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In Day of the Moon, the Doctor implants a message in the Apollo moon landing video to kill the Silence on sight.

In Time of the Doctor, the Silence are seen as confessional priests.

Since Time of the Doctor is farther in the future than the Silence, the message to kill the Silence should still be active for anyone who ever watched the moon landing footage (which I would assume would still be taught and shown to humans as it was an important part of Earth history), so why didn't the human members of the Papal Mainframe attack the Silence confessional priests?

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    What makes you think they're human? Or that they grew up on Earth?
    – tilley31
    Commented Jun 9, 2014 at 20:55
  • The whole point was that the Doctor assumes that the moon landing is a seminal moment in human history and that even a potted video history will certainly contain some footage of it.
    – Valorum
    Commented Jun 10, 2014 at 17:40

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Which I would assume would still be taught and shown to humans as it was an important part of Earth history.

Which itself is a Very Earth, 20th Century, 1st World centric point of view. And begs a few questions. What makes you think a small clip of some grainy 20th Century film, which even today is still seen as American History instead of Human history, will exist a few thousand years in the future? That something that 28% of Russians, 25% of UK (Poll targeting technical and engineering minded people at that) and 9~14% of the US don't believe/unsure happened. Multiple countries straight teach it as a conspiracy. Only 1/5th of the planet has TV, even less have internet. Or that something more important won't replace it? Or that it won't fall into the "obscure trivia" category once space travel becomes an everyday occurrence. Hell, we can't even recreate the apollo program today, less than a century since it happened. How long until it falls into the myth category?

In world though, it can be quickly explained as something the Papal Mainframe found out and fixed as it happened.

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  • Thanks. I suppose that it makes sense the moon landing would eventually fall into the myth category, and not be taught further.
    – user28134
    Commented Jun 11, 2014 at 13:53
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    "Multiple countries straight teach it as a conspiracy." - source for a national curriculum that teaches (or has ever taught) the 1969 moon landing to be conspiracy?
    – OrangeDog
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 12:03
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All information on the silence deletes itself after some time has passed hence the clip has probably been deleted by the time that the papal mainframe activates. The suggestion only lasts so long after watching, so once the act is completed you forget that you was even supposed to do it.

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    Hello and welcome to SFF! Could you add some sources/evidence to back up your answer? Thanks.
    – TheLethalCarrot ♦
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 11:13

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