6 Space Myths that Hollywood movies have promoted - Debunked!

A layman’s knowledge of space is very similar to their knowledge of science and history…It’s usually based on what we’ve picked up from movies, not research-based awareness of the world around us. I’m not underestimating laymen but there are a good many people who just assume they know the truth and have not sought it – so here’s another mythbuster: Outer-Space-style!

Asteroid belts are deadly.

Myth: Remember in The Empire Strikes Back, Hans Solo (temporarily hyperdriveless) had to navigate through a chaotic asteroid field while trying to evade the Empire. Obviously, all of the Empire starships were destroyed while Hans succeeded in doing what C-3PO said the chances were slim to none. But that’s what an asteroid belt is right? A stampede of millions of huge murderous space boulders instead of pissed off buffalos…

Reality: Wrong! The asteroid belt in our solar system looks like the picture below (scroll down…got it?) It looks very similar to the one in Star Wars. Yes, there are about half a million asteroids that we know of, in there but no picture of space can convey the real distances. There are miles and miles inbetween those hunks of rock, to the point that when NASA sent a probe through the belt, scientists said the odds of colliding into a meteorite was one in a billion!

So basically, Hans could’ve blindfolded himself and steered through the belt with his knees and his odds of colliding with an asteroid wouldn’t be much more than hitting one driving to the grocery store. Once upon a time, our belt had a thousand times more asteroids in it and even then, each asteroid had (wait for it…) 400,000 square miles to itself. No jokes.

You could argue that this particular galaxy and this particular asteroid belt in the Star Wars universe could be superdense but that’s impossible due to the laws of physics. Over time, they would HAVE to disperse due to all the collisions; they would go flying off outside the belt into outer space, free from the bounds of the belt’s gravity.

So to get hit by an asteroid, you’d have to have a hell of space pilot with a hell of a deathwish!

Black holes are cosmic vacuum cleaners.

Myth: Out of all the horrible things out there in space, black holes are one of the worst. They are ominion, invisible, huge and hoover everything within lightyears into their incomprehensible void. Due to this tendency, black holes are pretty much contractually obliged to appear in every sci-fi epic. From the planet-Vulcan-destroying black hole in Star Trek to Doctor Who, the black hole is portrayed as an inescapable vortex of destruction, slurping our universe through a straw.

Reality: Say tomorrow we woke up to find someone had replaced our sun with a black hole of the same mass. What would happen? Nothing. Well, we would freeze because our sun is gone but other than that, neither would we get sucked into or fall into space. Black holes are not as frightening as other people believe them to be. As big as they are, they still have mass and that means they have a finite amount of strength (Force =Mass x Acceleration of Gravity). So, black holes are like any other object subjected to the laws of physics meaning that this black hole would have the same gravitation pull as our sun – no more, no less.

The sun is yellow.

Myth: If you grab a crayon now and you drew anything other than a yellow sun, you would be a smartass or failing kindergarten. The sun is yellow, pretty much the first thing a child learns, right after it is hot. It’s even classified as the yellow dwarf.

Reality: Sorry to crush all the memories of art class, the sun is not yellow, nor is it engulfed in wavy flames. Doesn’t look like anything much, except perhaps an intergalactic cue ball. The sun appears yellow-tinted due to the Earth’s atmosphere and at 6,000 Kelvin, any thing can only be one colour: white. Pretty boring white, too.  Yes, the sun looks like the moon, but without the face or interesting dents.

I'm not kidding. That's actually our sun. (Courtesy of NASA)

We aren’t dependent on our eyes for the rest of our solar system either. For example, Mars, we’ve got pictures right, straight from the Mars rover landed on the ground, taking pictures of the red planet from inches away? It’s not even NASA’s fault - extraterrestrial photography is tricky, and the pictures that result do not necessarily represent the most accurate version of the subject. Instead, the scientists involved in the process tend to go for the combination of colors that help their work the most.

 Basically, all those awesome pictures space research has been throwing our way for years are nothing but black and white images colored in to show how much science each part of the picture features. And NASA will run it through filters to approximate what the full color version would look like if you were actually there sitting on the rover:

(Left: What the Mars Rover sent back. Right: What we coloured in.
All pictures courtesy of NASA)

But then you have to remember that Mars gets less than half as much sunlight as the Earth, and that said light is shining down through an atmosphere full of dust made of iron oxide (rust) particles. What we're saying is, the question of "What color is ________?" never has a simple answer when you're talking about outer space.

Meteorites are hot.

Myth: Say, a meteorite were to land in your backyard right now. You run out and see it sitting in its very own crater. Do you touch it? Hell-to-the-no, right? Not till it cools down? I mean, we’ve seen it in a million movies like Armageddon where the fiery meteor shower bombard NY, exploding stuff on impact.

Seriously...would you touch this? I wouldn't choose to be anywhere within 100km.

Reality: Sorry, wrong. These chunks of rock have been in space, 3 degrees above absolute zero, which is -270degC for billions of years. Due to their extreme speed, they are only in the atmosphere for a few minutes. They have NO time to become scorching hot before impact and likely to be just lukewarm.

So where does that giant fireball image come from, in those meteor showers? In fact, the fireball is not from the actual physical meteor but from the air in front of the meteor being compressed at incredibly fast speeds. That layer of air, creates a shock wave all the way to impact and heats up to point of catching fire!

Of course, the fire would heat up the outer layers of the meteor in those few minutes but it doesn’t matter since those always get blown off on impact. So if you’re around when a meteor lands, just pick it up. Great souvenirs for when the alien conspiracy fellas turn up!

YAY! All for meeee!

People explode in the vacuum of space.

Myth: In countless movies and sci-fi shows (the low-budget 0nes), we’ve seen it time and time again; if you go into space without a spacesuit, you will explode! The pressure inside you compared to the pressre outside will turn you inside out in a gruesome way immediately. Even Bart and Homer Simpson died this way (although I’m not sure we can expect accurate science from The Simpsons).

For example a balloon in the upper atmosphere, the pressure outside is greater than the pressure inside the balloon, the balloon will go splat! So this part is indeed correct. But why not humans?

Reality: Well…we’d like to think that we’re more complicated than balloons! We have our skin and circulatory system! The skin contains and protects our body so well that it can negate the effect of explosive decompression. The circulatory system is so adaptable that instead of boiling, the blood keeps going. Even freezing isn’t an immediate issue despite the cold environment, as there’s not much matter in space to absorb your body heat. The fact is that the main dangers of not having a spacesuit are oxygen-related: breating and holding air in your lungs, which leads to lung-inflating trauma.

Of course, if you just decide to hang around in space in a bikini and a respirator, it will kill you. Just won’t be as hilarious to watch.

There is a permanent dark side on the moon.

Myth: The moon has a dark side that doesn’t receive much sunlight, resulting in a freezing, dark wasteland, complete opposite to the other side where there is warmth. Thus, the dark side of the moon has become a place of myth, mystery and fear in popular culture, such as hiding ancient Transformer technology.

Reality: There’s no such thing, just like there’s no dark side of the Earth. Of course, only one side of the moon faces the Earth at any given time, just the Earth, not the sun! Besides eclipses and other anomalies, both sides of the moon get exactly the same amount of light as the face side, at different times though. On Earth, scientists refer to this phenomenon as ‘night’ :D

Just because we don’t see the far side of the moon doesn’t mean it’s bathed in darkness. It’s like applying the same logic as the baby game, Peekaboo: ‘Can’t see my face? Not there!’

Yes, I'm obsessed with Memes. I almost added one with the Win Baby :)

So there you go...Now you can watch Star Wars and point out more flaws...than usual. Thanks Shrusti and George Lucas :) 

Source + Pics from Google Images mainly...It's too annoying to list sources for pictures.

Psychology and History behind To-Do Lists

So...what do you do when you are completely stuck? I have been having writer's block for a month. It's BAD! The lack of inspiration is not for lack for trying. I'm still reading plenty of articles, bookmarking what I find interesting as possible future blogposts; but I can't get around to writing them. I've been working on ONE post for what seems like 2 weeks. Anyways, so instead of making some grand return to the blogosphere, I'm going to ease my way in with articles I have enjoyed and don't see any purpose in redoing it as it is very interesting by itself!

Written by: Maria Popova at BrainPickings

“The list is the origin of culture,” Umberto Eco famously proclaimed. (Leonardo da Vinci,John Lennon, and Woody Guthrie would have all agreed.) But the list, it turns out, might also be the origin of both our highest happiness and our dreariest dissatisfaction. So argues New York Times science writer John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. While the book is fascinating in general, its third chapter, titled “A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey,” is particularly interesting. In it, Tierney and Baumeister dissect the sociocultural anatomy of our favorite organizational tool, from the storytellers who crafted the Bible and wrote the Genesis myth with its six-step world-creation plan, to Benjamin Franklin’s fastidious pursuit of virtue bound by goal-setting lists, to comedian Drew Carey’s quest for supreme personal productivity.

These anecdotes and pieces of cultural mythology are interwoven with ample psychology experiments from the past century and, ultimately, distilled into insight on how to make the to-list a tool of fulfillment rather than frustration.

Franklin, for instance, demonstrated one of the greatest pitfalls of the to-do list: trying to do too much at once, letting different goals come into conflict with one another:

Franklin tried a divide-and-conquer approach. He drew up a list of virtues and wrote a brief goal for each one, like this one for Order: ‘Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.’

…

When, as a young journeyman printer, he tried to practice Order by drawing up a rigid daily work schedule, he kept getting interrupted by unexpected demands from his clients — and Industry required him to ignore the schedule and meet with them. If he practiced Frugality (‘Waste nothing’) by always mending his own clothes and preparing all his own meals, there’d be less time available for Industry at his job — or for side projects like flying a kite in a thunderstorm or editing the Declaration of Independence. If he promised to spend an evening with his friends but then fell behind his schedule for work, he’d have to make a choice that would violate his virtue of Resolution: ‘Perform without fail what you resolve.’”

The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action. But deciding on the right goals can be a daunting task.

Tierney and Baumeister recount a revealing experiment: When a psychologist was invited to give a talk at the Pentagon on managing time and resources, he decided to warm up the elite group of generals with a short writing exercise. He asked them all to write a summary of their strategic approach limited to 25 words.

The exercise stumped most of them. None of the distinguished men in uniform could come up with anything.

The only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: ‘First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.’”

Unscrupulous, perhaps, but the authors argue this is a simple version of an important to-do list strategy for reconciling the long-term with the short-term, or “the fussy with the fuzzy.”

Comedian Drew Carey took a different approach to mastering his to-do list — he outsourced his strategy to productivity guru David Allen, author of the cultish, modern Bible Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, who taught him how to adhere to specific next steps rather than abstract larger goals. The latter loom in the back of our mind like a nagging mother, never fully silenced until specific actionable steps are taken.

In fact, our brain appears to be wired to nag about unfinished to-do list items as uncompleted tasks and unmet goals continue to pop up into our minds. This is called the Zeigarnik effect and explains phenomena like earworms — when you hear only a portion of song, the song is likely to run through your mind at odd intervals as your brain struggles to finish it. Originally, the Zeigarnik effect was believed to be the brain’s way of ensuring goals are eventually accomplished, by prodding you into urgency until they are. But recent research has shed new light on the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in our cognitive to-do lists.

[It] turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.”

The moral, then? Unless you are Woody Guthrie, keep your to-do list to a few very specific, actionable, non-conflicting items, then go fly your kite in peace.

I love this for multiple reasons.

1. LISTS are amazing! They are neat, organised and highly productive if used efficiently.
2. The fact that the only person who managed to eke out her strategic approach was a woman! (Yes, I'm a feminist. Sue me!)
3. It's nice to see that even Benjamin Franklin was sooo busy he couldn't get his lists to work towards his advantage at times.
4. The Zeigarnik effect, not only has a cool name, but explains the way your conscious and subconscious mind interacts. The earworm (classic problem). Not being able to focus on anything nowadays, yes there are more distractions, but at the same time, we also have more to do, which means we are spread thinner. So if we don't have a plan to tackle these things, we can never get a single thing done right. Great explanation.

Thanks for reading...Sorry for the long hiatus (if you missed me at all). I promise I'm going to try harder.