Jury is still out on an astronomical explanation for the apparent 26M year periodicity[0] of mass extinction events. Lisa Randall has an entertaining theory[1] that it’s due to the sun passing through dark matter in its orbit around the galaxy.
It doesn’t even have to be dark matter, most of the (non-dark) galactic mass is in the galactic plane and the sun oscillates up and down passing through the plane as it orbits the centre.
That’s the argument I think. Per that Wikipedia link:
> Randall hypothesizes a plane of dark matter exists roughly on the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. As the Sun oscillates in its orbit around the center of the galaxy, it passes through the dark matter.
If you're not smack bang in the middle of the galactic plane, you're going to be accelerated towards it by gravity, so you'll tend to bob up and down, like a pendulum.
The oscillations are not "around" the plane, they are through the plane.
That is; the plane itself has a local gravitational attraction
which is orthogonal to the galaxy core gravitational attraction.
If a mass is above or below the plane, the "local" gravity will
pull towards the plane.
since nothing stops it at the mid line of the plane it passes through
to the opposite side; rinse and repeat.
This bouncing above and below center line of the disk
is more or less independent of our solar system completing galactic orbits.
Fair; the descriptions I've seen seem to focus on the galactic orbit more than the local neighbourhood as the cause of the oscillation; this makes more sense.
The up down oscillation is completely decoupled from the orbit itself, assuming the orbital potential is uniform. It's like the galaxy wasn't rotating at all. You put something above the disk, and it gets accelerated downwards, but doesn't stop at the disk, it keeps going, until it gets dragged back up. Think of it like a pendulum.
There might be some gas in the way that would slow it down slightly, but I expect that to be a very long time scale compared to other things like interactions with other systems and even the upcoming collision with Andromeda.
I haven't done the math but I would think it's possible due to interactions from other solar systems. Similar to how satellites oscillate around Lagrange points
I don't think that's really an accurate description. There's a discrepancy between observations relating to gravitation and general relativity's predictions. The discrepancy could be accounted for by significant extra mass, but no non-gravitational observations seem to confirm the presence of that extra mass. So "dark matter" is the supposition that there's a significant amount of extra mass that interacts only with gravity but not, for example, light, making it categorically different from ordinary matter. And I don't think there's any evidence that this dark matter follows the same gravitational constant as ordinary matter.
It does not matter whether it "follows the same gravitational constant as ordinary matter" or not.
For any kind of matter, normal or "dark", which is observed only through gravitational effects, you cannot determine separately its mass and the gravitational constant that applies to it. You can determine only the product between mass and gravitational constant (which is the cause of measurable forces).
Therefore for many astronomical objects the product between their mass and the gravitational constant is known with a much greater precision than their mass (because the gravitational constant is known with very poor precision even for ordinary matter).
The same applies for "dark matter". You cannot compute the distribution in space of the mass of the dark matter, but only the distribution in space of the product between its mass and whatever gravitational constant is applicable to it.
So even if a different gravitational constant were applicable to "dark matter" that fact would be irrelevant for any mathematical model that is fitted to the observations.
Nevertheless, mass is a separate quantity, which means that the original claim that orbital speed is determined solely by mass and orbital radius is not supportible in the context of dark matter.
Not quite. Dark matter is the hypothesis that the discrepancy between theory and observation is due to a form of matter that interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically. So we can't see it, and thus "dark".
There are other competing ideas including a family of modified Newtonian dynamics models, but nothing comes as close as explaining the observations as dark matter does.
There was a paper recently that showed that the discrepancy may be the higher order terms from general relativity that is often neglected because they are believed to be small - but that idea still needs to be proven to work for a large variety of cases.
The observations in question for this Dark matter hypothesis include the rotation velocity of stars in galaxies and a few other things like gravitational lensing.
Dark energy is a different discrepancy with theory. It's a term that we have to add to Einstein's field equations to account for the observation that the universal expansion is accelerating instead of slowing down. Again there are competing hypotheses, like non uniform density on the largest scales, but nothing quite explains everything as dark energy.
That’s just how often the local dark forest reaper aliens fire a relativistic velocity impactor at every biosphere they can detect within range. Keep resetting to make sure nothing too complex evolves.
How much longer do we have to bug out before the next one?
Asimov and Silverberg's Nightfall novel seems related- a great sci-fi story about a civilization on an alien planet that isn't prepared for the long cycle of astronomical movements (they go crazy during an eclipse every 2000 years or so). Fun read :)
Asimov and Silverberg confused me for a moment - Nightfall was an Asimov-only short story from 1941. Still think it's one of his best. TIL there was a collaborative novel as well, which carried on after the events of the short story.
* * *
If you like novels that explore civilisations that have long astronomical cycles, the other classic is the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss. It's set in a double star system where the main planetary orbit takes 2500 Earth years, and the seasons last for Earth centuries. Civilisation tends to collapse when winter comes, but gradually approaches semi-industrial levels of technology by autumn.
Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The term was coined and named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. In the 1920s, he hypothesized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth's surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns.[1]
Admittedly I struggled on my first read through, but it’s one of the bigger discoveries in climate research in a while
It might give us some answers on why the Younger-Dryas happened argubly leading to the Quaternary Extinction event, as there’s some dissent around the causes
If it was a concurrent epicycle that stacked up that could be a pretty compelling argument
People is born in seasons, constellations and planets appear in seasons, and so ancient smart people made a connection.
Then the largest actor interested in destroying Astrology is the Catholic Church for reasons. The church also had wrong astronomical theories. Science evolved, but we inherited a dead horse to beat.
The reasons the Catholic Church did away with astrology can be explained in a one liner. Catholicism assumes a belief in free will, and the claimed predictive power of astrology contradicted this, and so was deemed blasphemous.
You are being downvoted, but it is completely true. This is going to be used in the gurusphere in the way Deepak Chopra abuses the language of quantum physics to justify quackery. While things like this are always interesting, part of me can't help be be depressed knowing it's going to go into the firehose of nonsense we're being sprayed by every day.
It's happening in this very thread in a few places already...
Mocking the thinking of others while literally engaging in soothsaying is rather ironic don't you think?
And yes, of course, I'm well aware you are able to cherry pick some silly quotes from Deepak to "prove" your point, and that I "should" "know what you meant" (let's ignore whether even you did, at the time you wrote the comment), but the never ending Motte and Bailey from you people is exhausting. Please try to broaden the scope of your knowledge, it may naturally reduce levels of hubris.
Conspiracy theories don't come from thinking one is smarter, but rather from a lack of trust. When somebody (or some entity) says something, how you respond to them is not only based on your perception of their knowledge, but also on your perception of the trustworthiness. It's somewhat of a tautology to say that as decline in trust of US institutions declines, lack of believing in what these institutions says also declines.
And trust in US institutions is not just randomly declining either. We just seem to have largely removed the social mores on lying and manipulation, so long as it can be used to push an agenda. If the powers that be want to reclaim public trust then there needs to be a much greater effort to increase transparency, honesty, hold open debate on all topics, and also hold groups accountable for misleading or lying to individuals. Instead we seem to be going rapidly in the exact opposite direction, and it's not difficult to predict the outcome.
Cycles exist on Earth. Cycles exist in astral bodies. If an astral cycle aligns with some earth cycle, you can legitimately use the astral cycle to track the earth cycle. There is nothing wrong with doing this, it’s a useful tool.
The problem came when people confused correlation with causation. There’s also some spurious correlations used as well as some scale extrapolation issues.
But what was probably the root mechanism is sound. That is why ancients seem so weirdly obsessed with the stars, it actually works in some cases (non causally of course).
Let's say for example that Bill incorrectly believes his wife and his friend Steve are having an affair and he kills them both in a fit of rage - did Bill's belief play any role in the causality underlying the death of the two humans?
Didn't need to. I just went to the website of the organization that sponsored the lecture and saw the quackery I expected.
> "The Meru Project has discovered an extraordinary and unexpected geometric metaphor in the letter-sequence of the Hebrew text of Genesis that underlies and is held in common by the spiritual traditions of the ancient world. This metaphor models embryonic growth and self-organization. It applies to all whole systems, including those as seemingly diverse as meditational practices and the mathematics fundamental to physics and cosmology...Meru Project findings demonstrate that the relationship between physical theory and consciousness, expressed in explicit geometric metaphor, was understood and developed several thousand years ago."
This is how Stan starts the lecture. His research is the exact opposite of quackery.
> No one should believe what I’m saying. It’s not that I’m telling you anything that isn’t so it’s just that you really need to be skeptical about this sort of thing. This is work in progress; it’s an honest research. I speak quickly and I may say “is” when I mean, based on the models and based on the references, it is my best conjecture that this “is”. So I’m not saying “absolute truth” when I say “is”, I’m just trying to fit things into a short time period.
> This is very controversial materiel because of, in the words of a friendly scholar, “It cannot be so”. And what he means is that if “it is so” then there is a lot of readjustment to be made. And I try to explain to people that this really doesn’t say anything like, “I’m right and you all are all wrong.” It says rather that this is deeper level integrates a whole range of material. And it demonstrates that what the scholars have been saying and what the religious people have been saying, and what the different religious people have been saying; they’re all right, but in their own context and if you go deeper you find something more common.
So the lecture starts with quackery as well. At no point does he say that he is using the scientific method to verify any claims. Instead, he says that the religious people and scholars are right because of magic.
He talks like a duck and walks like a duck. If these religious quacks had made their claims with science, they wouldn't have been ignored. Instead, they made their claims with magic and then retconned their claims to fit the actually believable results from science. It's always the same with these nuts.
> But the more general idea that the arrangement of the solar system when you were born affects your personality (among other things) -- this is obviously reasonable.
Well, the gravity alone definitely affects us, so also our personality. But whether it affects us in any meaningful way, is doubtful, since the force is really, really small.
What definitely has an impact is, in what season you were born(if there are seasons). Whether your first steps outside are in snow, or in warm sun. That has an effect on development.
Still, I always loved Astronomy and could never understand the appeal of Astrology in the first place. It never made the slightest sense. So if I am born on day X, I am supposed to have trait A, but if I would be born some hours later I should be personality Y? (besides the fact, that the baby was alive and conscious before the birth). The reason why people take it serious, is probably to find guidance in a chaotic world and they seem to think some guidance is better than none (but I rather have no guiding, than one that makes no sense to me in the first place).
> Well, the gravity alone definitely affects us, so also our personality.
You're talking absolute micro-units of G force difference. Within a margin of error of most sensors. Orders of magnitude lower than we can detect as humans physically.
And even if we were not, how is there an obvious correlation between these two?
This is the exact sort of pseudo-scientific nonsense that's being spewed everywhere these days.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to engage in a hypothetical conversation about possibility that unimaginably small gravitational fluctuations affect brain composition to a noticeable degree.
You certainly don't have to engage in conversations about things you cannot imagine. Would not be much point in it.
But I mean, this article was literally about a measurable effect from Mars on Earths climate and I never claimed there was a measurable effect or any significant effect at all on the brain (that would support Astrology). Just that there is influence.
> But I mean, this article was literally about a measurable effect from Mars on Earths climate and I never claimed there was a measurable effect or any significant effect at all on the brain (that would support Astrology).
> Just that there is influence.
Wait, what? There's no effect at all, just influence? You're talking in circles.
Ah the next one. Do you also negate, that the gravity of mars influences particles on earth, so also in the brain?
And maybe I used 2 different terms to emphasize, that I do not claim that there is a significant change in the brain because of that influence. But a force is influencing, even though it is very small and below of what you can usually meassure. You can still calculate it if you want and extrapolate the meaning, if you are capable:
F = G x m1 x m2/(d²)
"Where G is the universal gravitational constant (meaning it has the same value throughout the universe), m1 and m2 are the masses of the objects in kilograms, and d is the distance between them in meters"
Spoiler alert, the result will be really, really small, but not zero. And none of this will proof claims of astrology, in case you got that mixed up.
To reiterate: the base of my argumentation is -
gravity: every object with mass influences EVERY other object with mass
butterfly effect: small changes in complex systems can lead to great outcome
The particles in the brain have mass and are a complex system.
So if you declare my argumentation is unscientific, it would probably help your case to show where exactly.
The arrangement of the solar system -> birth month -> time of the year your mother was gestating you -> different conditions for different people during key growth phases (summer abundance vs harsher winters)
This is a 2.4 million year cycle, not something that can lend any credence to the idea that the arrangement of the planets at birth has any effect on a person.
The arrangement of your house or neighborhood has a stronger gravitational effect on you at a young age than the planets. Feng shui would be a better predictor of people's personalities than astrology.
Astronomical signs (in the west) are entirely related to the time of year when you were born and not at all related to the "arrangement of the planets", besides of course the position of the earth relative to the sun. The idea that some voodoo around the position of your bed relative to your chair relative to your door has more impact on your life than your spawning phase shift in the (second?) most significant cycle of our existence is pure absurdity.
As a simple test: ask N self-proclaimed astrology experts to guess your sign, and perhaps the signs of some others around you. Run a Chi-squared on the results. Come to your own conclusions.
Alternatively, plot some user data against birth month. Observe dependence.
> the position of your bed relative to your chair relative to your door
IIUC, the idea behind Feng Shui (traditional Chinese interior design) is that if your furniture is arranged in a logical way, it has a positive mental impact and is therefore conducive to allowing you to thrive. On the other hand, if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it can lead to frustration and clutter, which have a negative mental impact.
I don’t think there are any studies on this, but at least intuitively, it seems to make sense to me.
Example: if you put your desk directly in front of your door, it’s in the way and therefore will be an (unconscious) source of frustration every time you enter the room (because you have to walk around it all the time). In Feng Shui this is described as the desk blocking the ‘energy’ of the door; I find it useful to think of ‘energy’ as a synonym for ‘traffic flow’ in this context.
If you want to know more about this, check out the excellent YouTube/TikTok channel ‘Dear Modern’, especially his short-form videos. (no affiliation)
Also, consider which direction windows of various rooms you have face. Rooms are used differently during the day so for example morning sun in the bed room might be helpful if you need to wake up when sun rises. Also before modern houses things like air circulation and so on could have real effect of livability.
> IIUC, the idea behind Feng Shui (traditional Chinese interior design) is that if your furniture is arranged in a logical way, it has a positive mental impact and is therefore conducive to allowing you to thrive. On the other hand, if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it can lead to frustration and clutter, which have a negative mental impact.
That’s an incomplete description. Traditional Feng Shui says if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it disrupts the flow of Qi, and causes spirits to grant you ill fortune. Which sounds less plausible
Sure, but you can change one description into the other, while keeping the practical application the same.
I really recommend watching the following video, which introduces Feng Shui principles in a non-superstitious way:
“Feng Shui does make sense! The basis of how to plan your home for comfort and practicality” (runtime 6 min 34 sec) — https://youtube.com/watch?v=YsBPqO3pv_Y
You could also provide some evidence instead of telling me to gather my own. I'd happily read some more double blind studies on the effectiveness of astrology, most of what I've read points to it all being complete bunk.
Science is observation, not consumption. I ran the experiments, I got the data I needed to inform my opinion. You're more than welcome to do the same. But if all you will listen to is what scientific journals want to publish, you've already made up your mind, and there's little use pretending otherwise.
If you ask me, nothing could be more "complete bunk" than some "scientist" claiming they've somehow blinded someone to their own birthday.
Science is specifically a process of cooperative knowledge building, using testable explanations and minimizing human biases. I would like to hear about your experiments, though. I don't have full faith in scientific journals, and they've had loads of problems in regards to reproducibility and legitimacy of data, but the process is the best we have for determining truth.
You don't blind people to their own birthdays, you mix real astrological predictions and readings with randomized ones, and see if the results fared better than random chance. I'm very skeptical of astrology (to be completely honest, I completely reject it), but I am trying to take part in a real conversation here. I believe that astrology is complete bunk, wall to wall, but I'm open to reading more on it and talking to you about it. I don't want to attack anybody for their beliefs.
I'm not particularly interested in what constitutes a "real astronomical prediction", I'm more interested in the crux of the topic: Are there common traits shared amongst people with similar birthdates that experienced astrologists can identify and use to correctly place an individual into one of 12 buckets based on a short interaction?
I originally was like you and thought the answer was "no, my birthday says nearly nothing about me". However, over the past few years I've made a point to ask all new strangers I meet ("met at a bar" type folks who I had 0 prior connection to, so excluding friends of friends/etc.) who display an interest in astrology to guess my sign and state their astrological confidence. Roughly 85% folks who are "very confident" in their knowledge of astrology correctly guess it first try, often with little to no hesitation (N = ~8). The folks who are not as confident vary: some will also get it first try, some will take a couple, some give up after like 6.
That's an experiment that is extremely susceptible to biases and unintentional information sharing, including things like expressions on either party's face. Not to mention your very subjective determination of whether or not the predictor is confident, or the fallibility of human memory and experience.
For that experiment to be fair, you'd have to interact with them, and then they would have to write their guess and confidence down without you knowing what they're writing, and then afterward you'd have to collate the information.
This is the common thread that I've always seen, as someone who used to be very interested in the paranormal and supernatural. When you actually start measuring things properly and controlling for biases, the supernatural mysteriously disappears. It's only there when it can't be proven. Human imagination is extremely powerful. Remember the story of Clever Hans. Everybody, including the trainer, believed the horse could do math: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
This story comes into my head whenever I see psychics and readers of anything like this. Nobody is lying. Everybody believes it, even when it's not real. You can read body language and pick up on things without even understanding how. It's interesting, because you seem to be the opposite of me. I started out open to much of what I now consider hoodoo, and became a naturalist and a skeptic through my experiences. You had the reverse path. I suspect the answer may lay closer to the middle than either side, but I'll keep with what can be objectively shown in well-controlled tests.
I'm well aware of the tricks that can be played, but there's simply no other explanation for the sheer volume of people who have said to me point blank, no hesitation, no beating around the bush, no listing out options to gauge responses, no nothing: "Oh that's easy, you're a XXX". Even totally disregarding confidence filtering, it's a staggering proportion.
There's really nothing not "fair" about it, but folks like you are so perverse to the idea of anything that doesn't fit your perception of the "scientific consensus" that you'll make up hoops in the name of "bias" to throw out every experimental result that doesn't agree with your preconceived notions up until the point all you have left are those experiments that you didn't see fit to invent hoops for because they already matched what you think you know. It's honestly terribly ironic, when you take the time to examine it.
I really do hope you can take the time to try this yourself and see for yourself what your own personal results are, there's no use at all for me to waste my time debating my own personal experience with someone so hell-bent on discrediting it on the basis of "actually I once read a paper that said..." and "well actually I know X Y Z errors with your experimental setup that you've told me next to nothing about and I never was able to even observe..."
The unfair bit is the filtering happening in your own brain. Without actual hard statistics, it's an anecdote. I don't care about scientific consensus, but I do care about process and data.
If I try it myself, it'll be done right, and I won't keep the stats in my head. I know how fallible my own perception is, and as somebody with an anxiety disorder, I know how easy it is to read patterns out of thin air. For some people, reading patterns that don't exist seems mystical or illuminating, for me, it's a sense of constant unease and fear. I can't be universally open to just accepting things, or reading patterns with my intuition, because my intuition is that everything is potentially poisonous and I'm definitely going to die in less than a week.
Ok then just try it yourself. I'm sick and tired of an online person I've never met acting like they know more about statistics and experimental design than me regarding downright trivial experiment with results as obvious as day that they've never even bothered to run themselves. Good day.
Edit: You could have mentioned that you have a mental condition characterized by an irrational fear of pattern recognition in your diatribe about biases. I'd have known not to waste my time.
That's fairly rude. My point was that what manifests in myself as being negative manifests in other people as simply reading more into things than is actually there. Even trivial experiments are prone to biases.
Your point has been telling me my experiment isn't valid because it doesn't align with your preconceived notions, telling me I'm "seeing things that aren't there" and that you know better than me about what I went through, then coming up with bogus claim after bogus claim to try to justify that position, then back in reality after a half dozen messages you finally self-admit to having a mental condition that makes you reluctant to see patterns clear as day.
Seeing patterns clear as day is, in fact, bias. My condition heightens my biases and makes me confront how flawed reasoning about the "obvious" is. I wouldn't have brought it up if I thought you might try some weird ad hominem about how anxiety makes me immune to "real science". I haven't been attacking you. I just don't think your methods are sound. I don't know what your quote is coming from either, because I didn't say "seeing things that aren't there" either. I said reading more into things than are there and seeing patterns where they don't exist. This is the basis of things like numerology, homeopathy, racism, and many other human failings. The obvious, "clear as day" things can be actively dangerous.
How about your data? Like I said before, I'd be happy to see the data. You've thrown some numbers off the top of your head, but I'd rather see the raw gathered data.
Collect it yourself. I don't have a detailed log because the results were immediately obvious. You pretend to claim nothing can be obvious. I'm sure if you saw 12 people in a row guess your sign you'd think the correlation was obvious. My experience was similar.
> I didn't say "seeing things that aren't there" either. I said reading more into things than are there and seeing patterns where they don't exist.
Ha.
And it's not an ad hominum when the trait is something directly related to the topic at hand.
Fair criticism, but then look how many Scientific Materialist fundamentalists in this and other threads would have you believe they are omniscient Oracles, but then cry foul if one dares to critique or have a bit of a laugh at their hallucinations.
The only saving grace of this simulation that I can see is how absolutely hilarious it is, it's like living in one of those old British sitcoms.
It's not even clear to what degree many of the people exist! One thing that really blew my mind is that there is no reason to believe anything even resembling the events of exodus exist for example. That is to say not just the personage of Moses. There is no reason to believe the jewish people were ever in bondage in Egypt at all for instance. Reading from that huge chunks of the old testament cease to make sense in the context of the real history of the region.
It's not even absolutely clear that Jesus was a historical personage.
> It's not even absolutely clear that Jesus was a historical personage.
It is pretty certain that Jesus was historically a personage, since we have historical evidence that people had a text (often called The Holy Bible, or some variation) with a character in it called Jesus.
We at least know that the Apostles were real people since Paul’s authentic letters depict him having to haul a sack of collections money to Peter and the extant living Apostles, nevermind his arguments with them over whether Gentiles should be circumcised, a debate which would yield the universality of Christian belief rather than being an extended Hebrew sect.
It's also important to note that Paul, whom is the founder of Christianity as we understand it, never ever mentions anything about Jesus' life, Jesus' lived experience in his authentic letters; he is strictly concerned with, strictly extrapolates from, Jesus' death by crucifixion and the meaning of his resurrection. The books in the Bible that describe Jesus as a historical figure are written after Paul has died.
I would suggest not using wikipedia as a source especially one full of insufficient arguments as that one.
> Only two accepted facts of a historical Jesus
Main article: Historical Jesus
Part of the ancient Madaba Map showing two possible baptism locations
Bronzino's depiction of the Crucifixion with three nails, no ropes, and a hypopodium standing support, c. 1545
> There is no scholarly consensus concerning most elements of Jesus's life as described in the Christian and non-Christian sources, and the only two events of this historical Jesus subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate (who officiated 26–36 AD).[14][4][5][6][7][note 5]
The criterion of embarrassment has been used to argue for the historicity of the baptism of Jesus, shown here in The Baptism of Christ by Juan Fernández Navarrete.
> Based on the criterion of embarrassment, scholars argue that the early Christian Church would not have invented the painful death of their leader.[15] The criterion of embarrassment is also used to argue in favor of the historicity of the baptism of Jesus,[16][17][18] given that John baptised for the remission of sins, although Jesus was viewed as without sin and this positioned John above Jesus
Neither is even a kind of good argument. In place of actual evidence we are making impossible to disprove psychological arguments to the motivation of believers.
There is no contemporary as in at the time evidence of Jesus or reason to believe that the parties that wrote down accounts long after his death were actually recordings of first person accounts.
If the bible can make up exodus and fabricate Noah I have no reason to believe fabricating Jesus is beyond the pale. Here is what I think a better write up looks like it is admittedly biased
Another reasonable challenge to the use of something like the Bible is that normally when a work contains thousands of clear fabrications and myths it tends to diminish its worth as a source.
For instance if I wrote a biography of wizzwizz4 and in the course of my writings claimed you were a godlike being from pluto who came to earth in the middle ages it would not only be dubious it would cast doubt on myself as a credible source. Even true things I wrote which were not corroborated elsewhere would be reasonably deemed dubious.
> If the bible can make up exodus and fabricate Noah I have no reason to believe fabricating Jesus is beyond the pale.
From a historian's perspective, these are completely different sources, from hundreds of years apart. There has been a lot of analysis of their composition, which tell us what we probably can and probably can't trust about them. You don't discard a historical source just because it's a religious text. There are no absolutely trustworthy sources in history, but that they existed within a context, giving us some confidence in certain properties at least.
Of Pythagoras, it has been written:
> There is not a single detail in the life of Pythagoras that stands uncontradicted. — Walter Burkert (via Wikipedia)
Aristotle is only attested in other people's writings, produced after his death. We still think he existed. All evidence of Diotíma of Mantinea can be traced back to Plato's Symposium, where a handful of her ideas were recorded. Plato might have made her up, but there's reason to believe he didn't. We only have, like, four sources on Genghis Khan's life, and he was viewed as a deity for hundreds of years. Nonetheless, we're pretty sure there was a person called Genghis Khan who existed, and held the role in society that all these tales suggest he did (even if the tales themselves may not be true).
Very little is known about almost everyone. Jesus is not exceptional in this regard. If you say that Jesus didn't exist because there's not good evidence, you have to discard a lot of allegedly-historical figures for the same reason. (Or, I suppose, just make a special exception for this one guy.)
how did you go from Mars possibly having an effect on oceans to arbitrarily defined constellations having a predictive effect on people's personalities?
But the idea that the position of the moon or planets affects us is insane
(There have been several small-N studies looking at various folk beliefs about higher incidences of certain events during full moons, but I don't believe any of the studies found a significant correlation)
The moon does not affect bodies of water. The moon's gravity pulls every mass equally. The water being closest to the moon is pulled more strongly than the earth whose center is 6300 KM away from that water - so the water creeps closer to the moon than does the center of the earth.
Same thing on the other side - the water is 6300 KM further away from the moon than is the (center of) the earth. So it is pulled less strongly, and thus to an observer on the earth it looks like that water is being pulled away.
"The moon does not affect bodies of water. [description of how bodies of water are affected by the moon]" lmao fucking nerds, man.
So, hypothetically, if our blood or CSF had a different mass-slash-density than our bones, and our skulls were further from the earth's surface than the rest of our bodies, they could conceivably be pulled more-or-less strongly than the rest of it?
It actually does not depend on the density, because mass is on both sides of the equation. Your head is in fact pulled on less than your feet. For an extreme example, look up "spaghettification".
> But the more general idea that the arrangement of the solar system when you were born affects your personality (among other things) -- this is obviously reasonable.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC344925/
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter_and_the_Dinosaur...