I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.
I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”
I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.
And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.
My friend, whom I love dearly, found out that the moon orbits the earth as a 20-year-old in an upper-level political science class, and was utterly and completely flabbergasted. When questioned, her defense was that she doesn’t have anything to do with the moon, so why would she have needed to know?
i was once talking to a friend of mine about how at that point in time you could see mars, jupiter, and venus at the same time, which was pretty cool, and she said “where’s pluto? wait, it was destroyed” and that’s how i found out that my friend, who is in her third year of a medical degree, thought that pluto stopped being a planet because it was eaten by a black hole.
When i was in physics class my sophomore year of high school, the teacher drew a simplified diagram of a person standing on the planet earth as part of the explanation for how it was initially discovered that the earth was round. And one girl sitting in the class said "wait... we live on the OUTSIDE???"
she had spent her whole life thinking that the earth was a hollow sphere and that we lived on the inner walls of it
i had a coworker in his early twenties who, when i mentioned seeing admiring how bright mars was that morning on the drive to work, laughed and said 'mars? like the planet?' and i was like 'yeah mars the planet. it looks like a very bright star, it was supposed to be extra bright and close lately.' and he got quiet and oddly worried and he said, quietly, carefully, '...are planets... real?' like he was checking to see if i was completely insane.
i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back 'yes. planets are real. did you.... think they weren't real?' and he looked even more disturbed and said, 'no. they're just made up for movies and shit, right?' and i was totally horrified by this point and said 'planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.'
he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, 'how do you know planets are real?'
i said, 'i've seen them. i've seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.'
he said, muttering now, 'well, maybe that's just what you think.'
the conversation did not get any better from there.
I am a biologist, and what’s more, in theory I am the kind of biologist who studies wild animals in their natural contexts. I had an ecology component on my qualifying exams. I did my undergraduate work on a process that can lead to speciation. The department I got my PhD in used to be Zoology, before they renamed themselves to sound more up to date.
Some years ago, at a party, I mentioned narwhals and a labmate and colleague told me that what I’d intended to be a fairly serious statement was a funny joke. I was confused, so I asked him some questions.
As it turned out, he thought narwhals, like unicorns, were mythical beings.
The party was a party of other biologists from the department. I... don’t think there is necessarily a worse time to discover that narwhals are very, very real than when you’re surrounded by drunken ecologists who know very well that you, yourself, are halfway through your own dissertation. (In his case, that dissertation was very neurological, but. well. for reference, narwhals are very real.)
