"Twenty four percent said they believe people can be teleported. Forty percent claim that hoverboards exist, while nearly half of respondents believe "memory-erasing technology exists." Perhaps the weirdest result, though, is that "nearly one-fifth (18%) of adults have the incorrect view that they can see gravity". Seriously, WTF does that mean?"
I need to look up this survey to see how these questions are worded, but a lot of them are more ambiguous than they sound.
"Twenty four percent said they believe people can be teleported."
With our current scientific knowledge this is certainly impossible, but the idea that some time in the future we will learn to do this is not one i would dismiss out of hand on the principal that if we limit what we believe we can accomplish and do not challenge that limit then we will never know what we could have done.
"Forty percent claim that hoverboards exist"
We have hovercraft right NOW. No not the land speeders of Star Wars, these things float on a cushion of air that's held in place by heavy cloth skirts. They can't fly but they can certainly hover. It's not a far stretch of the imagination to go out and make a hover board with currently available technology. It might be big and clunky and ultimately dis-functional for almost all the things you would like to do with it, but it can be done.
"Perhaps the weirdest result, though, is that "nearly one-fifth (18%) of adults have the incorrect view that they can see gravity"."
That depends on what you mean when you say "see" I can certainly see the EFFECTS that gravity has on objects, but i can't literally see the force that is causing the effect. I can also "see" people not bothering to make this distinction. (if you saw what i did there then you can "see" what i mean.)
Also I've been hearing that someone is developing a sort of confined plasma beam that could one day become what many people think of when you say the word "lightsaber". But then I've been hearing that from shows on the TV (i forget which) so they could be greatly exaggerated or outright fabricated.
I hope i'm not jumping the gun by writing this and then doing the research. But i wanted to get my thoughts down while they were still fresh.
*EDIT* my god... yeah this shouldn't be taken seriously. The questions seem deliberately ambiguous, changing from literal to abstract. "Can you spray on solar cells?" Apparently you can, but only if you want to be extremely literal. I can't possibly believe that it would be that simple, you would still have to have a way to transfer the energy from each individual cell to the place you want it if you want them to be functional. But i guess strictly literally, you can. Then theres "Can stars sing?" the answer was yes. But literally they cannot. Apparently when they say "sing" they mean "can you measure the oscillations of a star, convert that to data, and send that data to a speaker and play them as sound waves in a way that sounds like music but is not literally singing (but we'll call it singing because it's a good analogy.)
Yeah, like i said, the questions are phrased to be deliberately ambiguous, i guess if you didn't actually hear of each of these things yourself you're likely to get them wrong. So i guess it does accurately test your knowledge of recent scientific developments, but this is NOT to be confused with how intelligent the person answering the question is. Any person with a reasonable understanding of science could argue either side of most of these without being wrong.
**EDIT** and now i am severely annoyed at all the people who are taking this seriously when the questions on the poll were so severely very manhandled.
I need to look up this survey to see how these questions are worded, but a lot of them are more ambiguous than they sound.
"Twenty four percent said they believe people can be teleported."
With our current scientific knowledge this is certainly impossible, but the idea that some time in the future we will learn to do this is not one i would dismiss out of hand on the principal that if we limit what we believe we can accomplish and do not challenge that limit then we will never know what we could have done.
"Forty percent claim that hoverboards exist"
We have hovercraft right NOW. No not the land speeders of Star Wars, these things float on a cushion of air that's held in place by heavy cloth skirts. They can't fly but they can certainly hover. It's not a far stretch of the imagination to go out and make a hover board with currently available technology. It might be big and clunky and ultimately dis-functional for almost all the things you would like to do with it, but it can be done.
"Perhaps the weirdest result, though, is that "nearly one-fifth (18%) of adults have the incorrect view that they can see gravity"."
That depends on what you mean when you say "see" I can certainly see the EFFECTS that gravity has on objects, but i can't literally see the force that is causing the effect. I can also "see" people not bothering to make this distinction. (if you saw what i did there then you can "see" what i mean.)
Also I've been hearing that someone is developing a sort of confined plasma beam that could one day become what many people think of when you say the word "lightsaber". But then I've been hearing that from shows on the TV (i forget which) so they could be greatly exaggerated or outright fabricated.
I hope i'm not jumping the gun by writing this and then doing the research. But i wanted to get my thoughts down while they were still fresh.
*EDIT* my god... yeah this shouldn't be taken seriously. The questions seem deliberately ambiguous, changing from literal to abstract. "Can you spray on solar cells?" Apparently you can, but only if you want to be extremely literal. I can't possibly believe that it would be that simple, you would still have to have a way to transfer the energy from each individual cell to the place you want it if you want them to be functional. But i guess strictly literally, you can. Then theres "Can stars sing?" the answer was yes. But literally they cannot. Apparently when they say "sing" they mean "can you measure the oscillations of a star, convert that to data, and send that data to a speaker and play them as sound waves in a way that sounds like music but is not literally singing (but we'll call it singing because it's a good analogy.)
Yeah, like i said, the questions are phrased to be deliberately ambiguous, i guess if you didn't actually hear of each of these things yourself you're likely to get them wrong. So i guess it does accurately test your knowledge of recent scientific developments, but this is NOT to be confused with how intelligent the person answering the question is. Any person with a reasonable understanding of science could argue either side of most of these without being wrong.
**EDIT** and now i am severely annoyed at all the people who are taking this seriously when the questions on the poll were so severely very manhandled.
