Does you know someone who compulsively forwards bogus email rumors?

I get it all the time. Sometimes it's political, sometime it's religious, sometimes it's scientific, but it's always bullshit. The women of a certain age in my family forward "fun facts" that are untrue, and they would know that if they took 2 seconds to run a Google search and find out for themselves. Today's flavor is the below email, super obnoxious formatting mostly removed for your sanity:

Two moons on 27th August 2010

27^th Aug the Whole World is waiting for............. 

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky

starting August. It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will culminate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles off earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons.

 

The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. 

 

Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again.

Well, a quick search on "two moons mars august 27" will lead you to this article from Science.NASA.gov, a fairly reputable source, given the subject. The article states:

Just when you thought it was safe to check your email...

For the sixth year in a row, a message about the Red Planet is popping up in email boxes around the world. It instructs readers to go outside after dark on August 27th and behold the sky. "Mars will look as large as the full moon," it says. "No one alive today will ever see this again."

Don't believe it.

Here's what will really happen if you go outside after dark on August 27th. Nothing. Mars won't be there. On that date, the red planet will be nearly 250 million km away from Earth and completely absent from the evening sky.

Right: Only in Photoshop does Mars appear as large as a full Moon.

The Mars Hoax got its start in 2003 when Earth and Mars really did have a close encounter. On Aug. 27th of that year, Mars was only 56 million km away, a 60,000-year record for martian close approaches to Earth. Someone sent an email alerting friends to the event. The message contained some misunderstandings and omission--but what email doesn't? A piece of advanced technology called the "forward button" did the rest.

So not only do we have a case of "any fool can create a hoax email and many of them do," but you also have people setting up their lawn chairs and binoculars for an astrophysical marvel that will never happen.

 

So I ask, why does this happen? In a day and age when information is ubiquitous and so easily accessible, why do people lack basic curiosity check on the facts that are presented to them in such an obviously unreliable manner? That is, why do so many people lack a filter to the netterwebs when they know the very same webs are full of sites that say the moon landing and the Holocaust were both faked? Why do people trust email forwards so much?

 

I send my family the Snopes.com link to nearly every urban myth they sends me, but they continue to blindly forward nonsense.

Posted via email from technosocialite