Constellations: What is that, an egg timer? Oh, no it’s a dude. | Photo: theilr, CC BY-SA 2.0
This is just a quick reminder to everybody that constellations don’t affect your personality traits or lives, and that the good folks at NASA in fact know this. If you “are” a “Scorpio,” you still “are,” and NASA hasn’t just found scientific data to indicate that you actually “are” an “Ophiuchus.” Got that, Yahoo! news? No? Well, I can only assume you haven’t because you’re still reporting that “Your Astrological Sign Just Changed, Thanks To NASA.”
No, according to Science Alert, NASA’s educational site for kids, Space Place, ran a story on how the ancient Babylonian zodiac actually ran through 13 constellations, not twelve, and that because the Earth wobbles, the days of the year that align with those constellations changes over time too.
But as anyone who knows how to google “zodiac change” and “snopes” could tell you, people have been freaking out about Ophiuchus for years, and it still hasn’t sunk in:
Even if the positions of the stars and planets could have any kind of effect on your personality or life, which they cannot, NASA doesn’t regulate systems of stone-age augury. NASA does astronomy, not astrology.
Anyway, if you want the complete rundown on this idiocy, you can read Science Alert.
Happy Monday, everybody.
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.