Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, first of all, we have to take ourselves back. deep prehistory. We know that ancients were looking at the constellations because they were seemingly either in control of or correlated with or perhaps causative of the seasons. And that was of divine importance, supreme importance for them, right? Their whole existence in early agrarian societies, hunting societies, gathering societies.
So they had to know about time. So time, the essence of time and that On large scale for seasons, for holidays, for festivals, for propitiation of deities and so forth, they had to keep track of it. And that's why in the caves in Lascaux that date back to the 40,000 BCE, they depict constellations. Orion, the hunter, Taurus, the bull, all these different constellations, they depict them there.
Now, partially that was because Netflix didn't exist back then, right? There was no TikTok. And so there wasn't much to do at night. And in fact, the more you were out at night, you probably increased your opportunity to be consumed by some predator, right? So you were more focused on being stationary, observing.
And as I said, we can do astronomy uniquely so amongst all the sciences with just the equipment we're born with. you know, measurements with our eyes with respect to landmarks to calculate patterns. And humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, sometimes too good.
Yes. And the repetition of it over and passed down through generations. Before there was written language, there was pictography. There was the cave paintings and so forth. There was oral language and that was it. Written language is only 10,000 years old or something like that. So to store information, that meant it was a continuity between generations.
My great-great-great-great-grandfathers, elders, whatever, taught me that when the moon is in this constellation, the sun is in this constellation, we all should plant or we should harvest in other times. And so it was – we still do use – the rotation of the earth hasn't changed that much since this 40,000-year period, right? I mean the axis in which it rotates, that's a different story.
But the actual spin rate, the angular momentum of the Earth has not depreciably changed that much. And so the positions of these objects were of such importance that the ancients would use them for all these purposes. But there were so few things that changed position that they actually had names for them. They're called planets. So planet in Greek – It's like the word plane, like airplane.
It means something that moves or wanders. So when you name something, it means it's pretty different from the other things in which are not associated with that characteristic. So the planets, there were only five that they could see at that time up to Saturn. And they actually would associate those not only with astronomical events but events down on Earth. That's what connected the Earth.
So we have legacy of that in our calendar today. So Sunday, named after the sun. Monday, moon. Tuesday, and you go to the Latin languages. I think it's Mercury, which is Mercury Day. Venus Day, so you go to the Romance languages. And then the only one that's not a Latin name is, of course, for Thor, the god Thor, Thursday. And then it comes back Saturn Day, Saturday.
So they were all used as a clock. And people don't really grasp this. I mean, we have an Apple Watch. We have whatever. We didn't have a clock that was functional that would work on all different time zones and all different conditions on the pitching deck of a ship until the 1700s, basically. It was a huge problem.
And so measuring time became crucial for commerce, for human culture and civilization to arise, for education, and obviously for planting, harvesting, and so forth. So there was an obvious connection between the two. They believed, actually, that they were causative.
That actually the position of the planet Jupiter determined something on the day of your birth and the sun's relative position with respect to it determines something about your future and your prospects in life and so forth. So when I'm not confused for a cosmetologist because of my lovely hair and makeup, I'm usually asked, oh, you're an astronomer. I'm a Virgo. So what's going to happen to me?
like, I used to be like, oh, okay, that's an astrologer, I'm not an astrologer. But now I just, I kind of lean into it. I'm like, ooh, you're gonna get a letter from the IRS next week, and that lump on your ass, that's... You mean you're playing games with them? Yeah.
There's no evidence for astrology. In fact, there's many, many random controlled trials, double-boned studies that show not only is it... It's almost counter to the evidence. Like, And they say that a monkey can throw a dart at a stock chart and get – do better than most hedge fund managers or something like that. Actually, astrologers are even worse. Like I don't even know.
A protozoa can throw a dart. It's almost anti-correlated with what reality is. So no, there's certainly no validity to that. And I had a provocative tweet, whatever, post recently. And it was about – there's actually – we believe there are 12 zodiac signs. And that dates back to the Persians and the Babylonians and how they divided up them.
And it almost divides – they were fascinated with the number 60. So that was the base of their number system. Our number system is 10 because we have 10 figures. For some reason, they love base 60. I don't know why. And so they love things that divide it evenly into it. 10 does. But anyway, hashtag fail for the Babylonians. But they divided it up into 12 zones. 12 zodiac signs.
So we still use those. There's a problem though. The zodiac that you're, do you know what this is? Do you know what determines your zodiac sign?
Okay. So it's determined by the position of the sun. What constellation was the sun in on the day you were born? September 26th. So that means that the sun was in the constellation Virgo. Oh, no. You were a Libra? Libra. Libra.
So you do know what you are, but you don't know why you are. So Libra means it's a constellation. There's 88 constellations. that are accepted by astronomers. And one of them is Libra. And the path that the sun and the moon and all the planets travel in is called the zodiac.
It's confined to a plane because the same proto-solar system disk from which we formed out of, all the planets came out of a nebular cloud, a cloud of gas, dust, rocks, and so forth that came from a pre-existing star that exploded, creating what's called a supernova. The supernova provided the materials to make not only the Earth, but the entire solar system, including the sun.
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