Why are people not so interested in Astronomy?

[Yellow_Kazooie (Gabriel)]

Check out this article I wrote on Medium and tell me what you think!

https://medium.com/astronomy-cosmolo...n/cd70cb8cb68f

[acropolite (Phil)]

I don't think I agree, at least in our country, interest in space and Astronomy is probably higher than it's ever been.

There are numerous Television shows on Space and Astronomy, frequent Newspaper coverage and just the other day I noticed our local radio network hosting a lengthy discussion on the makeup of the Universe.

The membership of this forum and the associated equipment spread amongst members shows that those interested are spending more and delving deeper in to the tehnical aspects of their hobby.

Finally take a look at any photography forum, (and to soem extent Social Media) you'll find some very good examples of night landscape photography and timelapses, often taked by people who don't consider themselves astronomers.

[multiweb (Marc)]

I think the simplest answer would be light pollution. Ancient civilisations had a close affinity to the stars and were curious about what they saw. Our skies have mostly gone in populated areas nowadays.

[Manav (Yugant)]

Nice article! I would agree with Marc LP is a big contributor. If you can't see whats up there how will you get interested.

[Yellow_Kazooie (Gabriel)]

Originally Posted by multiweb

I think the simplest answer would be light pollution. Ancient civilisations had a close affinity to the stars and were curious about what they saw. Our skies have mostly gone in populated areas nowadays.

God, how could I forget light pollution? I knew something was missing. Thank you

Originally Posted by Manav

Nice article! I would agree with Marc LP is a big contributor. If you can't see whats up there how will you get interested.

Thanks.
Sorry, but who are you talking about? who is marc lp?

[Shano592 (Shane)]

LP= Light Pollution ....

[pdalek (Patrick)]

I asked my daughter - she said nobody can see any stars due to light pollution. This was also my first thought.

I was born the year sputnik launched and so grew up feeling the link between space travel and astronomy. This link died for most people at the end of Apollo. Modern space travel is too expensive for private flights and stuck doing the same old stuff with NASA. This may change in about a decade.

I used to sail and needed to know celestial navigation. Now there is GPS. Even professional ships masters don't need to study celestial navigation.

I think the public likes the pretty pictures the observatories now publish, but most are not interested in understanding the research. Expensive pictures don't help pay the mortgage.

Astronomy education was never good. Now legal liability limits any observing.

[pdalek (Patrick)]

Just read this article on space research
http://phys.org/news/2014-02-space-people.html
It shows the post-Apollo decline.

[rally]

Patrick,

On the contrary - It actually states an increase !

"The Apollo missions inspired a generation.
The number of US graduates in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM subjects), from high-school through to PhD, has doubled. The relative growth rate since then has dropped drastically, even though the total number has gone up."

So when there was a very small number, the increase as a percentage was great, as the numbers climbed the rate of growth has declined even though numbers have increased.

But I think there is a greater level of awareness on so many new and fronts.
As I recall Astronomy gets a greater number of citations than any other discipline


As for the OPs initial argument and the link provided.

Maybe that cited growth rebuffs the argument or the fact that in the 60s we had two Nations involved in Space flight (UK and USSR) we now have many wealthy developed countries involved in Unmanned Space flight - USA, UK, China, India, Japan, European Space Agency, Italy . . .
Plus lots of countries making and launching satellites
People of 38 Nationalities have been into Space

Whilst the expenditure of NASA Space missions has dropped, there is more expenditure on building terrestrial based space research by the US and other nations as sole or joint projects and in the last few years private enterprise well and truly participating in commercial space flight.

We dont send people into space because we have robotics to do what people cannot do for much less and much longer !

The first of anything - first space ship, first astronaut into space, first lunar landing, first walk on the moon - these are always the sort of events that will capture the publics imagination and get the press.

So is the argument that there hasnt been as many groundbreaking, head turning events that have captured the public's imagination ?

It just seems to me to be an extremely simplistic argument based on an unsubstantiated premise by the author without facts, real research or details and missing about 99% of the content that should be there and relies on unsubstantiated opinions on a few barely relevant points.

Its barely even an opinion and whilst a good talking point - needs further development to be treated seriously

Sorry for the hard line.

Where's Gary when we need him !!

[Poita (Peter)]

Some barriers are:
Light Pollution.
Hubble images setting high expectations (that are dashed when looking through a scope).
Public not understanding any relevance for Astronomy to them.
Daylight savings (Hard to get my kids to stay up late enough in Summer, then too cold in Winter).
Access to equipment. (Though equipment is cheaper than it has ever been it is still pricey).
Difficulty. (People are used to getting their info/imagery/entertainment quickly and easily now).

That said though, whenever I have taken a solar scope into an infants/primary school, every kid in the playground has lined up to take a look, and questions flow. Interest is there, it is just sometimes hidden due to not having an outlet.

[BPO]

Originally Posted by Poita

Public not understanding any relevance for Astronomy to them.

^ This.

[mental4astro (Alexander)]

More fundamental to the public not understanding astronomy's relevance to them is ignorance in its many other forms. The relevance part stems out from a lot of the underlying reasons.

While Apollo, Hubble, Voyager, etc, have done a lot to show us what is out there, a lot of people equate this with "rocket science" and how being brainy is a prerequisite to get into astro. What doesn't help is a mass media that screws up explanations of what scientific bodies put in media releases.

Worse still is a more sinister aspect that underlies the "uncool" aspect - that being dumb is cool. While we that are involved in astro revel in new discoveries and rejoice at someone's first astro photo, in too many schools the love of knowledge is lost for the sake of appearing cool amongst peers. While there are many, many schools where this is not the case and learning thrives, we can't ever forget those schools where this IS the case, learning is frowned upon, and these young people then share their ignorance for evermore. This makes me sad. This is not new. I'm sure you all would remember classmates that insisted in not working at school. But it seems to be worse today.

[mental4astro (Alexander)]

My last post is rather doom-and-gloom. But I should also note that one of my favourite astro related past times is attending star parties at schools! Not only do I get to share my passion for astro, but I also work hard at showing what modest gear can do, AND at insisting that I make my explanations simple to understand without talking down, talking at or dumbing down. Yes light pollution is a pain in the bum, BUT a video camera can do live what our eyes can't. If I'm the only person doing a presentation at a school, I always take two scopes - one for visual and another set up with a video camera. People's curiosity is satisfied in looking through a scope, but I can also show them something now lost to light pollution. While not as spectacular as the highly processed images we see here in IIS, the image is live and of good enough quality to impress all the same. This I really enjoy.

[Wavytone]

Originally Posted by mental4astro

Worse still is a more sinister aspect that underlies the "uncool" aspect - that being dumb is cool.

Alex, nihilism (which is what that is) has always been around in a certain socio-economic segment of the australian population. I'd have to say there were three things that stand out, which are very missing today:

1. NASA was given a very simple clear mission - to land a man on the moon, a dream that even drunken yobs at a pub could understand pretty well. Mars and the planets... didn't quite get so much interest, frankly.

2. Carl Sagan's TV series, 'Cosmos', managed to capture the public imagination fairly well, especially school-age kids learning science for the first time. Couple that with the Mariner and Voyager missions and yes quite a few were sufficiently interested to at least take a look at astronomy.

3. Upto the mid 1980's, keen amateurs with the right gear could make minor contributions to astronomy. That is pretty much finished now, thanks to the technological advances on several fronts.

In current times all three of these are lacking.

- NASA is doing nothing much of significance and its budget has been slashed, and there are no really outstanding missions going on that will grab the public.

- since Carl Sagan there hasn't been a really decent astronomy series that compares. The BBC efforts are all very well but frankly rather lame and too dumbed-down.

- there isn't much you can do now as an amateur beyond "ooh look at that" and take a few happy-snaps much the snap as millions of others.

Lastly... there has been a general trend away from the hard sciences in secondary and territory institutions for the past 20 years as these are perceived as "too hard" compared to the soft subjects, and admittedly have rather poor career prospects. The output from one graduate school alone in Australia is enough to supply all the positions requiring PhDs; the rest finish up driving taxis or waiting on tables while making major career change.

It leaves astronomy where it was a hundred years ago - an interesting little niche subject which kids should learn about if they have a chance, to see for themselves that these things are real, that mathematics has real applications and that there is such a thing as "hard proof" (i.e. right or wrong) by actually observing something, not just stuff in a book or computer game.

[AstroJunk (Jonathan)]

Originally Posted by Wavytone

3. Upto the mid 1980's, keen amateurs with the right gear could make minor contributions to astronomy. That is pretty much finished now, thanks to the technological advances on several fronts.

Got to pull you up on that one - Australian amateur astronomers are world leaders in research and discovery. We are somewhat drowned out in the noise of a millon astrophotographers taking the same photos of the same objects, but we're very much alive

[JB80 (Jarrod)]

The BBC efforts are all very well but frankly rather lame and too dumbed-down.

Maybe, maybe not. It's a fact that after each airing in the UK of Stargazing Live the interest of newcomers has spiked tremendously.
After the first airing retailers were unprepared for the coming assault on their stock levels and many were sold out for months on entry level equipment. Astro societies saw a boom in interest as well.

Even after the latest airing a month or so ago the largest UK forum was breaking records for number of people online at one time.

The BBC throw out plenty of well made science/astro related shows via Horizon(people still moan about them too but it's the best we've got) but they don't capture the publics attention in the same way as the Stargazing shows or even the Sky at Night does. The new Cosmos may be good but it's not accessible and will go largely missed by the general public until it's aired on a main network. I know I'm going to miss out on it so yeah, hype away.
Sure it may seem like the BBC shows are dumbed down to those already in the pastime or with an interest but for newcomers it is clearly a starting point that should only ever be encouraged and applauded.

Personally I think it's a fine example of what sort of impact can be made if given the right type of exposure.

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Simple reason why a large proportion of the population aren't interested in astronomy.....

50 percent of the human population are in the bottom half of the distribution of numerical values of individual human intelligence, and these people, through no fault of their own, are genetically unable to understand information of moderate complexity.

It has become a popular and standard belief that people are "equal", but this is actually a moral position held by the opinion makers in our society;
the only problem with this position is that it is not in accord with the facts.

[Varangian (John)]

20,000 years ago it was all about fire and stars

50 years ago it was all about television

Yesterday it was all about the internet

Kids have way too many options these days and if they want to know what's up there they'll just Google it rather than look up their local astronomy club.

[pw (Peter)]

And yet I've found the internet a brilliant adjunct to hobbies, you can participate in communities like this where the interest is shared, you can learn from the mistakes of others, you can research purchases and deals and so on. For me the internet has been an enabler in my participation in hobbies.

[Varangian (John)]

Originally Posted by pw

And yet I've found the internet a brilliant adjunct to hobbies, you can participate in communities like this where the interest is shared, you can learn from the mistakes of others, you can research purchases and deals and so on. For me the internet has been an enabler in my participation in hobbies.

Yep true although you need to have a predisposition to search out an astronomy forum don't you? Kids have to get past epic fail videos etc. and the rest of the peer pressure rubbish first.