Sutter - Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence

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Of course the Earth is at the center of the universe. Just look at the evidence. The sun, moon, stars, and planets all wheel around us in the great celestial dance; how are we possibly to make sense of that if we're not at the focal point? And have you seen the Earth? It's large and solid and made of rockare you seriously suggesting it moves?

Look up in the sky. Birds. Clouds. The wind. All moving effortlessly, right? They are well removed from this immobile rock on which we stand, so it stands to reason that movement comes even more naturally to the stars and planets, even further removed from us.

Besides, things up there are just so different. Our lives here on Earth are dirty, chaotic, even sinful. But the graceful movements of the heavenly realm are something else. Motions so precise we can use them to set our calendars. Unfailing, the same stars appear on the horizon at the precise time they did last year, and the year before, and so on into the unwritten time of our ancestors.

Surely the laws of nature that we understand here on Earth don't apply up there. They have their own rules, their own sets of laws that govern their behavior. The heavens surround us but are separate from us.

Oh, what about those comets and meteors? Surely they're just strange atmospheric phenomena. Don't worry too much about those.

Can we really blame our forebears for thinking we are at the center? Up until a few hundred years ago, it was the simplest and most natural explanation of the available data. Not only that, it was supported by rational, coherent arguments. Our ancestors, as we do, used multiple paths to understand the world around themevidence-based, faith-based, reason-based, math-basedall of which pointed in the same direction: out.

Our ancestors were no dummies. They were just as smart as we are today and perfectly capable of understanding the world around them. And astronomy was vitally important to their daily lives: when to plant crops, when to reap the harvest, when to start preparing for campaigns, when to celebrate holidays. Humans have been using calendars for millennia (at least!), and the natural, regular, repeatable, predictable movements of the heavens provided the perfect device.

I suppose I should mention that ancient peoples thought that the stars influenced our daily lives toonot just by proxy through the effects of the seasons, but literally determined our fate. It's a unique perspective that's missing from modern scientific perspectives (with good reason, and I'll get to that in a bit). But again, I have to stress that your extremely-great-grandparents regarded their horoscope with as much seriousness as they could muster.

The motions of the stars and planets were connected to the seasons. So even though the celestial realm obeys its own set of laws, it must surely be connectedsomehowto events here on Earth. And despite the messiness and chaotic nature of our home, there's a sense of some sort of hidden order and regularity behind our lives. There are obvious patterns in nature, so perhaps there are unobvious patterns as well, patterns that can only be teased out by careful observation and interpretation.