Isn’t it illegal for an individual to have a moon rock? I swear I’ve read that somewhere.
Because too many people equate “ignorance” with “stupidity” and confuse “asking a stupid question” with “being a stupid person”, and are therefore discouraged from asking questions that might reveal their ignorance, for fear of being thought stupid.
But that’s just stupid. (-:
Smart people ask questions all the time — even stupid questions, if that’s what they’ve got.
That’s how they got to be smart. (-:
Even funnier is her follow up, where she implies he could have “just stepped off” the space station . . . and I guess landed on the moon where he could snag a souvenir.
If he calculated his trajectory and launched himself out of the station at just the right angle, I suppose he could. Eventually.
I think you’ll find that it would require a bit more deltaV than most of us could provide even by jumping really hard
Even Johnny Fartpants couldn’t do it.
Canadinauts? Canukanauts? Maybenaut.
Yes, but the question itself may be stupid. They may be missing background info, or they may not be capable (or unwilling as seems to be the usual state of things) to process commonly accepted information, but that doesn’t somehow render the question itself non-stupid.
And encouraging the stupid question asker by lying and handing out a platitude that their question isn’t stupid, well, to each their own on how ethical that is.
I’d argue that “how many states are there” is not a stupid question precisely because it is a neutral information gathering question meant to fill an information gap that someone has. A truly stupid question would be something like “Ok, I get that Obama already showed his supposed birth certificate, but that doesn’t convince me one bit that he’s not a Kenyan Muslim put in place by the reptilians to take away our guns. Huh! Can you prove to me that he’s not?”. That question is stupid because it shows the position of being unable/unwilling to process commonly accepted information, and then asks for information to prove the counter position (which will similarly not be processed). It’s a totally pointless and stupid question.
Can we posit there’s no stupid question, but only people who are more ignorant than they have any developmental right to be? The OP question would be perfectly reasonable from a 3rd grader (though even the sharper 3rd graders know better), but not from a presumably educated adult.
The National Science Foundation has been doing scientific literacy studies for decades, and the results are appalling.
When he said “I wasn’t on the moon, I was in the space station”, she took it to mean they just never went outside the Moon Station.
Sounded like he was about to explain how far away from the moon he was, then backed off out of politeness.
Hey now, maybe it’s ok to say the ISS is 350 km away since it’s, well, international, but America owns the moon so it’s actually 240,000 miles away.
And they drive on the right up there.
Wouldn’t that be somebody who explored Canada? How about Astrovoyageur.
Ahhh, my daily reminder that we are living in Idiocracy. Thanks!
Admittedly since the important thing it the amount of energy (Which, when you divide out the mass that you are sending ends up having units of velocity, or ΔV) that it takes to get there rather than the distance, low Earth orbit is something like 2/3rds of the way to the moon rather than 1/1000th of the way.
They could sell gravity-free snow globes where the snow never falls to the bottom.
Reminds me of an old joke (possibly a variation of a Chelm joke):
Sitting on a porch in the evening are two men in North Dakota, observing the Moon. One says to the other, “Which do you think is closer to us; Florida or the Moon?, to which the other man responds, “Silly question. I can see the Moon.”
A friend claimed a space elevator would burn up on reentry.
Another conversation included his belief that the earth’s visual pattern of stars would not change, no matter where you were at in the universe. He changed the topic when he couldn’t answer my follow up questions.
Besides being educated and in a professional career, he is a fundamentalist Christian. I find the line/chasms between knowledge and belief fascinating. Does belief inhibit knowledge? Or does a lack of knowledge promote belief? Are some people predisposed to rely more on beliefs than observation?
Or, is this all simply the difference between people that love space travel and people who don’t give a crap?
Admittedly most people fundamentally misunderstand heating during atmospheric reentry. It;s not about altitude, it’s about the EXTREME speed that you start that reentry with.
