For many thousands of years, in many thousands of countries, in the minds of many thousands of impressionable human beings, the stars in the sky dictated everything in your life. How prosperous you'd be, who you should or should not marry, what type of personality you'll be stuck with until your family forces you to get therapy, or if you liked Coke or Pepsi better, or God forbid, Mello Yello.
And somehow the nearest star to the rock in space that we call 'Earth' gets off scot-free when it comes to everything from the polar ice caps melting to snow in Egypt to that lovely shade of piss-yellow/green that everybody's lawn turns into around the middle of August.
Somehow, stars such as Betelgeuse, Procyon, and Sirius, which only create pretty pictures inside the minds of imaginative astrologers when they're randomly connected in elaborate drawings, can influence your life, despite their magnetic fields ending so many light years away. It's like someone farting in Europe in 1779 and some poor schmuck in Canada in 2023 getting a whiff of it.
Astrology divided the diverse effects these distant stars have on humans into astrological signs with names like 'Pisces', 'Gemini', 'Taurus', and the frequently forgotten 'Galactica'. And despite the belief that such impossibly distant stars can change and influence your life, our very own star, the Sun, that big, bright, hot mass of nuclear energy that could hold one million Earths inside it, and has a surface temperature of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, isn't blamed for our climate changes.
Sure, those little tiny specks of dust on the Earth that we've labeled 'mankind' have created pollution, but Sunny Boy is right on our doorstep, heating up our little planet, sometimes shooting out gobs of solar flares like a teenager with his first Playboy magazine. Just as you can experience different weather on Sunday than you had on Wednesday, the Earth can have its bad days and bad years, courtesy of our temperamental Sun. Sometimes you get a nice sunny day with a nice breeze, and other times you get hail and tornadoes. Fun stuff. And yet we're supposed to believe that us human microbes can alter entire global weather patterns? We can't even figure out the secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken!
Our million-times-bigger-than-us Sun keeps us, miraculously, more or less, in the same orbit year after year. And should that orbit deviate somewhat, it'll affect our little blue marble's weather patterns. Maybe even turn you into a left-handed vegan with anger management issues, but also have a great sense of humor and 11 kids.
Odd.
Procyon is 11.45 light years from Earth.
One light year equals 5,878,625,541,248 miles.
The Sun is just 96 million miles from Earth.
My Grade 12 math tells me that the Sun gave me my freckles, not Sirius...and that guy in Europe sure eats ALOT of beans!
