Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

INTRODUCTION
I love
bad science fiction shows. Angry Red Planet, Voyage to the
Bottom of the Sea, UFO, all those old TV shows and movies in
black and white or living color. I grew up on them. I’d stay up late
watching TV, sometimes long after my folks would normally let
me. I remember clearly coming home from third grade and asking
my mom for permission to watch Lost in Space. I worshipped that
show, Robot, Dr. Smith, Jupiter 2, and all. I wanted to wear a
velour, multicolored V neck sweater, I had a crush on Judy Robinson—the
whole nine yards.
Sure, I liked the good ones too. Five Million Years to Earth
and The Day the Earth Stood Still were favorites of mine back
then, and they still are. But the important thing to me wasn’t that
they were good or bad, or even if they made sense—I remember an
Italian flick about a voyage to Venus that might have been written
by Salvador Dali on acid. What was important was that they had
aliens and rocket ships.
I would spend long hours as a child pretending to ride a rocket
to other planets. I always knew I’d be a scientist, and I was pretty
sure I wanted to be an astronomer. Those movies didn’t discourage
me because of their bad science; they inspired me. I didn’t care that
it’s silly to try to blast a conventional chemical rocket to another
star, or that you can’t hear sounds in space. All I cared about was
getting out there, and if I could do it by watching ridiculous
movies, then so be it. I would have given anything—everything—
to be able to step on board a spaceship and be able to see a binary
star up close, or cruise through a nebula, or go out through the
plane of our Galaxy and see it hanging in the sky, faint, ominous,
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