your funiest misconceptions about space

jedidia

shoemaker without legs
Addon Developer
Joined
Mar 19, 2008
Messages
11,319
Reaction score
2,789
Points
203
Location
between the planets
...as you were a kid. It's sometimes rather hilarious how ones logic works at the age before ten. :)

so here are mine:

first, after seeing astronauts weightless in space, I concluded "the further from earth, the less gravity there is". I didn't know that other planets had gravitiy too, so I imagined a mission to jupiter, and all the people had to be secured all the time and move very carefully, because any sudden movement could send them hurtling of into space, since jupiter was soooo far from earth! (remarkably though, I seemed to have grasped the concept of conserving momentum...)

another one was confusing weightlessnes for masslessnes, thinking that mass didn't matter in space whatsoever.

And the best one I found in a comic book I drawed somewhere at the age of nine or ten (right after seeing my first star-trek episodes). This comic book had an incredibly inteligent storyline, which went something like this:

10 galaxies were about to collide and would fuse into a giant black whole in the process which would devour the whole universe! The valiant crew of the enterprise finally solved (quite literally) the problem by dissolving one of the ten galaxies with acid... spraying it all over said galaxy by one of these old soda-bottles out of the airlock :lol:

Talk about scale here... :blink:
 
Talk about scale here... :blink:

Considering the human height is growing from generation to generation...
Taking the stardate into account...
That would make the Enterprise about the size of...
OH MY GOD IT WOULD WORK! JUST LOOK AT THE DATA :facts:
 
I used to think that the Earth and the Solar System was in the centre of the milky way...

Oh, and I used to think Pluto was a planet, right up until last year in fact. Silly me.

Well, I don't remember an misconceptions about space in particular but I do remember a trip to the Sydney Opera House when I was about 5 or 6.

The Opera House is isolated right on the end of Bennelong Point and as we approached it on foot we crossed an expansion joint in the paving. Contemplating the purpose of said joint, and thinking that it looked remarkably like the connection between a floating and fixed jetty I had seen earlier in the day, I turned to my grandfather and asked him if the Opera House floated. My family thought this was a hilariously ridiculous question to ask but I still, to this day, think it is a perfectly reasonable inference. :)

Jee, I wouldn't have made the connection at all at age 6, I don't think... I'm not altogether brilliant though.
 
Oh welll .. when I was like 8 or so, I used to this there was some "skin" around earth that rockets went through on going to space :D . And that is what caused all that heating and all on reentry. :D . I guess the comparison of earth's cross-section to an onion didn't do much to help.

When I was around 10-12, I used to think that we saw only one side of the moon, but those on the other side of the earth could see the other side only :D. In fact I never thought of it again till about 3-4 years later and on doing a little reading on wiki, I found that it faces once way WHEREVER you are on earth.

~
Thomas
 
I remember during the Apollo missions, I think it was Apollo 11, I went out in the backyard with my Dad's binoculars and tried to see the men walking on the moon. I was most disappointed when I didn't see them. Aged 5 or 6.
 
I don't recall having any particular misconceptions about space. I suppose I couldn't really imagine the distances involved, but then who can? Anyone who says they can are either (a) lying, or (b) have a far more highly evolved brain than the rest of us!

There were things I didn't understand, of course. I couldn't quite get my head around the explanation for why things orbit, and why "weightlessness" occurs, but I don't think I held any misconceptions about them. I just didn't understand them.

I suppose I could say I fell for the explanation as to why the moon looks bigger on the horizon than it does up in the sky (i.e. that it can be measured against objects on the horizon but there is no such reference higher up - perhaps slightly true, but not the real reason).
 
I remember when I was a kid and my dad was trying to teach me about time zones. I instantly saw a means for time travel a la Superman by going the wrong way against the earth's rotation faster than the rotational period!

Stupid international date line!:@
 
When I was a kid I remember that I thought the Apollo was a single-stage rocket. Of course I didnt think "single-stage" but I didnt know It had three different stages. I thought they landed the whole rocket in the moon. Just like in that Tintin comic book where he goes to the moon :P.
 
well, I knew they didn't land the whole thing on the moon, but I thought they lost the rest due to accidents... :lol:
 
When I was very young I often wondered how they landed spacecraft back on Earth. I also assumed that it was all one stage and I thought they probably just came down vertically and used the main engines to slow the descent for a soft landing. I couldn't think up any other way to get back safely! I think this was before I knew what a shuttle even looked like. :p
 
When I was 7, two of my friends and I spent a month's allowance each on firecrackers, dug a big hole, and then rigged up a garbage can to launch one of us into orbit. This happened in Yaounde, Cameroon back in 1968, so you know what we were inspired by. None of us had ever heard of Jules Verne yet.

We practiced re-entry by putting the can up in a tree, and taking turns crawling out of it and unfurling the parachute we made from my parents' king sized mattress sheets. Due to our low weights, and the effectiveness of our parachute, nobody ever got hurt, even though we were leaping from above the roof level. We even took turns for an hour in the can to make sure there was enough air to breathe.

We got into pretty full-on drag out fights over who was going to be the astronaut, and I don't seem to remember who "won," though I do remember we finally drew straws for the honor. I do remember it wasn't me, and I was pretty unhappy about this.

When the Saturday rolled around when we were going to launch (we had dug a hole three feet deep and slightly narrower than the garbage can's diameter), Tony's dad showed up and confiscated our 2500 firecrackers. Tony's little brother had spilled the beans.
 
I used to think space was full of green-haired scantily clad women. Alas, this doesn't seem to be the case.

If this was the case, i'd go to space alot more often.

The Challenger accident happened in 1986 when I was 5.

Apollo was obviously before my time. I vaguely remember seeing videos of the capsules landing in the ocean and thinking that the capsule parachuted the whole way back from the moon... I had also seen video of the shuttle landings by this time, and also thought that the parachute was used for re-entry.

Now, this isn't really a 'funny' misconception, but... I was in school when Challenger exploded, we were all watching the launch live on TV. After seeing the explosion and the initial reactions of the class, I remember speaking up to calm everyone down and saying, "They might have be OK, they've got a parachute."
 
I wasn't quite ready for Orbiter when I first got it, and I natuarlly, out of interest, launched the shuttle first, and sent it staight up, not knowing how orbit works. I also believed that every 9 years, I was lucky to find this out at that moment, all the planets in the solar system would come into visual range on Earth, and I expected to see Jupiter about 3 feet wide in the sky.
ಠ_ಠ
 
I can't remember any large misconceptions. Mainly I didn't understand all this stuff about orbital mechanics. For example, I thought that once the Apollo missions were in orbit, to get to the moon all they really had to do for TLI (a word I didn't know) was just point at the moon and fire the engine. Plane alignment? Who cares? The Saturn V was huge! You could go anywhere in a rocket like that!

Come to think of it though, I was surprised to learn not very many years ago that a little pin-hole in your spaceship doesn't mean instant decompression and death.
 
The two biggest things that I got completely wrong, was first, that in space everything floated up (as opposed to weightlessness), and I thought that a vacuum was what caused weightlessness.
 
I used to think space was full of green-haired scantily clad women. Alas, this doesn't seem to be the case.

I smell a new scenery addon! I wager 20 Quatloos that creating a green-haired chick colony on one of Neptune's moons will encourage more Orbinaut deep space travel.
 
Really didnt have a misunderstanding of space, Built a replica of the Space Shuttle Launch tower in 1982 when I was 4, Put a Plastic Space Shuttle Model I got, and made the Launch Tower out of Legos. I knew that it took 17,500 MPH to get orbit
And I new Jupiter had lots of gravity.
 
Back
Top