A website entitled “Bare Natural Truth” is reporting a story with the headline “NASA Confirms Earth Will Experience 15 Days of Darkness in November 2016.” This is, roughly speaking, true.
But of course not the way they mean it. I won’t link to it, but you have Google if you need it. The site claims that “NASA has confirmed that earth will experience total darkness for 15 days in November 2016 starting from November 15 to November 29.” This is not true in any way. That this needs explaining defies all logic, and would just depress me too much to do so, so I simply won’t. You’ll just have to trust me that physics makes a fifteen-day stretch of night impossible.
There are, however, thirty days in November, and worldwide half of that time will be spent at night, so yes, the Earth will indeed experience roughly 15 days of darkness in November. Cumulatively.
Happy Monday, everyone.
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.