Sources of Cosmophobia
There are many sources of cosmophobia. We will examine a few of them

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Where do people get these ideas, anyway? As it turns out, most of the ideas do not have a single verifiable source. They are rumors, or urban legends. People saying things like "NASA said that… " followed by absolute crazy stuff.

This is not new either. In fact, many of the strange ideas floating around are not new, they are very old. Some of them date back hundreds, or even thousands of years, and have their roots in the flawed understanding of the universe of people from those times. In the modern era, however, these old stories, old attempts at explaining the universe, have taken on a new life. People run across these stories and sometimes think that they are new knowledge, gained from new science, or alternately that it is old knowledge that has been suppressed by the "mainstream science establishment".

Today these stories are disseminated quickly via the internet. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or video sites such as YouTube, play a huge role in mis-educating people in these subjects.

YouTube

YouTube has to be the number one source of bad astronomy information in the world. So many people who don't understand what they are looking at, are jumping to conclusions about what they see, and posting those conclusions on YouTube.

FearMongers

Fearmongers are people who deliberately induce fear in others for their own purposes. Those purposes could be things like trying to convince you of the correctness of their opinion, trying to promote an idea for financial gain, or trying to discredit people who disagree with them.

Bibliography

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