I'm pretty sure..
..that people take the piss when it comes to dumb surveys like this. I know I would.
Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.
In the BBC series How TV Ruined Your Life, one-time games reviewer Charlie Brooker talks at length about the British public literally believing what is seen on their screens. This has now been confirmed with some investigative numberwang which shows that a large percentage of Brits are convinced fictional technology from …
It's not just people taking the piss that are the issue. The significant questions are (a) how big was the sample of respondents and (b) how was the sample chosen?
You can get all sorts of problems with a small sample. You just can't stop a hundred people in the street and then say they represent a population of tens of millions, it's an absolute nonsense. For example go to a shopping precinct at 10am on a wedndesday and stop 100 people. Amazingly enough you are going to get a much higher portion of unemployed or retired people than if you chose the same location at the same time on saturday. The bigger the sample and the more locations you choose (if you are stopping people in the street) the more representative you sample will be.
Then there's the matter of how the respondents were chosen. If it's a truly random sample stopping people int he the street and asking if they'd be willing to answer a few questions then you'll get a very different sample of people than you would if you were to advertise for respondents on a particular website while telling people what the subject of the survey is before they agree take part.
The best surveys are the ones that include questions on all sorts of subjects. If your questions are all along similar lines the respondents will tend to colour their answers. It doesn't matter if they are taking the piss or giving the answers they think you want it makes your survey worthless. If you ask loads and loads of different questions on different subjects then the respondent is more likely to answer honestly.
In short: Most of these surveys are bunk. Let's play family fortunes.
This is an old, old, apocryphal piece that comes up time after time¹. I recall smirking at the idea decades ago when I read a "survey" that said people believed the stuff in Star Trek was real. It's good to see that not only are poeple still responding to the same silly claims, but that they also think that survey results are real, too.
[1] and not because it's discovered the secret of traveling through time faster than we all do naturally.
There is an American physicist (Ronald Mallett) who has developed a machine that in theory could bring things here from the future. So time travel would be possible but you could only go back to when the machine was turned on. or something.
Anyway, were travelling through time now at the rate of 60 mins per hour. (Slower when moving faster)
... is that it can only work in a universe with a fairly specialised spacetime structure containing an infinite one-dimensional singularity, which our universe does not have.
Also the energy requirements are prohibitive, and the diameter of the ring of circulating laser light needs to be bigger than the visible universe.
But apart from that, it would probably work.
Mallett has also made some utterly egregious schoolboy-howler-level mistakes in his plans and design, for instance confusing the slowing down of light travelling through a medium with an actual alteration of the universal constant c. That was a rank amateur error to make, and the rest of his analysis seems to be on equally shaky ground.
"By definition, if time travel was to be possible ever, it would be possible now."
Not true. General relativistic time travel using a pair of connected worm holes would only allow time travel back to the point when the wormholes were created and not before. So it is at least conceivable that time travel might be possible in the future without us knowing about it today (although I doubt it!).
Assuming that time travel is impossible now, doesn't automatically necessitate that it won't be possible to travel backwards in time from some point in the far future to a point in nearer future. Or that we might be able to travel into the future only, at some speed faster than 60 seconds per minute.
in fact we are all traveling from the past to the future via the present every moment of our lives. I think what isn't possible is more likely to be controlled time travel.
As Firefly puts it, dumb surveys get dumb answers. I would certainly give stupid answers if asked these sort of stupid questions.
Caleb Cox must be the dumbest writer the Reg has ever had if he believes a word of this drivel. Yes there are dumb people out there (conservative voters, conservatives, tabloid readers, people who buy into celebrity-ism, etc), but your sources were clearly playing you, and you fell for it.
How could a nation whose educational, political, and transport systems have continually declined be capable of actually inventing a real T.A.R.D.I.S. or hover board - no one is that stupid. And really, how can you erase non-existent money.
Your article would have been better if you just said' Charlie Brooker is poignant and moderately humourous' to yourself in the mirror - please don't write any more 'articles'
"How could a nation whose educational, political, and transport systems have continually declined be capable of actually inventing a real T.A.R.D.I.S. or hover board - no one is that stupid."
Who said thet anybody believed this tech was invented in the UK? Are you saying the nation has some sort of variant on the old NIH disorder in that we all believe that everything was invented here?
Oh do lighten up, please. It's friday o'clock, I have a really long clinic ahead of me and anything that is good for a brief smile or a laugh helps time travel more quickly.
Now if I could just find a memory erasing device that can erase the last 2 minutes I've wasted reading and replying to your post, that'd be swell.
Well, Hoverboard.org.uk *does* feel it is necessary (on the "Marty’s Hoverboard" page) to stress their replicas don't hover. You think it overkill?
Actually I stumbled upon that other website once, which also sold hoverboad replicas. I couldn't find it now, but I vividly remember how the seller went to great lengths stressing his wares couldn't actually fly; he even maintained a "Hall of Shame" for specialy gruesome complaints - some blokes would argue that at $ 100.00 odd the hoverboards were too expensive, even as they believed the thing would, well, hover (as if any machine capable of carrying a man would sell within the three-figure range).
So no, I don't think this is too stupid for mankind.
in surveys purporting to be factual when the sponsers need some publicity (nothing like claiming people are thick to get everyone feeling smug about themselves. So much smarter that all those Sun, Grundian, Times, Economist reading thickies..).
Ah well, wroks crap...think I'll pop back to last monday when I had a day off.
I bet right now you are looking for the edit button....
Anyway I know plenty of stupid people but I've never met a single person who thinks a single one of the objects or concepts mentioned in this article are real.
Either the respondents took the piss or the questions were phrased in such a way as to illicit certain responses which they willingly interpreted as "belief in the TARDIS lolol".
I hope eventually to see the source information so I can make my own judgement :)
Was it Britain that suffered a national panic attack and mass panty-wetting during a broadcast of a radio adaptation of a science fiction yarn?
No?
Remind me which country it was please. Was it the same country that REQUIRES the manufacturers to put "not a flying toy" on tiny model aircraft?
Glass houses!