Ignorance and Gullibility

I’ve been seeing an ad over and over again the past couple of days, and usually it’s the kind of thing I click on.  Planets whirling in space, hints of ancient magic, something something Gaia, that kind of thing.
Then I read the blurb. (At least until I saw the blue letters that said ‘more.’  By that point, I didn’t need to read any more.) The basic premise was that the sun we see in the skies today is not the same sun that we had 10,000 years ago, because ancient writing referred to “a shining stone, standing still in the sky.”
Well, they can’t expect anybody to take that seriously, can they?  I mean, if we’d somehow swapped suns, we’d have either been torn apart by the competing gravitation of two suns, or frozen to death had our atmosphere sucked out into space as we drifted, alone in the darkness, in search of a distant solar system to attach ourselves to.
But, obviously, they do expect a certain percentage of people to believe it.  They are counting on a certain percentage of the population to know nothing of the distance between, or the size and power of stars, nor of the delicate balance of the ecosystem on Earth.  I blame our educational system.
People should know what a solar system is.  That’s a basic.  People should know how many meters are in a kilometer.  How to multiply two digit numbers, at least.  That whales are not fish.  That kangaroos are not native to Africa.  Who Galileo was.
The thing is, since none of these things automatically comes up in a standard conversation, you can know somebody and not realize they don’t know these things. They walk among us.  And they still vote.