Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Thank you Robert

Just the facts, m'am
Robert — (archived)

Oh, and I forgot to mention the eleven year sunspot cycle. Cycles are a standard feature of the Universe.

Just to be clear (mostly for RL's benefit), I have to reject supernatural explanations, particularly reversing cause-and-effect and imagining that the planets cause events here on Earth. But with biological cycles on Earth demonstrably tied to three bodies in the Solar System, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the natural orrery in the sky could be useful in the way that an almanack is useful.

That's just pure speculation, but it's interesting how ideas have a way of coming back around in a new form. A hundred years ago the idea of the "aether" was discarded because it was found to be literally wrong. Yet, nowadays physicists and cosmologists talk about spacetime as if it were, in some ways, a substance or "fabric" like the aether. Different in all details, but yet usefully similar as concepts, the way astrology stripped of the supernatural might have something interesting going on as an organizing concept.

There's also the more prosaic aspect of how people's beliefs and customs interact with astrology, and I think RL underestimates it. When people start out believing in astrology, they'll organize their societies around it, using astrological calendars for planting and festivals and marriages and such; and people in turn are shaped by their societies and internalize the rhythms from the sky that were imposed on them by the priests. You might say that people and the cycles in the sky are somewhat attuned simply through millenia of practice. You also see artifacts in modern society of ancient astrological belief, such as festival days and ritual foods at certain times of the year, that might help maintain that original imprint; echoes of astrology, so to speak. Astrology today might be reading the psychic imprint left by all those years of utter belief in it, like the way physicists read the imprint of the Big Bang in the cosmic background radiation. So maybe astrology is real, but not the "real" that people commonly think it is.

And I cannot back up a single one of those speculations. Not a one. But I enjoy chewing on the ideas.

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