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.

I used to work with a man who told me that the moon wasn't real, it was a reflection of the sun. I asked if he meant that it was reflecting the sun's light, and he clarified that its not an object, just light. I asked what the light was reflecting off of, and he said "the sky". I asked what we could see outside because the moon was visible that day, and he said it wasn't a real thing, just an illusion.

The office manager had to drag him away because she said she legitimately thought I might have a stroke if we kept talking about it, and all talk of the moon in general was banned from the workplace.