Spreading Ignorance

Ignorance spreads as quickly and is as dangerous to civilization as wildfire. Like most wildfire, most ignorance is spread by the humans affected by it. Facebook is the largest modern source of ignorance, which is one major reason I left Facebook in 2014. I got so tired of debunking things posted there that were quite simply not true. However, the fake posts and lurid but untrue clickbait remain. I learned this month that I'm not the only one annoyed by it.

The CSN Planetarium director in Las Vegas wrote an op-ed in the planetarium's periodical this month that resonated with me. I actually went to meet him to tell him how much I appreciated his post, so he would know people read it, and so he would know he wasn't alone either. You see, when you're educated, you get real tired of stupid people spreading ignorance, because it takes far more work to fight misinformation than to spread it. I present his editorial, with his permission and with the grammatical errors endemic in the original, for your reading pleasure and benefit:

The Planetary Alignment that Wasn't

The internet is an incredibly powerful tool. We can accomplish tasks that took weeks prior in seconds today. Information is available at our very fingertips. The very same concepts that make the internet so powerful also make it a tool for the unscrupulous to either promote false information or to take advantage of others. Astronomy is not immune to this, as many myths about astronomical events are perpetrated on the internet. In some cases, astronomical events are simply blown out of proportion, while in other cases, the events are lied about.

The most recent example is the so-called "planetary alignment" occurring in January/February 2016. This is not an alignment in the sense that most people would think ok. The planets are not close together in the sky. In fact, they are spread out across nearly the whole ecliptic. the media is making a big deal about all five visible planets appearing in the sky at the same time. While this is not a common occurrence, it is not particularly rare either, and it is not significant at all. This is unfortunately the way astronomy reporting seems to be heading. Someone makes a big deal out of something relatively minor, which brings us to our next event, the supermoon.

Around three years ago, someone got the bright idea of referring to the closest full moon to the earth each year as a "supermoon". It caught on and spread rapidly, but the big problem is that it is not really all that noticeable of an effect. The distance to the moon is always changing because of its elliptical orbit about the earth. Every year there will be a closest full moon, and a farthest away. It's simply the physics of orbits, long ago explained by Kepler's three laws of planetary motion.

The last one goes back even farther, and still comes around every year like clockwork: Mars is going to appear as big as the full moon in the sky in August/September/October. The month changes, the year changes, but this ridiculous claim never seems to go away. If you have a large telescope, you can discern Mars's polar ice cap, and sometimes some darker areas on its surface. A small telescope allows you to see the red color, and maybe an ice cap it it is large enough at the time. If a friend posts any variation of this meme on social media this year...please shut them down hard. Don't let this one spread anymore.

Of course, there are others that come around fairly regularly (the next close approach asteroid is going to slam into the earth, etc.) and nearly all are an exaggeration or an outright lie. Do your homework and check out any claim. If need bye, you can contact the Planetarium and I can confirm or deny anything that someone has put out there.

People rely too much on others, in particular people with a penchants for science whom they often mislabel as "scientists" like Bill Nye the Mechanical Engineering Guy. We are too lazy to do our own research. We are too eager to pass on information and appear wise. We are fascinated with being part of significant things. However, as Dr. Kerr writes, far too much of what the media propagates is either an exaggeration or an outright lie. Recently, the meme in politics sounded that Trump was a Nazi. Do any of you really know what Naziism means? Do any of you know any Nazis? I do. Are any of you astronomers, arborists, nutritionists, or other variants of the concept of wizards of smart? Who is this that darkeneth wisdom by words without knowledge? Why are ignorant people so loud and so common and so reliable to spread half truths and whole lies? Far too much "science" out there is nothing more than "a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing", but that doesn't stop the idiots from crying it on every street corner and the rest of the idiots from believing everything they are told.

The internet is not the source of truth. It is not the source of wisdom. It is not even the source of knowledge. It is a source of information. TS Eliot opined as presciently today as in aforetime, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Things are not rare. Things are not significant. The loudest, the most common, and the most liked individuals are not the wisest. They are the most vociferous, and all too often they are the most deceptive and the most damaging. Their ridiculous claims never go away, because some nincompoop makes a big deal out of a minor thing, even if it is true, and then the internet blows it out of proportion because people post it, and once it's there, it stays, true or not, real or not, kind or not, useful or not. Most of what we read on the internet is pretty useless and fairly inaccurate, which is probably why it's free. What we obtain easily we esteem lightly.