It will dumb down your intelligence and more importantly your capacity to, and awareness of the need to resist! Search Challenger disaster survivers and the Van Allen belts. QI is worse than mythbusters. (Take this seriously; it's not every day somebody is so honest.)
What is funny is that Johnny is actually correct about the Sun being the center of the observable Universe because the earth rotates around the sun and we can make observations from earth at any point in its rotation around the sun, leaving the outside of the orbit the observable universe, placing the sun at the center.
Love Rich Hall. he can sit there for ages not saying anything, but when he does it’s usually very funny. Saw his live show a few years ago, that was hilarious
Never understood why he was on QI. Alan once said in an interview that they stopped having Hall on because he refused to get into the spirit of things. i.e. not at all funny.
"Which Moon?" was absolutely genius. As for not funny: Rich's humour requires active participation. In other words: He forces you to think before you laugh. I can see how this could prevent some people from finding him funny...
Can't go wrong with QI. Absolutely love the show and you learn a lot from it. Sandi is doing a great job and I hope they can get to Z which means they will be one of the longest television shows ever. I think they are on P.
OK, so I'm stating the obvious, but it has to be said: QI is extraordinarily good TV... it's brilliantly silly, engaging and good natured all at the same time. And the tone set by The Frymaster lifted it just that much higher. Sandi Toksvig gets the cigar for successfully taking on Fry's role and, if there is a God - thankyou for Alan Davis in particular - and triple ticks for the panelists who consistently set a standard difficult to match. Pommies set the standard for TV - no question.
@@jimraq1 if the earth was flat wouldn't he have to put a ladder on the underside of the planet as putting a ladder on the south Pole in a flat Earth scenario would be exactly the same as any other point of the earth?
I don't think he knew it, I think he inferred from the fact that they're called "Ken and Barbie". "Kell Doll" is a pretty common shorthand for lacking genitals.
Only the base of the lunar lander remains. A portion of it (the landing gear, descent engine, and its fuel supply) was left behind upon departure of the crew capsule. It is very possible that the lunar lander crew capsule is still in orbit around the moon.
Its both ironic and true, as he mentions with the whole "We were the same during our colonial period". The reason its in their DNA is because the colonizers were English and in English humour, self deprecation is normal.
Space elevator needs to be at the equator not because it's moving the fastest, but because the "counterweight" needs to orbit around the earth's center of mass. Otherwise you get a curve relative to ground and non-constant distance to the base (you're probably familiar with this from seeing the ISS orbit relative to ground).
No. The "counterweight" would not be in orbit, it would be pulling the elevator cord taut via centrifugal force, tugging away from the Earth's rotational axis. For example, a space elevator anchored near Seattle (at 47 degrees latitude), would still get to space but, near the anchor, the cord would be at about a 43 degree angle to the ground. Anchoring it at the equator would mean the chord goes straight up, saving time and materials, as well as making it less hazardous to airplane traffic.
Holdenon3 there is no such thing as centrifugal force. Also yes the ‘counter weight’ would need to be in orbit otherwise the counter weight wouldn’t be a counter weight, it would collapse to the earth. You need a geosynchronous orbit of a satellite attached to the equator with a rope, the satellite would keep the rope taut.
He didn't say that because it's wrong. While light reflecting from these objects would reach your eye, it would be far too dim for your eye to register, and the eye can't discern such small distances from that far away.
Mars is a red brown though. "Brown" is a vague description that includes many very red hues. "Brown" and "orange" can only be distinguished by saturation and thus by comparison to a dark backdrop. If the sky is black, Mars is definitely red, or red-orange. Just look at it and tell me it's brown.
The US government never developed a special pen for space. Some pen company (probably fisher-price) did it on their own to get in on the space craze. I think a regular pen was used by astronauts.
No they used the pressurized pens. the thing is back then ball point pens were very expensive and quite unreliable. It was until BIC used mass production that ball point pens became affordable. The pressurized pen was the only realistic option for the astronauts.
What if, by some work of fate, Jonny Vegas was right about the sun being the centre of the universe. As it's not provable, it is possible. Though I suspect my genitals are the centre of the universe. 🤣
What man made artifacts can be seen from the moon? Well if someone where standing on the moon they could see: an American flag, mirrors, spacesuits, and the luna orbiter.
The Rural Buddha Bill Bailey has a point with travelling to space using your own imagination. Olaf Stapleton used a similar idea where in his book 'Star Maker' the main character 'The Traveler' went to the top of a hill and 'projected his thought' out into the universe.
There's that scene in the Hitch Hikers Guide where they put Zaphod in the machine that shows you your relationship to the universe. The last clip was wrong. Douglas Adams already answered this question.
Wasn't that only because Zaphod was in the artificial universe designed to hide him? He'd naturally be the most important person in it. As Gag Halfrunt said "Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?"
@@zapkvr Me too! I also have them on cassette recorded off the radio, and somewhere the vinyl version of the first series with Dawn French as Trillian, I was obsessed with it :)
In the 1600s, the poet and swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac wrote that he had travelled to the moon by taking a magnet and sitting on a sheet of metal. He threw the magnet into the air and ascended on the metal plate (which was attracted by the magnet). He then caught the magnet, threw it upward again, and so ascended indefinitely. (He was kidding.)
Mars is rust colored because the color comes from iron oxide in the rocks and regolith there. NASA tweaks colors to look "correct" but there's a bit of a blue & black vs white & gold dress problem. Illumination affects color so do you want to know what something looks like under ambient lighting on Mars or do you want to know what color something is (the visible spectrum albedo). They are actually two different things. The Viking images were tweaked after they noticed a cable was the wrong color in a photo, modern missions like Curiosity take color calibration photographic targets attached to the rover to help get it right after the Viking lesson. In practice many images are multispectral for scientific analysis and aren't even optimized for human vision, so the visual appearance is a secondary concern, strangely enough. Color is used to help identify minerals as part of the mission's geological analysis, it's not primarily about the beauty shots although they are amazing.
It amazes me that people are told the photos from Mars are shopped to fall in line with our expectations and it just runs like water off a duck's back. Like i wouldn't have cared if they said "oh btw, it's not red. It's actually just a dusty brown colour", and i don't think many people would. So why even go to trouble? How does it benefit anything or anyone to lie about that? But what's more important than that is the admission that they shop photos to match expectations. Expectations set by the same people. So what else has been shopped? Like i know basically every photo that comes from space is digitally enhanced. But i no longer feel like i can trust those images at all, nor the source of where they're coming from
The centre of the observable universe is the observer. THe centre of the entire universe, we don't know, the universe seems to be flat as far as we can see in our observable universe, but maybe it's a 4D donut shape, in which case there would be no centre,
I like the "bubble to space" idea at 6:54. Unfortunately a bubble pops when there's more air inside it than there's surrounding air. And many other issues! But fun idea nonetheless.
I mean, the Earth feels like it's stationary and in the centre of the universe. Unless you have the leisure of investigating the universe yourself, you have to rely on people teaching you this stuff. Clearly, Johnny has confused Solar system with observable universe.
@@hareecionelson5875 I know that’s my point. I’m not saying it was stupid for people to ever believe it before we found it it wasn’t true. I’m saying they clearly can’t do much learning or reading if they got this far in life and either hadn’t been taught, or hadn’t read for themselves, that the sun and Earth are in no special place in the universe. Sometimes people have to take responsibility for their own ignorance.
@@MarxistKnight Is it so important to need to know that the Sun is not the centre of the universe? Clearly Johnny has the idea that the Sun is centre of something. Mocking laughter isn't an effective way to encourage people to learn about things. Isaac Newton was said only to have laughed once, when someone asked him what the point was of studying Euclid, Newton, like Stephen was amused that someone would not study Euclid. Ironically, non-Euclidean geometry is used by Einstein to fix Newton's universal law. Maybe if Newton had thought a bit about the usefulness of Euclid, he'd have solved the problem of 'action at a distance' that he was bothered by.
@@hareecionelson5875 I just think that knowing the sun isn’t the centre of the universe is akin to knowing that the Earth is round. It’s not like I’m going crazy when I’m not in here about how they don’t know it. I just think that that level of ignorance is deserving of derision, because as I say, to me it suggests a huge lack of interest in the world and therefore a certain closed-mindedness.
They were talking about the observable universe, not the whole universe itself. Even so, I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that the universe doesn't have a centre or an edge, so everything is redshifting away from us at the same rate.
@@thidang6247 I am certain I've heard that things are expanding away from us at different speeds, and that the delta in redshift can be used to find the originating direction.
@@adamnshame They are expanding away from us at different speeds, but that's a matter of distance, not direction. Everything that's the same distance is receding at the same speed, regardless of which direction we look. And we can measure distances out to about 10 billion light years using Type 1a supernovae, which all have the same intrinsic brightness.
Man made objects from the moon on the earth? So not made on earth, but actualy made on the moon? Stool/urine samples made by astronaute on the moon where collected in a bag and brougth back to earth fore research where labeld and stored and kept in a freezer . (If a nasa worker dint mastake it fore fudge took it out the freezer and eat it)
Stephen Fry is a national treasure in whatever country he happens to be in at the time, but it takes a remarkable level of hubris as a British citizen to point at Americans and unblinkingly call them "land grabbers". Pot and the kettle, sir. Also, I have watched numerous chat shows with Alan Davies and I have yet to see a clip where he doesn't directly and intentionally detract from the conversation.
