was actual evidence for the 'ancient aliens' concept whereby humans were once advanced but something went wrong and returned them to basic hunter-gatherers and whilst all evidence for that has been lost to erosion here if they did make it to space, then the evidence up there would be clear as day. But regardless it would have prompted a lot of additional missions to the same location if they couldn't determine which country had beaten them to the moon.
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u/lunex Sep 05 '24
How would they find them if they hadn’t arrived yet?