Flickr / Andreelau

Kids say—and think—the darndest things.

There's a hilarious thread on Quora, the question-and-answer site, for people to reveal what tripped them up when they were children.

We've edited a few related to technology and science and excerpted them here.

This poor boy was needlessly terrified on flights.

Actor Liba Vaynberg must have hated traveling by airplane:

I thought that the fasten seatbelt sign on planes was meant to indicate that another plane was approaching us head on, so whenever it was illuminated, I would freak out.

This kid thought that he had figured out a cure for HIV.

When Tolu Manuwa was seven he thought that scientists had it all wrong:

I felt that pathogens in the blood were just basically impurities, and just like water, blood can be purified by boiling. So, I drew machines that would get the blood out of the body, boil it and put the "purified" blood back in, and in my head, I had found the cure to most diseases and I was going to win a Nobel prize.

Flickr / Micah Sittig

You know when you close your eyes tight and sometimes see swirls and specks?

When she was a child, Nikhil Jain had an explanation for what caused the colored patterns:

I thought I was gifted with some kind of superpower that I could see individual atoms and molecules.

Here's how one kid believed automatic doors work.

Carl Grant, currently a convention speaker, was tripped up by a common religious phrase:

Hearing that God was everywhere at once, yet invisible, I figured he was the one that opened the door at the supermarket.

This child thought that cars automatically moved across the road when drivers signaled.

In the Kid-World of Jesse Lashley, this was how changing lanes on the highway worked:

My idea was that there were electromagnets on the roads and in the cars, so it was impossible to leave your lane unless you asked the road to turn them off first.

Flickr / The Difference

If only getting Oregon Trail was as easy as this kid thought.

Shaurya Chopra, now a roboticist, used to be a bit confused about how computers worked:

When I was 3, I thought I could get a game inside a floppy disk by writing the name of the game on the disk's slip.

Because of this programmer's mix-up, he always wanted to be a bus driver when he grew up.

Sourabh Agrawal was confused about what happened to the money you put into a bus's electronic fare collector:

I believed that the money the bus driver collected was entirely his. I spent my initial childhood hoping to become a bus driver.

Space and astronomy aren't easy for anyone—especially children—to understand.