Maybe I'm an eternal optimist, but sounds to me like they actually tried to put themselves into space, made the assumption that anything visible past the moon must be further out and were left with "wait, I thought it was supposed to be red?"

Uninformed, but not ignorant and perhaps even interested. I hope your response started with "No, actually, even cooler: ..." and you made a space fan that day.

There needs to be a word for that feeling of dread you get when reminded of just how feeble and weak the average human mind is, and how tenuous of a grasp on reality most people have.

I'd be genuinely curious to see a list of the things they had heard of, since Artemis has been in the news constantly for a month. E.g. have they just not heard of anything (consume no news), or are they in some news silo that excludes rockets, and if so what other things does it include? We may be missing something important that we've never heard of!