eCosmology

What is the most inane and juvenile question on astronomy?

I have compiled a list, but maybe others have some too: Q. Why haven’t they used the space shuttles to go to the moon? Surely, everybody has seen the newsreels of the thing landing. Apart from all the other reasons it can’t go to the moon, surely people realise it requires a runway on which to land?. And surely they realise what the surface of the moon is like? Q. With my telescope looking at the moon, I cannot see the footprints from the astronauts, the American flag that was left, nor any debris. A lot of people (mainly kids) think this is good reason to believe that man never went there. Q. What causes the phases of the moon? A. The Earth’s shadow on the moon - several respondants gave that answer. WOW And.... Q. Why is the North Star the brightest in the sky? A. Most answers never corrected this, but assumed she was talking about Venus, for some reason not obvious to me. I think they are confusing “Evening Star”. If he/she was talking about the pole star, then it is a garbage question anyway, as it it is not even in the top 50 brightest stars. Q. Are stars ever covered by clouds? Whichever way you look at this question, it is very naïve. Either she meant clouds on Earth, which makes it a very silly question, unless she lives in the Namib desert. Or she meant the stars themselves, which means she has no idea that the stars are suns. Q. Why doesn’t the moon shoot off into space Newton solved this one 350 years ago, and thus this person is living 350 years behind the times. and.... Q. I saw the moon in daylight and it was a half moon. How can that be possible if the Earth’s shadow is supposed to eclipse it Wow. So, many people think that the phases of the moon are caused by the Earth’s shadow. Yet here is a simple case where the penny should have dropped. The sun was in the sky: surely it is then obvious that it can only shine on one half of the moon. Q. Where do the stars go during the day? Amazing! Q. Where do the stars come from when it gets dark? Again, amazing! Q. Is it always dark on the moon? I’m sure people just do not think. Even from earth the moon can be dazzlingly bright. Q. How come we see the moon in the day but not the sun at night? That must beat all, surely. Are there people who have never watched a sunset or sunrise? Q. Does the sun orbit the Earth or the Earth orbit the sun? This was an adult, because he said he wanted the answer for his daughter? I don’t know what to comment. It is astounding. and .... Q. What colour is the dark side of the sun? No comment. Obviously people confuse the sun and moon, for some unnaccountable reason. Q. Instead of going UP to space why don't we go out of the SIDE of the Earth? The person cannot know that the Earth is a sphere. Remarkable. Q. If the Earth stops spinning, will we all fly off? Where do so many people get the idea that the spin has anything to do with gravity? Q. Why has the antartic not fallen off the earth since gravity holds things down and the antartic is at bottom? Wow!!! One of the answers actually compared it to the difficulty of getting ice off a windscreen. It seems the average person cannot picture things 3 dimensionally. Q. How many constellations are there in the galaxy? So many people think that constellations are real groups of stars.

Public Comments

1. For many reasons, yours is the most inane let me add the corollary: If you are an astronomy powerhouse like you profess yourself to be, why are you wasting your talents on yahoo answers? Oh, wait, I just answered the question!
2. This was actually asked on Yahoo Answers last week. *What is the hottest place in our solar system*
3. Here's a classic: "If the moon is moving away, how can it be 4.5 billion years old? Praise Jesus."
4. Asrtonomy is hard
5. I guess it was the one about whether men and women do the same things in the bathroom or not. Cheers!
6. My vote is for "Nobody could have taken the pictures of the first man on the Moon, so it's all a government hoax."
7. I think you need to make a distinction between the people who are ill-informed and the people who are deliberately and self-righteously misinformed. For example, someone coming on to the group and saying that Hubble can see the Apollo craft on the moon because it sees distant galaxies, therefore the moon landing did not happen, is deliberately and self-righteously misinformed. A question about why the moon can be seen by day but the sun cannot by night is actually, if you stop to think about it, someone groping with a serious issue, but often people have a hard time expressing their exact meaning. What he wants to ask is why is it that night and day have a "no exceptions" quality to them versus the moon which seems to "get around." We don't need to get into the details but suffice it to say that many people don't get this stuff when they are in school and sometimes, to be frank, it isn't even explained to them very well. The fact is, about 1/4 of all college students cannot name three countries that border France. And so we expect the 3/4 who *don't* go to college to know the fine details of the lunar orbit? "Earth's shadow on the moon" -- people have heard the phrase in relation to lunar eclipses. Not being clear about the difference between an eclipse and lunar phases, they conflate the two. Not hard to see where it comes from. My personal view is that the "these people are idiots" approach is not useful. Even the self-righteously misinformed people are useful to some extent. All this moon hoax stuff finally got me to calculate the length in arc seconds of a 100,000 light year long galaxy at a distance of 13 billion light years (about 0.15 seconds of arc) and compare it to the length of a lander on the moon (I'd say about 0.0018 seconds of arc) versus the resolution of some of our finer instruments such as Hubble (0.045 seconds of arc). And so it is the case that Hubble has the resolving power to catch a distant galaxy but not a lander on the moon, and that the moon lander is a more difficult target by almost two orders of magnitude. So now we can turn around and think angrily about the dweebs who can't figure this stuff out and don't know, but on the other hand, what I felt was somewhat staggered. I've always known galaxies are BIG but to work out that they are SO BIG that they are THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE easier to detect at the edge of the universe than a simple lander on our nearby moon is rather staggering. You can never really understand sizes on that scale, even though we can represent the numbers and push them around in a calculator or on paper. I therefore found the exercise rather useful and stimulating even though it won't affect the opinions of the willfully misinformed. The other thing that is worth considering is that not all people are ignorant about all things. You might have an excellent car mechanic who thinks the phases of the moon are caused by Earth's shadow. He has devoted his life's energy to understanding cars, and he may even have a "deep knowledge" of the evolution of car design that goes way beyond what he needs to perform routine maintenance. So he's not living in an intellectual stupor, he has curiosity and motivation, but he's not interested in the stuff that we are. But he still might not know the stuff we know about astronomy, and he might not be able to spell too well either. Personally I try to avoid the questions that look like they're posted by someone trying to bag a homework assignment and I am increasingly averse to answering questions that come from people who are willfully misinformed, unless I get some value added out of the answer (learning to calculate the size of an object in arc seconds on the moon, for example). But I think that one's approach to this kind of a forum is improved if you try to imagine that, away from the computer, the person posting the question is a really good car mechanic, or an excellent cook. Otherwise it's not a good way to be passing the time, one might as well be off reading or doing something less annoying. The levels of ignorance today aren't new, by the way. In the 1950s educators found that 1/3 of high school students couldn't identify the Atlantic Ocean on a blank map of the world.*** good luck, GN ***(And they all vote!)