The fault in our stars Pseudoastronomy |
Adding epicycles |
Epicyclists |
—YouTube comment by user Lucius Uri[1] |
Stars arseholes are Souls is a YouTube channel run by Mike Stars (allegedy a pen name) — a guy notable for being nuttier than squirrel shit.[2]
Created on the 28th of June 2007, his channel boasts just over 6,500 followers and has garnered about 610,000 views as of August 2015.[3]
Mike is also the author of a book 40-page pamphlet, which — to him — makes Principia Mathematica look like used toilet paper by comparison.[4]
Mike proudly displays ignorance even of many day-to-day facts, claiming among other things that "the moonlight cools things off"[5] and that "airplanes or ships never come from, or disappear in, the horizon".[6]
“”Stars are not "Suns" or glowing rocks. They are orbs of living energy. Souls. Thats why they emit different colors.
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—Mike being not even wrong and wronger than wrong[7] |
Mike's channel stands as a considerable monument to ignorance. His central belief is not only that Earth is the center of the universe but that Earth is flat as well. Oh, and NASA is hiding the true shape of Earth.
Ignoring the fact that there's no conceivable reason — nor possible way — to "hide the shape" of the world, and that all of physics basically goes out the window in that scenario, Mike presents all the evidence a sober mind could want in order to decide on the issue. His methods of investigation include:
Mike is also an expert at just asking questions, just asking literally suggesting things like "atomic bombs are alien technology?" and "will we have our first Alien President in 15 years?".[9]
A particularly hilarious video is "Einstein was Wrong" where Mike "proves" using a "simulation" of the Bedford Level experiment that the Earth is flat because a flat terrain drawn in Google SketchUp is flat.[10] Mike also pats himself on the back for being so very humble in the very same video he named "Einstein was Wrong".
Mike thinks that the moon landings are Barack Obama's biggest lie (Obama being 8 years old when the first moon landing took place). Why are they false? Because the lunar ground appears to be "unconnected" with the mountains in the background.[11] Furthermore, the photos of the moons of our Solar System are fake because a photo of Callisto has better quality than some photos of the Moon, not knowing that the photo of Callisto was taken by the Galileo probe (that was written right below the photo) at a much closer distance than the photo of our moon and not from the Earth.[12] In the same video, he also argues that landing smoothly on the Moon is impossible due to the virtual lack of air resistance yet ignores the fact that lunar landing modules are provided with a propulsion system below them to avoid this problem.[13]
In his paradigm-redefining work, he has also been able to connect the attacks of September 11th with Flat-Earthery.[14]
Regarding his religious beliefs, Mike firmly believes that there is indeed a creator, it's just that he doesn't know who he or she is. By virtue of this overtly-unjustified conviction, he further believes firmly that evolution is a hoax, that all fossils are unequivocally fake, and that dinosaurs never even existed.[15] Stranger still, Mike thinks that extinction is a myth too (even as a concept!), and so the Dodo bird must be alive somewhere,[16] possibly kept hidden by NWO stooges.
Regarding astronomy, Mike thinks that the galaxies, planets, and stars — as we know them through science — do not actually exist.[17][18] Interestingly, space doesn't exist either, but somehow Heaven does.[19]
“”Nothing helps drive home a radical theory like munching on potato chips during your narration.
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—YouTube comment by user Mike Bond[20] |
The first video (in his groundbreaking two-part series) consists mainly of him talking into his gas station-bought deluxe gaming headset, thus providing his viewers with a walkthrough of his process of investigating NASA the gut-wrenching noise of him greedily gobbling cereal and milk in an absolute car crash of guttural audio. Really now — this was chosen by him as an appropriate multitask activity to undertake while at the same time recording a talking voiceover way too close to his mic. While Mike does have a plethora of shortcomings... I can't figure out a way to end this sentence nicely
Science-literate (and, for good reason, quite measurably annoyed) YouTube user Ander Garin provides us with a rundown of some of the science in the first video that Mike apparently first wiped his ass with, then blew his nose with, and finally stuffed in his pipe and freebased in order to plausibly end up with his current worldview;[21]
Oh my goodness, there’re so many errors in this video.
- 3:13 – Of course it’s a false color image! The image was composed by the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray observatory. X-rays are beyond our visible spectrum, so the space telescopes have to add false colors in order for us to see the X-ray patterns.
- 3:40 – Who makes an explanatory video eating chips?
- 3:50 – That kind of galaxy is actually called "lenticular galaxy".
- 4:08 – "If these galaxies are flat, why can’t the Earth be flat too?” Well, to begin with galaxies, not all of them look flat. It’s true that spiral galaxies like ours, the Milky Way; look like a disc. However, there are elliptical galaxies, which have an ellipsoidal shape, like M32; and irregular galaxies, with no distinct regular shape, like IC 559. So, if there’re flat galaxies, why aren’t there flat planets? Because the two objects are completely different in composition. A galaxy is made up of very disperse “particles” (primarily stars) and they all orbit around their center of masses, the galactic core. However, in a planet, particles are orders of magnitude closer to each other, which means that gravity and intermolecular forces clump them together until they reach hydrostatic equilibrium: a spheroid or ellipsoid, with the densest substances inside and the least ones outside. A hypothetical flat planet (if something like that could even form in the first place), would collapse into a spheroid due its own gravity, because it isn’t in hydrostatic equilibrium. However, if the Earth were flat due to magic, there would still be plenty of evidence about its shape. On a flat Earth, it wouldn’t be possible to circumnavigate the world; things would fall into the centre from the borders because gravity wouldn’t be perpendicular to the surface in all parts of the world and the shadow of the Earth on a lunar eclipse would either be a line, ellipse or circle.
- 6:18 – Isaac Newton said that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, because the Earth is in fact an oblate spheroid, but it isn’t noticeable. Earth’s equatorial radius is 6,378.1 km, while its polar radius is 6,356.8 km. The equatorial radius is just 0.335% longer than the polar one. A planet’s oblateness becomes more noticeable as we decrease its rotational period and density. Saturn, a gas giant with a sidereal rotation period of only 10.55 hours, has an equatorial radius of 60,268 km and a polar radius of 54,364 km. This means that the equatorial radius is *10.86% longer than the polar radius, enough to be noticeable in a picture of Saturn.
- 7:30 – You really weren’t able to tell that that continent was North America at first sight? By the way, you can actually appreciate the curvature of the Earth while flying.
- 8:22 – Of course the "Blue Marble 2012" picture isn't a photo, it's a composite image.
- 10:11 – What's funny about that picture? Are you smoking pot or something?
- 10:28 – Maybe because Antarctica's air is so cold that a higher portion of water vapor condensates forming clouds?
- 10:54 – Well, if you take a photo of Ida’s asteroid satellite Dactyl, which only measures between 1.2-1.6 km, at 3,900 kilometers away, even high definition doesn’t help much.
- 12:04 – Maybe they could use the rockets that carry food and other supplies to the ISS? Those Christmas items don’t weigh much, so it isn’t an exaggerated cost to bring them into the station.
- 12:13 – “Why don’t just let them float around?” Maybe to avoid a disaster with the delicate instruments in the ISS?
- 12:53 – Just press Ctrl and + already!
- 13:43 – This links explains it: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/121204-curiosity-mars-rover-portrait-science-space/.
- 14:24 – “What you see is what you get.” Well, according to your “logic”, I don’t see you, so you don’t exist then?
Besides, ancient cultures never mentioned galaxies because only nine are visible to the naked eye and of these only three are easy to see, and they appear at best as fuzzy patches of light.
Mike chose not to respond to this criticism, instead taking all the time he needed in the very same comment section of the very same video to make fun of people who participate in democracy,[22] to argue that the word "oriental" means "[because] they orient things",[23] finally running along to happily subscribe to another random, equally cranky fringe channel.[24] Anything for Mike and his peers to stay isolated in their own little bubbles of fail.
For unknown reasons, Mike decided to eventually remove all content from his channel (maybe he finally saw an airplane disappear over the horizon?) and the links provided in this article no longer redirect to any video as a result. He's currently subscribed to Jeranism, a channel as idiotic as Stars are Souls featuring the same Flat Earth nonsense.
Some of his content is still available though, as YouTube user CoolHardLogic made a video about him.[25] Also, some of his videos can be seen in this playlist.[26]