Ridiculous Beliefs

[@JubileeBloom]

I have a friend who thought reindeer were a fictional species until her 20s. Honestly, I can't even fully blame her for that one. 90% of the time when reindeer are mentioned it's in the same breath as toymaking elves and an immortal man who can travel faster than the speed of sound.

[@m4rcyonstation93]

THEY ARE REAL????

[@BrandonSwinney-j2v]

@@m4rcyonstation93 yes, reindeer are real. I'm pretty sure reindeer is basically just a term domesticated caribou. they don't fly, of course.

[@StarshadowMelody]

@@BrandonSwinney-j2v Well they _Should._

[@bwayagnes]

They’re real?! :00

[@ScrumpeyBros]

@@StarshadowMelody Well, if you can convince some geneticists to genetically engineer a reindeer with hollow bones and wings...

[@Fayanora]

At least some of this can be explained by all the light pollution in our modern world. When the power went out in LA once, years ago, there were lots of panicked 911 calls about weird lights in the sky. These turned out to be the Milky Way. The sudden disappearance of all that light pollution made the sky actually visible at night, so they were seeing the Milky Way galaxy for the first time in their lives that night.

[@catbatrat1760]

Geez. That's... really sad, actually.

[@leondyer3855]

​@@catbatrat1760 it also has an element of Eldritch horror I think

[@catbatrat1760]

@@leondyer3855 Oh yeah, I guess it does

[@Blue_Bunny_Boy]

That's wild, but still just wild to me because I've never been able to see the stars at night once where I live, and I still know that planets exist. Like I'd understand people being shocked that you can see Mars from Earth, not... that it exists

[@RoboCop4000]

There's an Isaac Asimov story about this called Nightfall

[@cat21860]

The destroyed Pluto one sounds like her parents just liked lying to her as a kid.

[@someonessecondaltaccount6932]

What kind of parents did you have that you think they would lie about a planet getting destroyed

[@cat21860]

@ my parents didn’t lie to me about those sorts of things, but I had friends from very religious household that would lie to them for both agendas and convenience.

[@evanlogan3595]

I mean, it did stop being a planet.... it just became a Dwarf Planet. I can totally understand getting that confused with a movie if you never thought about the Solar System.

[@inkmaster5480]

@@someonessecondaltaccount6932 Some parents lie to their kids simply because they find it entertaining. My dad once tried to convince me that he could breathe through his ears.

[@johnmcconnell8826]

My personal theory is that their parents told them that Pluto was no longer a planet, but then they asked why, and not bothering to explain the requirements of being a planet (likely after the child asked several times) the parents just gave up and said it was swallowed by a black hole, hoping to shut them up and not really considering the consequences 😅

[@novacorponline]

2:00 Its the year 2046, Neil Degrasse Tyson, sick of getting constant letters angry at him for his position on demoting Pluto from being a planet has sent a shuttle armed with a nuclear warhead to finally get rid of Pluto once and for all.

[@scitimas12]

You'd need quite a few. It'd be easier to knock its largest moon Charon into it, as it's like half its diameter and a tenth its mass (bigger than moon:earth mass and diameter ratio) and would decimate the surface. Probably create rings.

[@DumAzzFairy]

​@scitimas12 arent there theories that pluto and chiron were historically confused as a single larger mass ? Or am i just making shit up?

[@babababad]

​@@scitimas12"its"..."its largest moon"

[@scitimas12]

@@babababad rip my grammar

[@EmilyMemily-it3xp]

@@scitimas12 After making that correction, you’ll be more gramatical than like 80% of people. no one uses its and it’s correctly D:.

[@iamthewalrus8391]

"It doesn't have anything to do with me" reminds me of Sherlock Holmes. In the books, he's so focused on identifying different types of cigar ash, or how long after death a body can bruise, that he is not aware that the moon orbits the earth, or the earth orbits the sun. And let me be clear Watson sees this as INSANE how someone can be so smart and so stupid.

[@inkmaster5480]

Something they carried over to the Sherlock TV show.

[@whatusernameis5295]

Watson even told him at one point and Sherlock got annoyed that now he would have to forget that information to free up the brain space for more useful information

[@StarshadowMelody]

Ah, the consequences of specialization.

[@Arkylie]

@@StarshadowMelody There's literally no reason for Sherlock to concern himself with such matters; knowing them would not significantly improve his life in any obvious way, and ignorance of them does not harm him. He's wrong about the brain being a finite storage space (in that a lifetime can't fill it above capacity), but in another way he's right, as we have finite time, energy, and focus to devote to incoming data storage and correlation, so it makes sense to ignore what doesn't matter to your life's work or your personal interests.

[@SofosProject]

​@@Arkylie Interestingly, having read most of the Sherlock stories, I can say that in a later story, he changes his mind and says something to the effect of "you never know what will come in handy for the detective", which also makes sense because his investigations have led him to making use of a wide variety of information.

[@c_x_3]

As funny as this is, a part of me also feels bad because whether it’s a parent or their schooling or literally anything, I feel like someone has to have catastrophically fucked up their job when these people were kids for them to have come to these conclusions.

[@averagegamingplayer]

Also, I can't imagine not having a phase where you love to learn about the planets and galaxies.

[@CloverField83]

In the modern age, you can also blame online echo chambers reinforcing their ignorance.

[@CybernerdShua]

Thinking Pluto was destroyed is, while thoroughly ignorant, also very understandable.

[@solalabell9674]

You severely underestimate how hopeless some people are obviously lots omit people were done dirty but some people won’t be able to figure it out

[@lajoyous1568]

I can remember the entire class having to make models of the solar system. The teacher had to point out that no matter how accurate they may look for color and perhaps scale, it was impossible to space them out accurately because Pluto (was still a planet back then) was so far from the sun it would need to be out of the classroom and in the hallway.

[@Horizonx527]

As someone who is fascinated by space this pained me Well done

[@DeathnoteBB]

As someone pained my ignorance I died

[@scitimas12]

I knew more than these people when I was in elementary school. This is so disappointing

[@battlesheep2552]

Fun fact: one of the reasons commercial flights generally dont go over antartica is because if an accident occurred and the plane went down, they'd be pretty much effed given how difficult it would be to get to the plane before everyone froze to death.

[@crazysasha1374]

Huh I had heard that there just aren't that many big cities close to the Antarctic circle that were connected with flights that cross Antarctica.

[@WeirdWimp]

@@crazysasha1374 that too

[@mrsejd3446]

Also if you actually look at the globe, it just isn't viable to flight straight over Antarctica. There are other flights that can get you from Australia to South America in a shorter period of time.

[@savvivixen8490]

I figured as much. Unless you're somehow flying along the Cirlce of Capricorn from one Antarctic settlement to another, I doubt planes have much reason to cross above the bulk of the Antarctic land mass...

[@Gamesaucer]

A bunch of plane routes go over the Arctic though. The conditions would be very similar there. So I very much doubt this explanation. And that's not to even mention cross-oceanic flights. What are you going to do if a plane goes down in the middle of the Atlantic? How are you any more likely to survive that? You just have to hope the plane stays afloat for long enough for everyone to board life rafts and then hope that you get spotted and rescued before you drown or die of thirst. At least on ice the plane wouldn't _sink,_ and if the hull is mostly intact it'll trap the warmth inside for a good while--which is on top of the fact that the plane might still have working climate control systems. After all, if the crash was so bad that it tore the plane to pieces you wouldn't have good odds of surviving the initial impact anyway, and that'd be true no matter where it happens.

[@garynumber22]

"How do you know planets are real?" My brother in Christ you're currently standing on one!

[@gerstein03]

No no you don't understand. Obviously the universe exists as planes of existence and we are on the material plane (yes this is from DND)

[@battlesheep2552]

It's not a planet, it's a pizza!

[@bluelfsuma]

That would've been my first response.

[@SorielHDTBers]

THAT’S LITERALLY WHAT I WAS THINKING THE ENTIRE TIME!

[@SorielHDTBers]

@@bluelfsumaSame!

[@Scottthespy13]

My mom has a story about sitting on the beach at midnight at a new years party, and this lady looks up at the sky and sighs, "That's my favorite planet." And mom looks up and can see both Mars and Venus, so she asks "Which one?" And the lady gives her a funny look and says, "The moon." Like it's obvious. And mom without even thinking laughed and said "The moon's not a planet!" And the lady now looks angry and says "Well then what is it?" In a smarmy 'you don't know what you're talking about' tone. And mom realizes she's serious and blinks at her and slowly says, "...it's a *moon*. To the planet Earth." And the lady just makes a disgusted sound and walks away. To this day, we call her 'planet moon lady'.

[@imagiguard]

While I don't believe in astrology, I think she could've gone by astrology logic in deducing the Moon as a planet. Besides astrology, in antiquity, both the Sun and the Moon were considered planets, and this is why them being included alongside the other five visible with the naked eye led to the "lucky 7" belief.

[@ghostkitten9264]

POV: you meet someone who learned her astronomy by watching Sailor Moon

[@Masquerade37]

POV: You met one of the moon aliens from Ducktales 2019, from the planet Moon

[@triacontahedron]

@@Masquerade37 1. *2017 (maybe you were talking about the year they debuted in, idk though) 2. I thought "Okay, Lunaris" as soon as I read "planet moon".

[@JonBrase]

Planet means "wanderer". The classical planets are the things in the sky that wander (don't stay in the same place relative to the "fixed" stars. The stars actually move, but too slowly to be seen within a human lifetime). So the sun, the moon, and the naked-eye planets.

[@MomirViggwilv]

We have GOT to teach people to be curious. A curious mind isn't satisfied with "it didn't affect me so I didn't care."

[@mythicalslugbeam130]

Exactly.

[@sporovid5856]

All children are born curious. Unfortunately though, school makes the process of learning so terrible that kids begin to associate learning with negative feelings. This is how we end up with adults who have no sense of curiosity whatsoever.

[@scitimas12]

​@sporovid5856 it's all about encouragement and accessibility. It doesn't matter how accessible it is if you're not encouraged to care, and if it's not accessible than it's had to gain the knowledge no matter how much curiosity you have.

[@yay29823]

Do you HAVE to be curious about e everything, though? Shouldn't people choose what they'll be curious about?

[@scitimas12]

@yay29823 well at least a little curious. They don't have to care that much, but just enough to ask why something is like that. They don't have to be experts

[@RavenWolffe77]

Carl Sagan is spinning in his grave so fast that the enraged red lasers pouring from his eyes could be mistaken for a pulsar.

[@daniellelondon439]

These takes are just WILD. Makes me wonder what the heck goes on in other people’s brains.

[@Bobb11881]

From the sound of things, not much.

[@deinsilverdrac8695]

Blacl hole apparently. Sucking up all form of intelligence. I mean, have none of these even watched Futurama ?

[@benwagner5089]

Like yelling into a void.

[@GillfigGarstang]

It’s mostly a sort of rattling sound, like when you put a bobby pin in an empty tumble dryer.

[@dr.cheeze5382]

I bet you have some insane beliefs you aren't remotely aware of. Ignorance is not stupidity. Scoffing at the idea that you could be wrong is.

[@Spaceracer_]

Omg, I literally learned about this the other day!!! I'm currently studying to become a teacher and one of my professors for educational science showed us studies about common misconceptions last week, and some of the hot takes about how the planets and stars worked were so flabbergasting! But it effectively showed us students that we have to prepare for misconceptions and learn how to tackle them; because: If these misconceptions are never addressed in childhood, they WILL absolutely stay until adolescence (and probably forever, if they are never addressed)

[@PINDAPELLERKIP]

What were some of those misconceptions?

[@lucyseverine9907]

Oh do you have any names of those studies? That'd be interesting reading.

[@GillfigGarstang]

My mum used to know a woman who was studying early childhood education who didn’t realise stars were actually other suns and not just ‘little twinkly things’. The thing that got through to her of all things was getting her to think about where exactly all the fictional planets in Star Trek were supposed to be located if our solar system only has nine planets, and what she thought the graphic of little dots flying past at different speeds when they enter warp was supposed to represent.

[@geoshark12]

The only people in this video that are stupid ate the ones who refuse the notions that they might be wrong , ignorance isn’t the same as being stupid, your only stupid if your unwilling to learn

[@Valandar2]

THIS. Ignorance can be cured with education, stupidity is incurable.

[@catbatrat1760]

@@Valandar2 Maybe cured with time, if anything. Idk if that's wishful thinking, though.

[@megarockman]

It does take effort and patience.

[@a2ndchnltoitslf]

@@Valandar2 Wasn't it the other way around?

[@andiwrath2293]

Agree entirely. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Stupidity is an inability to gain knowledge. Willful ignorance is deliberately refusing to learn; it's where seasoning incompetence stems from.

[@Bobb11881]

We interrupt your normal wholesome Bettina Levy content to destroy your faith in humanity.

[@brilliant_Potato]

Destroyed just like Pluto 😞

[@sketch-eee4165]

Meanwhile this grounded me from an anxiety moment due to realizing that I am technically smarter than many of these humans. Brain cant beat myself up about how stupid I am when these people dont know Earth exist!

[@TanukiTracks]

@@sketch-eee4165 this is both reassuring but still terrifying, thank you.

[@Gabu_]

​@@sketch-eee4165 Good for you. It only made me more certain that the world I grew in is dead and gone, killed by idiocracy.

[@PastaV4]

​@@sketch-eee4165LMAO?? IM USING THAT AGAINST MY SELF-DESTRUCTIVE BRAIN JVFKFKICNK-

[@averagegamingplayer]

It's hard for me to understand the people who say they don't care about the actual planets, but will also talk about their wild theories about how the universe works to no end.

[@JonBrase]

3:47 The crazy thing is, the classical planets were what was used to originally define the word "planet", so even if you don't believe that Mars is a huge sphere of rock that you can travel to and walk on "Mars sure looks bright tonight" is still a valid statement, because the name "Mars" just refers to that one particular bright light in the sky that people have been watching for thousands of years before they had a clue what it was. It could have turned out to be something totally different (a warlike Greco-Roman superhero wandering the sky, for instance), but it would still be called "Mars", and it would still be a "planet", because we assigned those names when all we knew was that there were traveling points of light in the sky.

[@janTesika]

"I don't have anything to do with the moon, what do I care?" ah yes, the Sherlock Holmes defence.

[@Doctor-NOOOOOOOOOOO]

Curiosity is dead. Dopamine is fuel. Tiktok user database is full

[@RedKincaid]

At a certain point some years ago I stopped feeling superior when hearing about strange and incorrect beliefs, and that feeling was replaced with a certainty that I hold one or several beliefs that are just as ridiculous, just waiting to be revealed. Now I just feel sympathy and hope that these people can learn and grow, in hopes that the same can be true of me

[@timohara7717]

You are unbigotable, truky a master of open mindedness

[@minaashido518]

Truky a saint

[@someonessecondaltaccount6932]

I wish I could send images in KZbin so I could find a positive reaction image to show you

[@EMLtheViewer]

I wish I could receive a comprehensive list of every belief and piece of knowledge I hold that is false or misleading. Then I wish everyone else could get the same thing for themselves.

[@Corvus_Brachyrhynchos]

👍

[@Florkl]

1:40 Serious Sherlock Holmes energy right here (Sherlock Holmes has the same justification for deliberately forgetting that the earth orbits the sun, as he believes his brain has a finite memory, and doesn’t want to fill it with irrelevant information).

[@lykanaslupus]

2:03 The implications of Pluto actually being sucked in by a Black Hole is immensely terrifying.

[@minaashido518]

If Pluto was eaten by a black hole, we wouldn’t be around to talk about it, how does she think black holes work???

[@TanukiTracks]

@@minaashido518 It only works if you don't know how they work.

[@saarl99]

A black hole isn't a vacuum cleaner, it doesn't suck stuff in. I has gravity like any other body. A black hole swallowing Pluto would have nearly the same effect on the solar system as an equally massive object colliding with it. Which, since I guess most black holes are multiple times more massive than the sun, would be pretty catastrophic, yeah. But we wouldn't be sucked in, we would just be flung out to interstellar space.

[@lykanaslupus]

@saarl99 Congratulations, you understood the joke!

[@cloudyfromtpotreal]

​@@saarl99thats still immensely terrifying

[@Jestermancer]

I gotta say. These insane people have awesome worldbuilding ideas. A hollow world you live inside? Now that's something that has potential.

[@JasminMiettunen]

It’s been a thing in many stories, maybe it stuck in their head from a movie they saw as a kid

[@lozm4835]

Humanity is a lot smarter than humans are.

[@iamthewalrus8391]

J: Just tell people, people are smart. K: A person is smart. People are dumb panicky animals and you know it. (Men in Black about the secret alien refugees)

[@jotasietesiete4397]

Humanity is also a lot dumber than humans are

[@sophiachalloner8951]

That is actually a good way of putting it

[@revolvingworld2676]

A human is supposed to be fairly intelligent. You do occasionally get humans with _defective_ intelligence though like myself.

[@S8EdgyVA]

I find this wild how both quotes are correct, because on one side the knowledge possessed by humankind as a whole is undeniably ginormous, as can be seen by the feats we’ve accomplished as a species, but on the other, A individuals, some of us are probably no more smart than the average bear or bird… yet with that said, humans tend to be much dumber when they are in a group, due to an actual psychological effect called “groupthink”… but that means that a group of humans is usually dumber than a its members, unless that group consists of enough of us

[@Evil_Q]

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe" -Albert Einstein (edit: this is a misattributed quote that I fell for! See the first reply, haha)

[@wegner7036]

The quote actually evolved from Frederick S. Peris' "Ego, Hunger, and Aggression: a Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method." The paragraph: "As modern times promote hasty eating to a large extent, it is not surprising to learn that a great astronomer said: “Two things are infinite, as far as we know - the universe and human stupidity.” To-day we know that this statement is not quite correct. Einstein has proved that the universe is limited." So really, you're just like the subjects of the video!

[@mihaleben6051]

Alr wegner we should cite all three scientists then

[@Evil_Q]

​@@wegner7036 Interesting! But darn those misattributed quotes… :,D

[@jotasietesiete4397]

"there are two infinite things: human stupidity and paying taxes. And i'm not sure about human stupidity" - me

[@Gamesaucer]

"Exactly 86% of quotes on the internet are misattributed or made up on the spot" - Abraham Lincoln

[@zachjones8085]

I never realized my space hyperfixated a$$ knew as much, if not more, about space than the average person until I was 13, in which I was rambling about some cool mars related fact and my dad commented "that's the red planet right, the one closer to the sun than us?" He thought the reason it was called the red planet was because it was hotter than earth and closer to the sun. I can't blame him at all for no one ever correcting his misunderstanding before then, but it just astonished me that an adult could theoretically know less about space than my hyperfixated butt

[@GillfigGarstang]

Yeah, I don’t know why we expected the average person to know more about our closest planetary neighbours than they do about other countries.

[@Doctor-NOOOOOOOOOOO]

Man I was like you. It was a pain as a kid when literally everyone around you didn't know that the sun was a star

[@GillfigGarstang]

@@Doctor-NOOOOOOOOOOO Right? It completely changes everything! And when you try and explain something basic like why solar-systems and galaxies _really_ aren’t interchangeable concepts they would act like you were doing the equivalent of trying to get them to care about something dull and abstruse like the difference between an estuary and a slough.

[@Arkylie]

Reminds me of the principle that the primary way we take in information as a baby/child is through Faith. Mommy says "that's a doggy!" and we learn the word "doggy" and that it means this thing -- oh and also this other thing that looks very different and is much bigger, but not that other thing that looks similar because that's a cow. We also learn about far-off places through Faith. Later on we can use Logic (what's more likely, that Europe exists or that all these things telling me it exists are all false?) and Empiricism ("I have finally been to Europe!"), but it starts with Faith -- and because that's prior to Logic, that Faith can get things a little wonky sometimes. Worse if you're Neurodivergent (and have trouble picking up on certain types of social patterns and implications and such), and even worse if your teachers (including parents) have their own mistaken ideas or mistaken ways of communicating them. Which means it's crucial to have various ways to check, at various points, how well the person's conception of the world is progressing. So we can take corrective measures if necessary. But it also means grasping, and accepting, that there's always going to be a section of our minds that got trained on wrong ideas -- sometimes *drastically* wrong -- and that it'll crop up in the weirdest ways. Everything from memorizing very different lyrics ("I've got a chicken to ride!") to, apparently, thinking that Pluto got eaten by a black hole. Some of these wrong ideas are a Big Deal. A lot of them aren't. There's nothing particularly worrisome about believing the wrong thing about how the solar system is ordered; it's not like that's going to affect your day-to-day. (I think it was Sherlock Holmes who got annoyed with Watson for teaching him that the earth went around the sun, because the knowledge didn't help him and he was under the impression that the brain is a finite storage space.) And so long as the person is open to new ideas with better evidence, it doesn't take much effort to help them correct their beliefs, if they care to try. On any given day, as xkcd demonstrated, there's gonna be around 10,000 people under 30 learning a common thing for the first time.

[@amaeliss7827]

Thank you for this comment it's legit absolutely brilliant

[@mythicalslugbeam130]

Well done.

[@d4n737]

"How do you know planets are real" ".... What tf do you think we are living on right now"

[@StarshadowMelody]

"... earth?"

[@ibrahimali3192]

@@StarshadowMelody "is the earth not a planet" "no?"

[@bluelfsuma]

If anyone ever shames you for a lack of education on something, you can use this to show them how much worse it can get.

[@doombybbr]

Except for the moon having water bit because that part is actually true and you can find it out with a single google search.

[@holycarp1676]

"I don't have anything to do with the Moon, so why would I need to know?"

[@bloodren0374]

I’m so sad that so many people form an inherent distrust of science and everything we’ve done to prove what’s been known for hundreds of years. Especially in the last decade.

[@12pentaborane]

I think a lot of the stuff that gets taught in school is a lot more recent. I'm not saying it's invalid but even commonly held heliocentrism is only 400 years old, distant galaxies being a 100 year old fact. The worst part about it is none of it is on a human scale or has 'kitchen table' application.

[@HazeEmry]

It's been happening ever since a new discovery pops up, in an age tbh. Like I'm pretty sure the idea that we're hurtling through space instead of being static broke people back in the day

[@raerohan4241]

​@@HazeEmry Sure. But people didn't use to stop believing in centuries-proven ideas just because. E.g. flat earthers today. That very much is a phenomenon caused by the promotion of anti intellectualism and spreading belief that anyone with authority must inherently be untrustworthy.

[@ConfusionUwU]

If anything, we're more accepting of new discoveries/ideas right now as opposed to the past unless you were someone who held some amount of power over other people, it was not uncommon for new inventions or discoveries to be labeled as witchcraft or heresy

[@nikolaybelousov1070]

Being distrustful in the modern age is more important to your personal survival than the knowledge of martian water or proper terms for the Moon and Pluto. We live in mass-marketing, mass-scamming age where all information is either malicious or safe enough to ignore completely.

[@zorphorias1523]

I feel like a lot of these are probably people who got trolled by family/friends when they were young, and then just never questioned it.

[@theletters9623]

nothing beats a classic insane coworker story, once had a coworker try to convince me that crisis actors were real, not in a "the problems never happened" sense but in a "surely the news would never ask a real person who went through a traumatic event to be on tv about it" way. Which was weirdly sweet but did not fully balance out the statement "crisis actors are real"

[@iansynge7656]

To be fair, crisis actors ARE real. They help train people like firefighters for dangerous situations. They’re just not part of conspiracies like certain people think they are.

[@apokalypthoapokalypsys9573]

There are a ton of false flag attacks and black ops all around the world, and that's been true throughout history. How naïve are you that you think crisis actors don't exist? People lie all the time. People in power, with an interest in retaining that power, lie even more so. That's not a conspiracy, that's realpolitik.

[@the11382]

Where did the coworker think the crisis actors have their scripts/information from?

[@thekoifishcoyote8762]

Veritassium made a video where he surveyed college students about space and stuff. I could understand people getting the sizes wrong (the sun is hundreds of thousands of miles across and millions of miles away) but you'd think they would have understood that galaxies are bigger than stars.

[@RandomPassrby]

To be fair, in the original Sherlock Holmes books, Sherlock himself didn't know that the Earth orbited the Sun or anything else about astronomical bodies. His defense was that type of knowledge was irrelevant to solving mysteries so there was no point in learning or remembering any of it.

[@phoebegilliland8897]

I was just thinking about that.

[@yugimuto1639]

I mean... he has a point... I guess

[@rocthatisrolling]

My special interest is solving crimes. Why would I, an investigator, need to know that the sun is big, and we go around it?

[@shrimpbisque]

To be fair, Sherlock Holmes also famously did CATASTROPHIC amounts of cocaine.

[@phoebegilliland8897]

@@shrimpbisque But only because he was bored between crimes.

[@thedevilsangelgaming3324]

4:55 This is very close to what H.P. Lovecraft wrote about... (read At the Mountains of Madness and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, they both talk about creatures in Antarctica, and creatures on the moon, respectively)

[@gothnerd887]

I was just reminded that The Clangers were a thing.

[@potatoheadpokemario1931]

2:02 everyone knows pluto stopped being a planet because it was blown up

[@GaiaBicolosi]

Entropy wave dude 😂

[@ibrahimali3192]

What are you talking about??? It was clearly 4th dimensional beings that stole Pluto and put it in their own world.

[@LeopardMask12]

The Pluto one is so oddly specific! I can definitely understand hearing "Pluto is not a planet anymore" and thinking that means that Pluto no longer exists, but where'd the black hole come from, I wonder?

[@inkmaster5480]

Well, there needs to be a reason for it to not exist anymore. A black hole is as good a reason as any.

[@Kjf365]

What else could you imagine just destroying an entire planet like that? (Obvious sci-fi references excluded)

[@LeopardMask12]

@Kjf365 ...fair point

[@StarshadowMelody]

Parents, probably.

[@LeopardMask12]

@StarshadowMelody Ah, true, also a possibility. It does kinda sound like a Lie Parents Tell Kids lol

[@ironici]

I wonder if some of these beliefs were told to these people by others who knew the real answer, for a laugh. Like how Calvin's dad answers Calvin's questions with literally anything because he doesn't know better

[@headphonesaxolotl]

Actually, I think it's just Calvin's dad being a troll, because Calvin is definitely smart enough to find out all those things if he wanted. I can only think of one strip where he genuinely doesn't know and admits it, which to me implies he was just harmlessly messing with his son like a lot of dads do.

[@NotevenTony]

Girl in my theology class asked “so if we have free will, than why can’t I fly?” This is at an elite university in the northeast

[@Akio-fy7ep]

While it pleases you to imagine your definition of free will is better than hers, I can assure you it is not. At best it would take longer to explain why it is not.

[@NotevenTony]

@@Akio-fy7ep there is a difference between have the ability to choose between two options and being omnipotent. these are terms that have meaning.

[@xerex21212]

I mean not really a bad question. Free will is limited by capability and resources. A millionaire can quit his job. A poor man cant.

[@Broomer52]

@@Akio-fy7epare you that girl from the theology class?

[@Broomer52]

@@xerex21212 being able to make choices is not the same as being able to fly. I don’t care how much resources you have or how strong your will is, you will not suddenly gain the gift of flight.

[@angeygirl]

Something that will always bother me is how I joined an online college astronomy class and was given no reading material. The textbook was optional and we were required to restate """""Textbook notes""""" (fragmented bullet points) for our discussions. The teacher probably couldn't care less and I would have dropped the class as a waste of time if I didn't go out and get the textbook for myself so I could actually learn something. Turned out to be incredibly interesting stuff but the teacher didn't teach us a single thing

[@ob2kenobi388]

This reminds me of something: My friend who has read the original Sherlock Holmes stories has told me that, apparently, Holmes believes that the sun orbits around the earth. His reason for this is that whether the earth does or does not orbit around the sun will never affect any of his cases, thus making it functionally irrelevant, and he likes seeing people screech and holler when he tells him that he believes it doesn't lol

[@catbatrat1760]

"and he likes seeing people screech and holler when he tells him that he believes it doesn't lol" Wait, really? The other comments also stated the "doesn't really matter to me" thing, but I didn't see any about him straight-up trolling people! XD

[@ob2kenobi388]

@catbatrat1760 That's what my friend told me! Lol

[@cardinalhamneggs5253]

04:16 That woman can’t tell the difference between a sphere and a torus.

[@areadenial2343]

She clearly only has surface-level knowledge on the topic.

[@M3g4nium]

They teach this in 5th grade..

[@LexYeen]

Clearly not well enough!

[@adrienstarfaer]

5th grade?? I learned this in 2nd and 3rd grade!

[@phictionofgrandeur2387]

4th at some schools

[@Riv_Falcon]

I even learned these in kindergarten…

[@snowkr3580]

I learned most of this stuff from cartoons before we even talked about it in school. How do people not know planets are real.

[@unlikelygamer]

That "inner walls of the earth sphere" one was the wildest thing I've heard in a while. Like most of these I can see where people went wrong, but that one... I can't even imagine what series of events in this person's life led them to have that idea.

[@ValeBridges]

Fun fact some Nazis believed in this and tried to spy on the Allies by directing their telescopes into the sky. It didn't work.

[@jayc7559]

As a space nerd who has been on my bullshit since before I left the crib, it always flabbergasts me when I get reminders that these things aren’t common knowledge. Just because I could recite random fun facts about black holes and nebulas at 5 doesn’t mean that a 50-year-old, fully realized person will know them. But some of these takes also make me seethe with rage at the utter ignorance of the topic, like WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN ARE PLANETS REAL!? EXPLAIN YOURSELF OR *YOU’RE* ABOUT TO NOT BE REAL IN A SECOND

[@jasoncola6071]

Really, instead of being a case for being disappointed in humanity, this just shows that not given an explanation for how things work people will fill it in with whatever seems to make sense.

[@Axolautism]

This is like getting punched in the face repeatedly by what you never realized would suddenly now be the new dumbest thing you've ever heard, when you were positive the last one was surely as dumb as one could get

[@nabra97]

I was sure that Catholics didn't accept the heliocentric solar system model until I was like in 8th grade or so (when I asked my history teacher about it, she made sure to clarify that the Spanish inquisition wasn't a thing anymore as well; probably just in case). In my defence, there are not a lot of Catholics in my country (most Christians are either Orthodox or Uniats), and I'm mostly secular person anyway. I also found out that the word "bastard" actually meant something and wasn't just a synonym for "scum" when I was 17, from an article about heraldry. I had a phase of googling some weird stuff when I was a teen, but bastards didn't get this treatment for whatever reason

[@BonaparteBardithion]

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about both the Catholic church and sciences of the last few hundred years, probably because of anti-Catholic bias in heavily Protestant areas (at least in English speaking areas). As an extension of the myth, I also remember being taught as a kid that Columbus sailed to prove the Earth was round when he only crossed the Atlantic because it was already well known the Earth was round and he wanted another route to India. As for swears, I learned early to look up the etymology before using them after I told someone "F- You!" and my mom told me in very literal terms what I had just said.

[@nabra97]

​@@BonaparteBardithionI'm from Ukraine, so not English-speaking country (by "bastard" and "scum" I meant analogues from my language, but I decided that it was an unnecessary context). But it's probably a Soviet propaganda aftermath in my case. As for bastards, I guess I never really used it, it was just something I've heard from movies once in a while (it's acceptable on TV in prime time) and just knew it was an insult

[@iphidamasfilms1245]

i assume that by "Catholics" you mean Latins, but Uniates very much are Catholics

[@cardinalhamneggs5253]

There’s a pair of books called the _Foxfire Books_ that chronicle various crafts, trades, tales, and the like of hillbillies and mountain folk (including log cabin construction, beekeeping, moonshining, medicinal herbs, etc…), and each book contains sections on some of the people who were interviewed to obtain the info in the books. One of them (I can’t recall his name) didn’t believe that NASA landed men on the moon. He believed that the Apollo program was real, but that the astronauts landed on Mars (which he also believed was somewhere between Earth and the Moon).

[@the11382]

How small or big did they think mars to be?

[@melon218]

ok but that one about living on the inside of the earth is legitimately a really cool sci-fi concept

[@Aloddff]

I don’t know how you feel, but if fantasy and real life were indistinguishable because I didn’t understand enough to discern the two, I don’t think I could take delight in an alternative fantastical setting. If anything is as likely as anything else, it sounds like you’d be unflappable

[@The_Alice_Natasha]

Imagine the joy of immediately falling into the Earth's core as you're born, to be together with the mass of other stuff that has fallen before you, as your mother hangs on the crust by some vines and says "oopsie"

[@liljatupsu]

It's not exactly that, but there's a hollow planet in the MTMTE comics

[@NODNS_n_M.ORD11630]

Final Fantasy XIII

[@Telawin]

like a planetary Dyson Sphere. yeah when it's not pseudoscience but sci-fi it sounds really cool

[@hermitcrabguy29]

Not knowing something doesn't make you stupid. Refusing to learn does. Many of these people picked up weird beliefs, but corrected them upon being properly educated. It is not fair to mock them for that.

[@timohara7717]

True!

[@timohara7717]

Thats why i blame the parents and teachers not the individual

[@timohara7717]

Except for the planet guy, hes bigoted

[@minaashido518]

@@timohara7717unless it was taught but the individual just ignored it, or they skipped class, or some other way it would be their fault You can never really know if it was the teacher or the student who failed, perhaps both were incompetent, or neither and the student just forgot after a few decades

[@GreyMaria]

I'm gonna have to point out that, _no,_ the people discussed in this thread did _not_ learn after being corrected.

[@joeshanklin2791]

I once had a dumbass moment where I confused our moon with Iapetus "one of the moons of saturn" I was having a discussion with a friend about the dark side of our moon being covered in non reflective material and they corrected me by pointing out that the dark side is earths shadow but I decided to Google it only to realize I was thinking of the wrong moon.

[@KayDeeKeySull]

When my brother was in a college astronomy class, someone in class asked if the 15° that the earth rotates an hour was in fahrenheit or celsius lol

[@digestivecookie7026]

thumbing temperature like play dough

[@iantaakalla8180]

I mean, at least that is fairly common to confused angle degrees with temperature degrees.

[@TheSkyGuy77]

....

[@ghostkitten9264]

Those middle aged women who thought the arctic and antarctic were connected, are part of why everyone (especially parents) should decorate their homes with globes. Kids end up learning basic astronomy and geography before they even go to school, if the parents can be bothered to answer a few questions.

[@paulamarina04]

ive heard a couple "black hokes arent real thats science fictions" but _planets_ are definetely a new one

[@Rose_Haw]

I had a woodworking teacher that thought the moon waters plants, like tides, but underground

[@Broomer52]

Again I can see a faint string of logic because you can dig holes and strike water, and the moon controls the tides. Two disjointed pieces of true information that combined into an absurd inaccuracy

[@kaylaa2204]

4:20 ok nitpick here, that’s not what a lunar calendar is. They mean a moon phase calendar. A lunar calendar is a kind calendar system based on the lunar cycle. Our standard calendar is a solar calendar.

[@The_Alice_Natasha]

Its shocking bc planets arent even a new thing y'know? Its not like mars was discovered 20 years ago and some people dont trust science or something. Venus and mars have been seen through a telescope in the 1600's ffs

[@The_Alice_Natasha]

Venus mercury Mars Jupiter and Saturn are known planets since the second century common era goddammit

[@WeirdWimp]

TBH, some people dont trust science

[@vilukisu]

To drive the point home, planets from Mercury to Saturn can be seen by plain eyes. I do recommend everyone try to spot some planets some night. It's really easy to find when they are visible and where. It is honestly really cool to see if you never have.

[@IceFireofVoid]

Stuff involving space is especially significant to humanity because, before digital clocks, the GPS and basically any technology, that was how people navigated and kept track of time. Ancient people were far far more aware of what was going on up there than many people give them credit for.

[@Doctor-NOOOOOOOOOOO]

Dude, the Romans 2000 years ago discovered the solar system I hate living here

[@able_archer01]

You'd be amazed at how many people can't even be bothered to spare 10 seconds to do a quick google search...

[@pianopanicattack]

i was in the middle of a university level earth and space science class when i discovered my brother thought there was ONE galaxy.

[@gunknightben1829]

As dumb as all this is, I have used the "it never really came up before" alot when I don't know things that are common knowledge

[@HSuper_Lee]

Unironically, I think this is why more kids need to watch TV. A lot of things I've learned I learned because I either saw it on TV or read it in a (fictional) book and then asled my parents if it was real or accurate. Heck, I learned about the frequency of different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum in third grade from a show on PBS Kids. When we later learned about it in a science class, I had that show in the bqck of my mind to make an emotional connection to so that it wasnt just a list of things I needed to memorize, but was actually something I cared about.

[@ParlonsAstronomie]

TV is vast and full of irrelevant stuff. You can spend a whole life watching TV without learning a thing. Here what leads to your knowledge wasn't TV but your curiosity and your will to know if ir was accurate. It would have been the same if you read books and comics instead of TV I guess.

[@DH-xw6jp]

"it has nothing to do with me, so I wasn't interested" is how 99.999999% of humanity has lived forever, so I don't judge them for that. I'm sure there are gaps in my knowledge that would flabbergast people that are "in the know" on the subject.

[@catbatrat1760]

exactly what I was thinking

[@lucarioinfamous]

The only problem with that is she could SEE the moon and decided “Yeah, that’s not my problem.” Like, I’ve known about the lunar cycle since I was a little kid because I could see the damn thing and was curious about it, so I asked my parents

[@Gamesaucer]

Oh, I _do_ judge them for that, and so should you. Humanity is defined by curiosity. Curiosity is how we keep learning and keep growing as individuals. A lack of curiosity means stagnation, and means being left behind. Curiosity is why humanity has lived all around the globe since before the dawn of history, why there are ancient civilisations in the middle of the Pacific, why we cultivate grains, why we drink alcohol, why we have religions, why we have science, why we read and write, and why we have pens or quills or computer keyboards to do so with. Saying that a lack of curiosity has been humanity's defining characteristic for 99.9% of its history is as far from the truth as you could possibly get. If the line had just been "I've been doing other things that seemed more interesting" that would have been fine. If it'd been "I've never really taken the time to learn about this before" that would also have been fine. But the moon is something that _should_ be of _some_ interest to _everyone._ Even if that's not enough interest to want to spend the effort learning about it. But _if something is right there in your face 50% of the time you're outside the house and you never felt even the slightest curiosity about how it works,_ there is something _very_ wrong with you. I'm not saying that just because this is about astronomy either. Frankly, there are far worse things than not learning about astronomy. What I care about is that if you're making an argument like that about something as ever-present and mystifying as the _moon,_ that almost certainly means there are more important things you should be interested in but aren't--things that you need to actively seek out, but far more vital. Things like "understanding other people", things like "learning new skills", things like "government policy". And perhaps somewhat abstractly but no less importantly, things like... "what do I fear?" Curiosity is the very cure for fear. In an era where fear grips the hearts of so many people, we need it more than ever.

[@DH-xw6jp]

@@Gamesaucer nowhere did I say that a lack of curiosity was humanity's defining characteristic. And guess what? For every person that did the wonderful things you listed, there were hundreds that did nothing except what was needed to survive. Maybe, just maybe, they don't care about something as "ever present and mystifying as the moon" because they are focused on those more important, and more personal, things you listed? Get off your high horse and put away the soap box.

[@Sacchi_Hikaru]

Y'all are trying to argue whether this is a Personal Failing on the part of these folks for Not Being Curious or if this is Just Normal Human Behavior For Survival and Everyone Does that when this shit is so obviously and clearly a failure of educational systems. Like, chill.

[@Devijhonas1]

...... *this physically pained me.* just.... wut.

[@StarshadowMelody]

Hello Watson!

[@Skijaramaz]

My morning's pretty shit thanks to a bout of Insomnia. This makes it a little better. Cheers, Levy.

[@Aloddff]

Not related. I once was in a religious class, where a teacher was trying to talk on the ethical repercussions of fossil fuels but didn’t understand either the greenhouse effect or the phenomenon of global warming (climate change is the new term didn’t exist in 2006) and in attempt to bridge ethical imperatives and no understanding of science came to the conclusion that if we keep burning fossil fuels, there’d be only smoke and no oxygen and we’d all pass out and never wake up

[@HaloInverse]

...maybe actually related? Your anecdote shows one way that ridiculous beliefs can happen in the first place - through genuine good-faith efforts to "fill in the gaps" around incomplete information. Kind of like the Pluto example, actually.

[@Polygonetwo]

And this is why I have no faith in the education system. I keep thinking that these posts are the most inane thing I've ever heard, but then the next one would get read with an even more wild take. Just what even.

[@timohara7717]

Truly

[@ParlonsAstronomie]

Before loosing faith in the education system let's remember that this is a cherry pick of the worse. Those are the minority that get through the net of education.

[@ParlonsAstronomie]

Before loosing faith in the education system let's remember that this is a cherry pick of the worse. Those are the minority that get through the net of education.

[@timohara7717]

@ParlonsAstronomie minority?

[@victoriamongiardo1015]

"Absolutely insane" says the MFer who thought indigenous Australians were a different species from the rest of humanity.

[@elplaceholder]

1:44 wait, she is studying to be a politician? Well that explains it 😅

[@vilukisu]

That is not what political science is. This gets a similar reaction out of me as the stories in this video.

[@elplaceholder]

@vilukisu sorry, i didnt know, but you get the joke

[@sou.p]

​@@vilukisu confusing politician as someone who's studied political science is not nearly as stupid as not knowing planets exist. they literally have the same root word 😭

[@gerstein03]

Honestly I don't know why I'm surprised. I already know humans can be profoundly and incomprehensibly stupid. But this is just insane. How the fuck are these real thoughts that people have?! Like I would understand if they were kids but full grown adults?! Wtf Also that dude who was like "well maybe that's just way you think" screams "guy who's too proud to admit when he's wrong"

[@glonx639]

Ignorance about the most basic facts of space are often tied to a basic lack of self-reflection. If you aren't trying to at least get a basic handle on how the largest most essential part of existence itself works, your priorities are misaligned

[@jaschabull2365]

2:05: Wow, that's worse than that thing I heard about a lot of people misinterpreting the news that Brontosaurus was disproven as a valid genus (it was lumped into Apatosaurus when people took the time to take a closer look after the Bone Wars were over and the most prominent palaeontologists weren't in too much of a rush to one-up each other) as the animals originally labelled Brontosaurus, or even sauropods in general were disproven and had turned out to have never existed.

[@indigofenix00]

I am often surprised to find adults who don't know things that I knew when I was a toddler, but the thing is that astronomical knowledge (unlike, say, math or language) generally doesn't come up outside of professional fields where it is specifically relevant. So if they somehow skipped learning about them as children because their parents or elementary schools didn't think it was important enough to teach them, the chances of them thinking about it later are relatively low. I suspect that this is why flat earth disease can spread as well as it does. There is a major disconnect between people who consider astronomical knowledge to be extremely basic since it was one of the first things they learned and those who simply never learned about it in the first place. Then people in the first group call people in the second group stupid, and the people in the second group don't want to feel stupid, which leaves them vulnerable to memetic contagions that encourage them to STAY ignorant.

[@MachuThePichu]

a coworker once said to me that recycling (note this was about recycling/reusing and not other related topics) is stupid because all the other countries on the planet (I think he mentioned china and india) would not do it and keep just throwing everything into the rivers which according to him all ended up in the Netherlands (where we both were) because it was the lowest point or something and all the rivers flow to the lowest point? I was so baffled trying to process this that I couldnt explain to him how he was wrong (I am not sure he wanted to be corrected tbh)

[@RandomTheIdiot55]

No matter how dumb you think humanity can be, there’s always someone dumber.

[@xenathcytrin202]

as someone who knows what i thought was a regular amount of stuff about space, it is honestly baffling to have conversations with people about space and find that either they are well below average in space knowledge or I have greatly overestimated what that average is.

[@IceFireofVoid]

This happens with basically anything you have any amount of interest in. You kinda take for granted what is common knowledge because it's always been there for you. I learned how to read at 3 and was fascinated with biology, dinosaurs, and all sorts of fields of science. So I kind of forget what isn't typically learned by most people because I sort of always knew these things. If a person isn't interested in something, they probably won't know anything about it. And a lot of people kind of aren't really interested in anything, so they know very little.

[@sagacious03]

I really want the guy in the car to take his friend to a telescope & show them Mars. Anyway, fun analysis video! Thanks for uploading!

[@MxPokirby]

I've seen Saturn and its rings through a telescope, I've seen the milky way above me, I've even seen light that was emitted before humanity had evolved. Those experiences give you a feeling One can't describe, and it makes me so heartbroken that there exist people who reject the very existence of such.

[@isaackellogg3493]

2:05 To be fair, in November of 2004, when the IAU first downgraded Pluto from planetary status, the reason they gave was that Pluto was only 20% as big as they had previously thought, which brought it below the diameter of the largest asteroid Ceres, and it had long been an unwritten rule that newly discovered celestial bodies had to be larger than Ceres to be considered planets rather than asteroids. Since Pluto was (now) smaller than Ceres, it no longer qualified. The problem was that astronomers had sworn up and down for 74 years that they knew the diameter of Pluto, and that it was much larger than Ceres. As I pointed out at the time (and subsequently), this meant that Big Astronomy was absolutely wrong about something they were absolutely certain of, which led to only two possibilities-either the possibility that they were absolutely wrong about other things they were absolutely certain about, and the things they were absolutely certain about which were discovered after Pluto included gravitational lensing, pulsars, neutron stars, black holes, or even that stars ran on fusion-or that something had EATEN eighty percent of Pluto. One of these would get every astronomer in the world fired instantly. The other would get funding to build Battlestars. Sadly, NASA went with the third option-completely ignore the logical consequences of their own discoveries-something they excel at.

[@Akio-fy7ep]

You do know you can look up the size of both Pluto and Ceres? Pluto displaces almost 15x the volume of Ceres. Pluto is, however, smaller than our moon. But what makes it not a planet is that it shares its orbit with other bodies of similar size.

[@isaackellogg3493]

@ that is what they say now, as to why it does not count as a planet. That is not, however, the reason they gave in 2004.

[@isaackellogg3493]

@ truth be told I just took their word for it (again) about the relative sizes of Pluto and Ceres. Looks like Big Science just can’t stop lying about astronomical facts, even when they’re retconning 😝. I do like your use of displacement to describe volume though. Thinking of throwing Pluto in a bathtub with Saturn? Or will you be commissioning it in the navy?

[@Justalittleguy3848]

This reminds me of the time I was teaching my friend how to play chopsticks and my friend with COMPLETE SINCERETITY ASKED IF 3 WAS AN EVEN NUMBER!!!! MY MAN YOUR'E IN GRADE 11 YOU SHOULD KNOW THESE THINGS! he wasn't even joking I quizzed him for most of the class to see if he was fucking with me

[@matthewgagnon9426]

"20 year old in a polisci class didn't know the moon orbited the Earth." Yeah, that sounds about right.

[@littleperson8315]

sometimes i just have rock myself and repeat "people dont get the same education quality across the globe" to reassure myself that there are people out there who are genuinely just not educated on a subject rather than... genuinely and whole heartedly believing all this despite education

[@BrotherSergeantFlynn]

People don't get the same education quality across the inside of our hollow globe

[@RaichuWizDom]

I remember coming home one day from college. Completely serious, this exchange happened. I should preface that my father is a relatively intelligent man, in the old school way of things, very much an engineer type of guy. My sister is a kindergarden teacher, and a good one. But when it comes to scientific jargon... Dad: "So, what did you have today?" Me: "First lesson on taxonomy." Sister: "Really, so you're learning to stuff animals now?" Dad: "No, you idiot, he's learning about poisons." Me: sighing in exasperation. You might think any of the parties involved were joking. I assure you, they were not. On a more general note, and beating a dead horse because it's a pet peeve: reindeer. Lots of people, I suspect especially Americans, think reindeer are not real. And the ones that know reindeer are real, often have no idea what the animals actually look like, going by how difficult it is to find correct references for art. Reindeer have fur on their noses, it's one of their distinguishing features. Black leathery snouts indicate an entirely different species. In all seriousness, though, the Sherlock Holmes defense kind of applies here: people probably learned about these things at one point, but if you press them and they get a knee-jerk reaction, they'll more often than not double down on the knee-jerk initial answer instead of thinking about it and admitting their first guess was wrong.

[@tfk_001]

Knew someone awhile back who thought NASA blew up Pluto when they made it no longer a planet

[@UnfailingEagle]

This is wild, these sound like bits straight out of Welcome to Night Vale

[@destinyyoung7347]

Planets? More like nothings.

[@Stirdix]

Honestly, I'll give the lady the "arctic/antarctic connected like east/west" one, it's not a crazy inference if you see a map more than a globe and her logic about flight paths was actually a really smart argument based on that misconception

[@iantaakalla8180]

Honestly, if the Earth were toroidal she would have an argument there, except she would be arguing about a toroidal earth. Still, it’s funny to see what happens when you encroach on topics you know nothing about but have to draw from, like topology.

[@taekinuru2]

What always astonishes me is how many people display a complete lack of curiosity about the universe they exist in. Like, you see the sky is full of shiny dots. They mock you with their mysterious nature. Doesn't it get you spitefully trying to learn all you can about them just to get them to stop being so smug? The moon is approximately the same size as the sun due to perspective when seen from the Earth. Why is that? Doesn't that piss you off? Don't you want to find out why that is, if there'e a reason for it? Mysteries are smug pieces of crap the universe hides the truth behind. Uncover them and show the universe who's the boss

[@shadowsight804]

someone in my study hall last year apparently had someone once try to convince her that Pluto was exploded or something

[@marcopohl4875]

My takeaway is that basic astronomy should be a required subject for everyone

[@justsomejerseydevilwithint4606]

To be fair, 99.99% of the time, the specifics of space are COMPLETELY irrelevant to our lives. As long as the space gremlins keep earth habitable and don't drop a rock on our heads, it doesn't particularly matter to the average person what's really going on up there. My pizza will still exist whether Saturn does or not.

[@Aveture]

I'm stumped. They go through 12 grades of public education more or less and theyre still this ignorant? I weep for humanity...

[@livinglandmine4374]

As stupid as some misconceptions are, better late than never to learn. I doubt many people haven't had one of these moments where they felt stupid for not knowing something.

[@79bigcat]

Why would i communicate with Antarctica? There's nobody with stories there.

[@TheDanishGuyReviews]

Tell that to the guy who got stabbed because he kept spoiling the ending to another researcher's novels.

[@deadlydingus1138]

I dunno. Maybe there’s a penguin or two with something worth saying.

[@Lectrikfro]

I made it through half the video thinking "these people can't really exist". Then 2:22 I heard that sentence in high school, more than once

[@skitstheskitty2787]

This post was all about astronomy but trust me there's DROVES of this in biology too. In a world where roughly 40% of the US population is creationist, there's a LOT of BS that you have to correct as a taxonomy and evolutionary biology nerd (me!). A lot of people think the March of Progress picture is literal, as in evolution is totally linear towards one goal (an anthropocentric one) and thus humans and monkeys shouldn't be able to coexist. There's also the occasional person who thinks that microorganisms aren't real because you can't see them with the naked eye. Which I think is ridiculous, because microscopes are really just fancy glass when you boil it down, and nobody calls whatever you see with glasses "fake", but I digress. It's more harmless, but I cannot count the number of people, EVEN PEOPLE WHO WORK WITH ANIMALS, who don't know what actually makes a rodent a rodent despite it being really obvious if you just look at their teeth. I get confusing rabbits for rodents, as lagomorphs are still closely related to them, but I see stuff like shrews, weasels, skunks, and raccoons being confused for rodents.

[@RaichuWizDom]

As someone who's been interested in reindeer for a creative project for several years now... I feel your pain, on a profound level. Some animals really get the shaft in terms of media representation. It doesn't end in popular media, either. Even at my job, there's a course where they mention the fable of "The Hare and the Turtle" (sic) and use an illustration of a tortoise. It's enough to give a person a mental BSOD moment. Games, too: I remember seeing the shopkeeper in Dimensionals thinking "Oh, cool, mole rat. We don't see those a lot, cool design." And then the first interaction with that character has him insisting he's a weasel.

[@minaashido518]

Shrew I understand, it’s very similar looking to a mouse and if you don’t care enough to specifically check it makes sense they’d think that, but the others are ridiculous

[@HSuper_Lee]

To be fair, the idea of linear progression within evolution is a lot closer to the original theory than what is now academically agreed upon. Look up the full title of "Origin of the Species" sometime. Most of the twentieth century was spent under the belief that evolution made things objectively better over time rather than simply more adapted to a local environment.

[@MurasakiNoKami]

​@@RaichuWizDom Hey so maybe I'm not understanding something, but the traditional fable is called, "The Tortoise and the Hare," so it sounds like the picture was accurate and the title was not. A mistranslation perhaps?

[@IceFireofVoid]

It's wild how frequently you see people who think evolution is an intelligent force with a defined end goal and everything on the way is just a stepping stone to the goal. People use this flawed logic to back up all sorts of insane and frequently bigoted takes.

[@CheeseyBreezey]

I love the hollow earth theory. There's a sort of beauty in how ridiculously stupid it is.

[@NuggetGal]

sometimes i am taken aback at how often i have been called smart other times i am taken aback at how often i have to call others stupid

[@psiseven]

"If it's not relevant to me I don't need to know anything about it." (Inhales). Yeah, I'm not an artist, but I know how to make ORANGE.

[@BaconNuke]

Some of these sound almost like they half knew some kinda info (ie the moon reflects sunlight being interpreted as the moons shines sunlight) and never had to actually have that tested because it got them by just enough.. until it was challenged in college

[@ViviBuchlaw]

Fantasy worlds need more people who are confidently, disastrously wrong