In the days before the internet, I came across an interesting story about Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Apparently the astronaut, who must have cleared a series of gruelling fitness tests to be selected for the mission, never ever exercised. ‘I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats,’ the famous quote goes. ‘I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.’
He wasn’t wrong on the number of heartbeats. Humans on average tend to have about 2 billion of them in a lifetime, while most other mammals have to do with around a billion. But there’s one important thing that Armstrong did get wrong. Exercise pushes your heart rate up temporarily, but regular exercise can reduce your general heart rate. So, while you’ll expend a few more during that hour of exercise, the body will more than compensate with a reduced average heart rate over the next 23 hours.
And so the first man on the moon was wrong, on something he should have known much better about. And his beliefs possibly convinced thousands around the world to give up on exercise, which may have been extremely beneficial to their health.
I was reminded of this entire episode while following the entire Novak Djokovic-Australian government slogging match. In brief, Novak, a nine-time Australian Open tennis champion, who has publicly declared his stance against Covid vaccination, applied for and received a travel visa into Australia on the basis of having just recovered from the coronavirus. On reaching Melbourne, his visa was cancelled, and he was detained as Australian PM Scott Morrison stated that contracting Covid in the last six months was not sufficient grounds for a quarantine-free entry.
An Australian judge then quashed the cancellation and ordered Djokovic’s release from detention, but also said the government had the right to deport him. And then Australian officials found evidence that Djokovic’s travel declaration had a host of inconsistencies.
In all this, Djokovic has become a poster boy for anti-vaxxers, both in Australia and elsewhere, and is the latest in a series of celebrities including basketball star Kyrie Irving and American football star Aaron Rogers who who have all decided that their understanding of how the virus worked was superior to that of the finest medical brains around the world.
Which brings me to something that is a bit of a bugbear. Why is it that we mistake a very specific world-beating skill for total omniscience? Novak Djokovic is a brilliant tennis player. But his views on vaccination are dangerous and stupid. Kangna Ranaut can really act when paired with the right director. But her worldview is, to say the least, disturbing. Eric Clapton has loony views on immigration and vaccination. And John Travolta and Tom Cruise were prominent members of the Church of Scientology, a pseudo-religion started by former science fiction author L Ron Hubbard in which humans are actually an advanced being known as Thetans who are often battling Xenu, the tyrant ruler of the galactic confederacy.
The truth is that being good at cricket, tennis, acting or music is no guarantee for wisdom — or even common sense — in anything else. If anything, being wildly successful at one thing usually makes one rich and powerful enough to have a coterie of people who agree with their worldview.
If you don’t think your literature teacher was the right person to help you with your calculus problem, why would you follow a tennis player’s opinions on vaccines, or a rock star’s views on immigration. It’s as simple as that.
On another note, a quick internet check actually turned up the fact that Neil Armstrong always said that the quote was totally made up and spent a lot of time denying it on every public forum that he could find, to absolutely no avail.
