h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ok. So no one else has posted yet.

"Have you ever seen Jupiter?... well, I haven't"

it's there in the sky shining brightly after dark in the northern hemisphere just now.

Second brightest 'star' in the sky just now, and visible as a decernable disk through even a cheap pair of binoculars.

Sorry if somebodies already pointed this out, but i haven't read the whole backlog yet!

Oh and another thing that may already have been covered (sorry i'm at work and i don't want to spend too long on-line reading the backlog..)

The constellations are totally meaningless. They are a chance arrangemnt of totally unrelated stars, which appear to make a certain shape when viewd from our position in space.

For example 'leo the lion' from another star would be a totally different shape. The stars in most constellations are not even in the same part of space as each other-they could be thousands or millions of lightyears apart.

Think of a lit match being held up to the sky next to the moon. From your perspective the match is right next to the moon- a few centimeters away, but in reality of course they are millions of miles apart!

So when an astrologer says ' mars is in cancer'.. that is a TOTALLY meaningless statement!! If we were observing from pluto, mars would be against a totally different set of stars!!

I personally thing the explanation mooted earlier for starsign differences is very likely. i.e. the time of year that people are born in affects their personality.

But you aren't in another position, it's completely impossible to do so...so how do you know they are meaningless?

none of our little planets can have any influence on any of the stars on any of the constellations, and therefore to say that they as a system they affect us - miscule beings on earth- is absurd.

I'm not sure if you grasp the scale of things out there.

light travels at 360,000 miles per SECOND

A LIGHT YEAR is the distance light travels in a YEAR (how many seconds?-don't ask).

Our nearest star is 4 or five lightyears away, but most in our galaxey are up to 100,000 lightyears away, and that is just our galaxey.

Our nearest 'neighbour' galaxey 'the andromeda galaxey' is 2.2 MILLION lighyears away (incidently also visible in binoculars)

There are MILLIONS of galaxeys, most containing millions odf stars...

etc,etc

Sorry if that bored you, but just trying to point out that the points of light we see in the sky at night, and that astrologers base our life triats on, are very, very, very, very far away!

And of course, as pointed out earlier i think, when we see a star or constellation, we are seeing it as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago, the light taking that legnth of time to reach our eyes.

er.. i really can't stay on-line here any longer, i'll catch up with this later tonight.

Think i may have wandered a little off-topic on the previous postings, but i'm just saying that in my opinion, astrology doesn't make any sense!

But then a lot of things don't add up scientifically. Doesn't make them invalid.

Perhaps if we correct winnoch2s` facts they`ll add up!
Firstly the moon is not millions of miles away but less than a quarter of a million miles. Secondly light travels at 186,292 miles per second not 360,000. You must be thinking kilometers! But having said that I agree with his opinion that asrology is bunk.
(Pretty much like ghosts and haunted houses...mutters to himself)

Guilty as charged. I *never* remember exact figures. Did intend to check the speed of light on google before posting that, but i didn't.

And I should know the moon distance off by heart these days, though of course it varies quite a lot(but not by millions of miles..)

Anyway the jist of my argument still holds, i believe.

Thing is, why carry on with in-depth discussions on how sophisticated modern astrology is with all it's various complex procedures, when there is an elequent theory, as postulated above. I.e.the seasons/ birthday correlation. That makes perfect sense to me, and would do away with the need for astrology!

I can think of many reasons why a feteous that developed, say, in relativly cold weather, and more importantly,with winter's shorter days, would develop slightly different brain chemistry, than a baby born in long hot summer days. This could easily explain different traits for different birthday periods.

It would be very interesting, however, to see if folk of certain birth signs have similar characteristics world wide, as obviously December in Australia is summer, when in britain it's winter.

As for trying to justify astrology as practiced by 'proper' astrologers, well anyone can invent a set of complex disiplines and procedures. O.K. it makes the whole thing look more impresive and 'scientific' to the layman, but at the end of the day, it's all based on nonsense, and false assumptions, mainly formed hundreds of years ago, before we had the scientific knowledge we have now.

And there I was thinking we were all playing the open minded game...!

It's good to have an open mind. But one's mind shouldn't be so far open that any old rubbish can fall out...or in.

Depends on what stance you take. Science explains some things, but doesn't explain all and everything...just because it can't be proved or it doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean to say it's not there...

oh, i agree entirely. I subscibe to a magazine called 'Fortean Times' Maybe you've seen it in newsagents. It deals with 'strange phenomena' and the paranormal, but from a neutral stance. Neither skeptical or believing, but a bit of both, depending on who's written particular articles.

When i believe in something or dismiss an idea, it's usually based on some facts. i'm afraid i don't just believe something because "science doesn't have all the answers"
Of course it doesn't- yet.

As someone who's interested in astronomy, i happen to know facts(if not figures that make a mockery of astrology, that's all!

True, but science is an open ended discipline. Just cos it can;t explain something now, doesn;t mean it won;t be able to explain it tomorrow, or in a hundred years time.

Also, on the distances of the stars and their relations, one thing that perhaps should be spelled out is that since different objects are at different distances away in space, we are therefore seeing them at different points in the past. This means that the light from the various stars has taken different amounts of time to reach us. Thus, even though they all look lined up not only are they potentially separated by vast distances, they could well also be separated by vast tracts of time. So really it should be that mars in aries, well, where this bit of aries was 50 years ago, this bit was 150 years ago etc etc.

But don;t say they have no effct on us, I thought all that quantum stuff and gravitational waves and whatnot implied that everything is acting on everything else even if the effect is infinitesimally small.

I do concede, however, that there have been studies carried out that show some correclation between people of the same star-signs. So there is a mystery to be solved. maybe the answer is the one mentioned above. But even if it's not, i am 100% sure the giant balls of super-heated gas/ nuclear reactors, that are the stars, have nothing to do with it.

o.k. i really am going off-line now.

"reason for dismissal- wasting company time and money on the internet"

Ah yes, but this is where we discover that stars and planets were all created by aliens and that they feed a giant dark matter mind control device in orbit around this planet!

p.s. the point about time / distance also means that some of those stars / galaxies / whatever that make up the zodiac signs may not actually exist anymore. What happens to Astrology when it discovers that part of a constellation blew up a million years ago?

Oh, don't get me wrong...I wasn't saying science COULDN'T solve it...just that it hasn't so far, and you never know, it might not be able to.

Of course science will be able to explain it.

It's just that they may have to invent an entire new branch called something like 'Quantum Macro-cosmic interactivity'.