( If you're reading this, you must love Star Wars. So why not watch Cracked's Adventures in Jedi School mini-series? )

Yep, it's not enough for space to make us feel small -- it needs to make us feel stupid , too.

Our knowledge of outer space is a lot like our knowledge of history -- it's really hard to separate what we know from research from what we picked up from movies. In both cases, this means that a lot of our everyday knowledge about space is just laughably wrong.

6 Asteroid Belts Are Deadly

Getty

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Remember how in The Empire Strikes Back the temporarily hyperdriveless Han Solo had to navigate through a chaotic asteroid field in an attempt to evade the Empire? The damn things were packed so closely, not even the tiny TIE fighters could sweep between them without getting squished by colliding hunks of stone. And those asteroid fields were everywhere -- in Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan winds up in the exact same predicament, swerving and dodging as huge space rocks miss his ship by inches.



Also missed: Plot, urgency, the existence of Boba Fett without a stupid back story.

But that's just the way asteroid belts are, right? As C-3PO will tell you, the chances of successfully navigating an asteroid field are slim to none. It's basically a stampede, only instead of pissed-off cows, you're facing millions of huge murderous space boulders.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

The Reality:

Here's a pic of the asteroid belt in our solar system. It kind of looks just like the one from Star Wars:

Wikipedia

Although it could really use a couple of extra Dewbacks. We'll take care of that in editing.

And there are loads of asteroids in that belt, true enough -- it features about half a million asteroids that we know of. However, there are also lots and lots of miles for them to cross. Lots and lots. To the point that when NASA had to send a probe through it, their scientists said the odds of colliding with an asteroid were one in a billion. So basically Han could have blindfolded himself and steered through our asteroid belt with his dick, secure in the knowledge that the odds of hitting an asteroid in the middle of an asteroid belt aren't a whole lot higher than the odds of you hitting one while driving your car to the grocery store.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

That sounds crazy looking at the picture up there, but no picture of space really conveys the distances. For instance, once upon a time, our asteroid belt had way more asteroids in it (about a thousand times more, in fact). Even if Han had to fly through that density of asteroids, he'd find that each asteroid has a mind-boggling 400,000 square miles to itself.