I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit.
They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal.
> Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon
"Earth's gravitational dominance" is not a single thing; it depends on what kind of "dominance" you're talking about.
For example, even though the Moon is usually described as being in orbit about the Earth, its orbit is always concave towards the Sun. In other words, its net gravitational acceleration is always towards the Sun--even when the Earth is on the other side of it from the Sun. So by this criterion it's not in orbit about the Earth, it's in orbit about the Sun, doing a complicated do-si-do with the Earth, also in orbit about the Sun.
I'm not sure what definition of "dominance" you're using that extends the Earth's "dominance" to 4 times the distance of the Moon.
> the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon
And all the others are negligible by many orders of magnitude compared to the moon. So it's really just the moon as far as this photo is concerned (except for the small sliver that's still illuminated by sunlight, including refracted sunlight).
I think this is exactly what's been happening ever since the ad-supported business model for the Internet began to spread. None of the big tech companies know what their services are actually worth to their users. The only way to really find out would be to have users pay for them, but that's a nonstarter now.
What something is worth and what it costs are two different things. The big correlation is that if something costs more to produce than it's worth to the customer, nobody is going to make it. But if it costs less to produce than it's worth, who gets the surplus? In a competitive market, it's mostly the consumer rather than the supplier, because customers pick the supplier with the best price.
What ad-supported services did is zero out the price of anything that costs less to provide than the amount of ad revenue it generates. But the amount of ad revenue companies get per-user is already pretty small and companies are demonstrably willing to provide the existing services for that amount of money, so we know the upper bound and it's not that high.
> What something is worth and what it costs are two different things.
Yes, surplus is a thing, I agree. But that doesn't materially change what I said. The thing still has to be worth at least as much as it costs for users to be willing to pay for it, so what users will pay at least sets a lower bound on what the thing is worth to users. (Note that it can be worth different amounts to different users; the more precise way of stating it would be that in a competitive market, price equals marginal cost equals marginal value, i.e., value to the marginal user, the user who just breaks even paying that price for it.)
> What ad-supported services did is zero out the price of anything that costs less to provide than the amount of ad revenue it generates.
Which also uncouples the price from any measure of value to the user. The price is now measuring the marginal value to the ad purchasers. The value to the users can be anything greater than zero--the fact that they're using it at all means (or should mean, if the users are rational) that the value to them is positive. But it could still be less than the cost to produce. And the worse the user experience gets, the more likely it is that the value to users is less than the cost to produce, even if that cost is small.
Plus, there's a whole other piece of this that the analysis we've just done doesn't even capture: externalities. One simple way of stating what many people think is wrong with the ad-supported business model is that it creates large negative externalities that, on net, mean that the value to users is negative--but the users don't see the externalities so they don't realize this, and the tech companies have offloaded the costs of the externalities onto others, so they don't see them either.
> Note that it can be worth different amounts to different users; the more precise way of stating it would be that in a competitive market, price equals marginal cost equals marginal value, i.e., value to the marginal user, the user who just breaks even paying that price for it.
In a competitive market the price only depends on the value to users in the sense that it's required to be lower than that to make any sales. If something costs $1 to produce in a highly competitive market then the price is either going to be ~$1 completely regardless of how much more value people get from it than that, or no one will value it at even $1 and then no one will produce it. This is why farmers are always on the edge of bankruptcy even though their product is "without this you will die". Actual competitive market.
> Which also uncouples the price from any measure of value to the user.
It uncouples the lower bound. If the production cost is $1 but the user only values it at $0.50, now it still gets produced as long as the advertiser is willing to pay $1 to show the user the ads. But depending on how much you value not having ads, that could still be good. You got $0.50 worth of value without paying anything.
> And the worse the user experience gets, the more likely it is that the value to users is less than the cost to produce, even if that cost is small.
The real problem here is, they can do something you value at negative $10, but the advertiser will pay them an extra $0.05 to do it, and then they do it because "you're not the customer, you're the product".
In an idealized market this doesn't happen because then you just pay them the incremental $0.05 instead of the advertiser, but we've been screwed by the regulatory environment on both ends. For the seller it's hard to accept small amounts of money from arbitrary users without doing business with a fickle payment intermediary that wants to take a huge cut for small transactions and can shut down your business on a whim with no recourse, and for the customer it's hard to make a tiny digital payment to a service without linking it to your identity, which is often the exact thing you were trying to pay something to prevent.
But that seems like more of a problem caused by not having a good anonymous digital payments system than one caused by advertising. The advertising is just the infelicitous workaround.
> but the users don't see the externalities so they don't realize this
Externalities are when the costs are imposed on someone who isn't a party to the transaction. What you're describing is an information asymmetry.
In theory those can be solved just by providing the information to the users so they can make a better decision, but that's assuming the market is actually competitive. If e.g. you like Android and have one but don't like Google spying on you, are there viable alternatives to Google Play and the other Google services? Judging by how many people actually use them instead of the Google ones, big no. But then we're back to this really being a different problem again, this time antitrust.
> In a competitive market the price only depends on the value to users in the sense that it's required to be lower than that to make any sales.
That's a restatement of what I said: price equals marginal cost equals marginal value--the value to the marginal user, who just breaks even by making the trade.
> It uncouples the lower bound.
Which you've already agreed is the only connection. So again you're just restating what I said.
> You got $0.50 worth of value without paying anything.
First, this is irrelevant now because the advertiser got at least $1 of value (or perceived value) in exchange for $1. The user wasn't a party to that exchange at all.
Second, the user didn't pay any money, but they did pay with their data. But they don't see that cost; it's a negative externality. And it's turned out to be a pretty large one.
> The real problem here is, they can do something you value at negative $10, but the advertiser will pay them an extra $0.05 to do it, and then they do it because "you're not the customer, you're the product".
If I actually assign negative value to using the service, I won't use it at all. They can't mine my data if I don't give it to them. I personally am in this exact position with respect to, for example, Facebook.
If the negative $10 is the net of all externalities, then yes, I can end up using a service that actually makes me worse off, because I don't see the negative externalities.
> Externalities are when the costs are imposed on someone who isn't a party to the transaction.
Yes; in this case the costs of having their data monetized using ads are imposed on users, who aren't a party to the ad transaction.
> What you're describing is an information asymmetry.
I suppose it could be viewed this way, in the sense that the services don't share with users all the relevant information about how their data is used. In many cases they share practically none of it.
> that's assuming the market is actually competitive
In the sense that there are massive thumbs on the scale, yes, I agree the markets in this area are not competitive.
> That's a restatement of what I said: price equals marginal cost equals marginal value--the value to the marginal user, who just breaks even by making the trade.
The thing you're saying is backwards; the consequence rather than the cause. If the price is $1 and it can't be lower than that because that's the production cost then the user who is only willing to pay $0.90 doesn't buy it, but that has no effect on the price one way or the other.
If that user doesn't exist and the user who values it the least values it at $100, there is no user who is only breaking even. Every user has a surplus of at least $99 vs. not having it and the price is still $1 because there are a dozen companies willing to sell it for $1 who don't want to lose business by charging more than the others.
> Which you've already agreed is the only connection. So again you're just restating what I said.
It's the only connection in a competitive market. Not all of them are competitive.
> First, this is irrelevant now because the advertiser got at least $1 of value (or perceived value) in exchange for $1. The user wasn't a party to that exchange at all.
They are party to it though. They didn't pay money, but they paid in attention and have the option to patronize a different service if the market is competitive. And if it isn't then it's that rather than the ads which is the problem.
> Second, the user didn't pay any money, but they did pay with their data. But they don't see that cost; it's a negative externality. And it's turned out to be a pretty large one.
There are forms of advertising where this isn't required, e.g. you can be pretty effective with search advertising by basing the ads entirely on the search query while knowing nothing whatsoever about the user.
Obviously they then collect the data too because it makes the advertising marginally more effective, but that's the thing where you'd like to pay a nickel to have them not.
> If I actually assign negative value to using the service, I won't use it at all.
The service doesn't have to end up underwater for something stupid to be happening. You could have valued it at $15 originally and then the advertiser pays an extra $0.05 to reduce your $15 value to $5. It's still a positive number but you would much prefer to pay the extra $0.05 yourself than to lose $10 in value, except that's currently unreasonably hard to do.
> If that user doesn't exist and the user who values it the least values it at $100
In a competitive market, which is the case being talked about in what you responded to, that's impossible. If the production cost is $1, more users will keep buying the product until the marginal user values it at $1. If there are no users who value it between $100 and $1, then you don't have a competitive market; either the product or service is too specialized to permit real competition (which is highly implausible for the kinds of services we're talking about), or someone has their thumb on the scale.
> Not all of them are competitive.
The market not being competitive doesn't create any connection that isn't there in a competitive market. So it doesn't change what I said.
> They are party to it though. They didn't pay money, but they paid in attention
The transaction in which the users pay with attention is not the same as the transaction where the advertisers pay the tech company to get their ads shown. The latter transaction is the one I was talking about in what you responded to. The user is not a party to that transaction.
> you can be pretty effective with search advertising by basing the ads entirely on the search query while knowing nothing whatsoever about the user.
Yes, you do know something about the user: what search query they entered. True, it's not as much information about the user as they collect in other ways, but it's still information about the user. If I enter a search query for Depends, Google knows something about me that's of value to advertisers.
> The service doesn't have to end up underwater for something stupid to be happening
True, but irrelevant to what I was saying, or what you were saying that I responded to.
"None of the big tech companies know what their services are actually worth to their users".
The users are the product. They sell their attention to the advertisers. And they know exactly how much that attention is worth, because they use auctions to set the price.
In other words, you agree with me that the tech companies don't know what their services are worth to users. They know what their ads are worth to advertisers, which is not the same thing.
They also basically don't care what their services are worth to users, except in the very weak sense that the services have to be sufficient to get users to use them. But that's an extremely low bar.
> When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.
I mean, there is discussion and a sense of community here. I’m not sure what exactly defines social media, but this is more than just a link aggregator.
Old forums weren't called social media. I think for it to be social media it has to be about your social graph, here on HN I almost never read peoples names and I don't really connect with people so it isn't social media, its just media with comments.
If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.
> there is discussion and a sense of community here
That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.
There's a massive whitewashing of what "social media" is. I don't feel there's one singular definition but I could be wrong, maybe I am the one who missed the boat. But I'd really love to see it quantified more
eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook
Are you referring to
a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction
b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction
c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction
I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)
I would say social media is any website where the connections between the participants are as important or even more important than the content. As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.
The first Google search hit for the UK variant of the law[1] says this:
This includes a range of websites, apps and other services, including social media services, consumer file cloud storage and sharing sites, video-sharing platforms, online forums, dating services, and online instant messaging services.
> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?
AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
Depends on what you consider "practically its entire existence": the same could be said of Google Search if we are looking at how long they did not compared to the rest of the time, but I distinctly remember the period when they did not and when I recommended them to my entire social circle as The Search Engine (compared to Yahoo, Altavista, MSN or whatever else was there at the time) or The Social Network (compared to MySpace, I can't remember anything else that was comparable).
The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
> "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
If you read Feynman's account in the book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, you'll see that he realized afterwards that he was prompted to make the demonstration he made at a NASA press conference--putting a piece of O-ring material in a glass of ice water, clamped with a C-clamp, and then taking it out and releasing the clamp to show that the material did not spring back--to get public attention focused on problems with the joint in a way that could not be ignored. But, as has been pointed out downthread, when the joint was redesigned, the new design did not change the O-rings at all. So the specific issue that was shown in Feynman's demonstration was not the issue that actually needed to be fixed. It was just a convenient way to show the public that there were problems with the joint, with a simple demonstration that everyone could understand. Trying to show the actual problem--that the entire joint design was fundamentally flawed and needed to be changed--would not have worked in a context like that.
> What would happen "normally" (i.e. the normalization of deviance) was that the rotation (from the SRB joints bowing--essentially "ballooning") would create a gap, and the O-rings would get blown into that gap and ultimately seal in there
But data from previous Shuttle flights showed that even that wasn't happening, at temperatures up to 75 F. And the Thiokol engineers had test stand data showing that it wasn't happening even at temperatures up to 100 F. In short, that joint design was unacceptably risky at any temperature.
It is probably true that the design was somewhat more unacceptably risky at 29 F. But that was a relatively minor point. The reason the cold temperature was focused on by the Thiokol engineers (who were overruled by their own managers in the end, as well as NASA managers) in the call the night before the launch was not that they had a good case for increased risk at cold temperature; it was that the cold temperature argument was the only thing they had to fight with--because NASA had already refused to listen to their much better arguments the previous summer for stopping all Shuttle flights until the joint design could be fixed.
Your "only" here makes it seem like predicting experiments is a narrow thing. It's not. All of the modern technologies we have--including the computers we're all using to post here--are based on science "predicting experiments"--but the "experiments" are things like building computers, or the Internet, or the GPS system. The fact that all those things work exactly as our science predicts makes it very hard to view that science as "only predicting experiments". It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.
Not only that - one could argue that all observed phenomena are experiments, and the way we behave in the world is based on predicting them.
A religious person - if not honest enough to simply say "existence of God is an axiom and cannot be derived from reason alone" - uses the very predictions of experiments to reason God into existence: everything that exists has a cause; universe exists; therefore universe has a cause.
Epistemically speaking, the existence of God is not axiomatic. Your second claims is more accurate, though not entirely. Knowledge of God's existence is derived from observed features of reality. However, these features are very general and not scientific per se; rather, they are presupposed by empirical science. Examples include the reality of change, causality (especially per se vs. what science is generally concerned with, per accidens), or the existence of things. The denial of these general features would undermine not just the possibility of science, but the very intelligibility of the world. You would hang yourself by your own skepticism.
These are also not axiomatically accepted features either (except perhaps in the sense that they are in relation to the empirical sciences, as science presupposes their existence).
Did you read my entire post? I already explained to you why this isn't the case. We known that, for example, change is real through general observation, but it is not something belonging to any empirical science per se. Rather, it is presupposed by each of those sciences.
Of course, the classical definition of "science" is more expansive, including what would be the most general science - metaphysics - so in that sense, yes, you can say the existence of God is a "scientific fact". (God here is self-subsisting being, not some ridiculous "sky fairy" straw man of New Atheist imagination.)
Yes I did, but the rest of the comment hangs on the initial claim I replied to.
If you redefine God to mean "fundamental assumptions of the universe", its existence becomes tautological. But that is not what most people mean (including the author of the article we're commenting on) when they say "God".
> Yes I did, but the rest of the comment hangs on the initial claim I replied to.
It does not, because the crux of the matter isn't observation as such, but that there is a difference between observing particular events or "special facts" (those the special sciences deal with), which carry with them greater uncertainty and error, and general observations and general facts. It is more certain, not less, that change is a feature of the world, that things exist, and so on, than whether the universe is expanding or whether some species has a mating ritual or whatever.
Otherwise, I have no idea what your point is.
> If you redefine God to mean "fundamental assumptions of the universe", its existence becomes tautological. But that is not what most people mean (including the author of the article we're commenting on) when they say "God".
This is confused.
The first thing one must do is distinguish between the epistemic order and the metaphysical order. That is, the order in which we know things is not the same as the causal order of things known. In fact, it is generally the reverse, because we see the effects of things before we come to know their causes. Thus, while God is metaphysically speaking the first cause, epistemically we begin with everyday general observation and through rational demonstration arrive at what must be the first cause, what must be true of of the first cause, etc, in order for general facts under consideration to hold. (And axioms are, strictly speaking, entities belonging to the epistemic order; in the causal order, you can talk about first cause(s).)
What the author means by "God" is exactly what I wrote - self-subsisting being. I know this because he is a Thomist, and this is the archetypal notion of God of classical theism (unlike views like so-called theistic personalism). It is irrelevant what most people (ostensibly) believe "is God", because we're not interested in taking a vote. We're interested in determining what the ultimate cause of everything is, what must be true of this cause, and so on. "God" is the traditional name for this first cause.
> It is irrelevant what most people (ostensibly) believe "is God", because we're not interested in taking a vote.
This concedes exactly the point I was making. You are stripping the word "God" of its established attributes (such as intellect, intent, and agency) and reducing it to a highly specific technical definition of a "self-subsisting being" or "first cause".
> "God" is the traditional name for this first cause.
This is a linguistic bait-and-switch. You cannot use a strictly literal, narrowed definition of a term to construct a logical proof, and then implicitly rely on the common interpretation of that same term to assert a broader reality. Labeling a mechanical first cause as "God" deliberately smuggles in the classical theistic baggage that your general observations about causality do not actually demonstrate.
Observing that change exists and positing a fundamental necessity for it does not prove a deity. Calling that fundamental necessity "God" is just a tautology designed to shield a religious premise behind sterile metaphysical jargon.
> That's a straightforwardly circular argument - creating your own definition, then using it as a proof.
Which definition? That of "God"? I didn't "create" that definition. It is the archetype of classical theism. It is the product of analysis from which we get the famous distinction between existence and essence. Only in God is there no distinction between existence in essence, as the first cause's essence is "to be".
And besides, when do you not define something before proving it? This isn't circular. I don't see where you are noting circularity. In fact, I didn't prove anything at all. Others have.
> Change is not presupposed by science. Various experiences/models of change are described by science, which is not the same thing at all.
Of course change is presupposed. It isn't explicitly stated, just as the presupposition that the world is intelligible isn't explicitly presupposed, but it is tacitly presupposed by the scientific enterprise itself. Science cannot deny such basic presuppositions without upending itself.
If you can't see that w.r.t. change, then consider some of the other presuppositions, like the fact that things exist.
> There are block universe interpretations of cosmology which do not require change.
So much worse for the block universe! It is as self-refuting to deny the reality of change - the very act of denying it involves change - as it is to claim that it is true that there is no truth, or that it is true that we cannot know the truth.
Scientific models - or more likely their interpretations - are not always faithful to reality as such. They can have observational correspondence without fidelity. Interpretations are where people often read in their bad metaphysical presuppositions into bona fide scientific results, forgetting the distinction. For instance, a Platonic interpretation of mathematics might lead some to think that the world represented by their physical model is actually static and eternal, but even though that is bogus, that physical theory can still function predicatively. Evolution suffers from similar problems, where evolutionism is presented by some as a necessary reading of evolutionary theory.
> Examples include the reality of change, causality (especially per se vs. what science is generally concerned with, per accidens), or the existence of things.
How do any of these things allow you to derive knowledge of God's existence?
> It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.
That's the popular definition of the word "real".
But this article is about the philosophical meaning of the word "real". And from that viewpoint science hasn't delivered yet, science doesn't know yet what "really exists out there", it can only predict how that thing behaves in experiments.
> this article is about the philosophical meaning of the word "real".
If the philosophical meaning of "real" admits that computers, the Internet, and the GPS system are real, then I don't see what grounds it has for rejecting that things like transistors and electrons and other such underlying things are real as well, since transistors and electrons and other such underlying things are what we build computers, the Internet, and the GPS system out of.
If the philosophical meaning of "real" casts doubt on whether computers, the Internet, and the GPS system are "real", then why should we care about it?
> from that viewpoint science hasn't delivered yet
If science hasn't, then neither has anything else.
> Is it rational or realistic to assume we don't have analogous perceptual and conceptual limitations
I never claimed we don't have perceptual and conceptual limitations. Indeed, recognizing that we do should make us extremely wary of "philosophical" concepts like "real" that appear to go beyond the obvious pragmatic definitions that I described, that are grounded in what we can actually do with things.
Pragmatism as a broad, basic, and reductive view of knowledge is self-refuting and incoherent. If "truth is what is useful" or "what works," you face a self-refutation problem. If you claim something is just "useful" rather than objectively true, then it has no authority. If it is claimed as objectively true, it contradicts the pragmatic premise that truth isn't a relation to reality. And what is "useful", anyhow? Is usefulness useful?
> Pragmatism as a broad, basic, and reductive view of knowledge
I have nowhere advocated any such thing. The fact that I used the word "pragmatic" does not mean I was adopting the view you describe here. Not everyone agrees with your philosophical jargon and the baggage it carries with it.
the question is about what does fundamentally exist, not what you perceive through eyes or experiments.
do particles exist or not? is it all just in your imagination because you are a "brain in a vat?" what about the everettian multi-verse, is that real or not?
by saying these SCIENTIFIC questions are trivial to answer because you can hold a GPS receiver in your hand is to completly misunderstand what is being discussed here
nobody said something else deliverd on this question. but neither did science. it's the consensus in physics right now that it can't say what "really exists", this is not a fringe position
No, I'm not. I'm just not drinking the "philosophical" Kool-Aid.
> do particles exist or not?
What difference does it make? What should I expect to see if particles "exist", that I should not expect to see if they don't?
> what about the everettian multi-verse, is that real or not?
Same question as above.
> by saying these SCIENTIFIC questions
If you can't answer the questions I posed above about what difference it makes, on what grounds are you saying such questions are scientific?
> are trivial to answer
I made no such claim. You are attacking a straw man.
> it's the consensus in physics right now that it can't say what "really exists"
I completely agree.
But you appear to think this is a flaw in science. I think it'a a flaw in the question "what really exists?" And as far as I can tell, that's what most physicists who hold the "consensus" position you describe think as well.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
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