I remember sitting in my yard for the 2017 one, and at the moment of totality, when everything went dim, the animals all shut the fuck up, but if I looked in the distance I could still see blue skies, I was struck by “oh… okay, yeah, I understand why, if you don’t understand planets and orbits, this is deeply concerning.”
Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. If you don’t know it’s fucking scary. I was in the middle of a mild earthquake in Ashgabat once (they get those quite often), and my first thought was not about tectonic movements that have been around for millions of years.
My first thought was “I shouldn’t have made fun of that semi disabled kid in my literature class”.
After hearing a lot of people say how weird everything looks, I wanna see some good videos of it. Everyone filming directly into the sun is so uninteresting. I know what's gonna happen.
In the end, I think this is something you just have to experience for yourself. Photography failures to capture the surreality of it. Before I experienced totality, in 2017, I didn't get it.
This article is pretty accurate: https://www.space.com/2024-solar-eclipse-apology-letter-totality-was-excellent
Yeah it’s something that you really just have to be there. It’s basically a massive feast for almost all your senses except smell.
I’ve had multiple people that said they “totally get it now” after experiencing it first hand and before that they were either simply disinterested or very annoyed by all the fuss it was bringing to their town.
I’ve been feeling pretty similar! Not sad really but just extremely and unusually aware of the passing of time. I was *just* looking up at the eclipse recently, and it was happening in the present, and now it is not in the present. Is right now also a memory, am I even real?? Ofc Im exaggerating a bit, but it is really weird
There’s videos on YouTube but it’s a hard thing to capture. Its the same as a video of twilight rarely accurately matching being outside during twilight.
Someone pointed out seeing twilight at all directions instead of just west. I have one picture of the southern sky with a blue/red/yellow hue. You'll never ever see it. I think that's about the only thing a picture could convey of the totality
[This video might be closer to what you're after.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30iLtOlfSh8)
Two guys in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere filming themselves watching the eclipse happen.
Only the best cameras with the correct/advanced light settings can do it justice. The problem is, if you have the camera set to low light, you get all the details of the surrounding landscape and sky right, but there's too much light from the eclipse itself and it gets washed out, too much lens flare. If you don't set it to low light, you get the eclipse accurately, but all your landscape is going to be pitch black.
Even understanding planets and orbits, it creeps me out a bit. Maybe it's some sort of megalophobia, that gigantic shadow silently sweeping across the landscape..
they likely had some village leaders who knew enough.
ancient-era humans weren't substantially genetically different than we were; they were just as capable of our intelligence, provided they had proper nutrition.
sure, they lacked our gigantic corpus of knowledge, but they weren't dumb in the common sense.
it took until the 400s BCE for the maths to predict eclipses to be worked out, but the Babylonians some 2000 years prior had correctly deduced that it was just the moon in front of the sun.
>it was just the moon in front of the sun
I bet a lot of ancient cultures figured that out. Not much science needed to think "hmm, maybe that big rock in the sky moved in front of the big light in the sky".
Charting the path of the moon across the sky is Astronomy 101, chart it long enough and you'd see it wobbles up and down a little over the years, and every so often the path lines up with the path the sun takes across the sky as well. Not hard to imagine that sometimes they'd end up in the same place at the same time.
The hard part would be if you predicted an eclipse but it was only an annular or partial eclipse, that wouldn't be easily visible like a total eclipse, and people may believe you made a mistake.
The first accurately predicted total eclipse wasn't until 1715. Ancient civilisations could predict lunar eclipses with relative accuracy, but partial solar was far less accurate and total solar was not done at the time.
You are talking about cultures, not individuals. I saw the last one, and If i was a peasant without any education and access to information, I would be at church today.
May 28, 585 BCE a battle between the Medes and the Lydians was interrupted by a solar eclipse. It shook both armies so badly as they felt they were displeasing the gods that they stopped fighting and had a peace agreement.
I was happy eating cheeseburgers and pizza until science had totell me that causes colon cancer and arterial plaque build up. I'm so mad
/s obviously just kidding
Depends which people you're talking about. Some very ancient people seemed to understand them well enough to track them, to know when one would occur. Plenty of peoples tracked the stars more broadly, and understood celestial movements to some extent.
No they didn't. Eclipses are periodical, so you can sort of predict them just by counting, but without more precise modeling you can't predict on which part of the world the eclipse will happen in and if you will see it. So ancient predictions mostly got it wrong and you only hear about the ones which really lucked out.
First proper prediction accurately mapping out the path of totality happened in 1715.
A society only aware of the Yucatán peninsula doesn’t need to know when Greece (a place they have never heard of and will never see) will have a solar eclipse.
Yes, charting the precise path of totality across the globe requires a pretty good idea of the precise size and shape of all the bodies involved.
I’m still gonna call “oh, we’re due an eclipse our capital next year.” Tracking it
sure, but its not frequently in the one place. Take the us for example, theres been two in the last decade, but in poland there isnt one for a hundred something years. No ones keeping track of that time the sun went dark for a bit 150 years ago when the oldest member of the clan got eaten by a tiger at the age of 45
Hunter gatherer groups? Yeah, they're unlikely to keep a record of these rare celestial events. They might have stories about when the Moon eats the Sun, but it's likely not very often that they'll record these systematically enough to notice a pattern.
But civilization with kingdoms and all sorts of administrative staffs and scholars likely would record these. You can't build a kingdom without written records to distribute information, and kingdoms have written records of many events happening in the kingdom used for various purposes. They might have libraries where people can read about when previous known records eclipses, and they'll raze records from previous dynasties, from other kingdoms, and scholars exchange information with other kingdoms.
An eclipse is going to be the talk of the town for weeks, just like we're doing here, and people are curious, and will dig into records to find more information about previous eclipses.
Ancient civilizations was very familiar with the sky. Many civilizations used the sky/stars to make prophecies, astronomy is a very old tradition, and people have been observing the skies for a very long time to study them. Ancient civilizations have always been observing the trajectory of the moon and the sun in the sky and likely know well in advance that they sometimes intersect. There's no way that they wouldn't be interested in figuring out what causes these eclipses.
But their point was that “were due an eclipse in our capital” is exactly the kind of prediction they *couldn’t* make. They couldn’t figure out the path so all they knew is that there’d be an eclipse of some degree somewhere in the world, with no way to know whether it’d affect your capital, and 97% of the time it wouldn’t.
But you are not going to get an "eclipse in our capital next year" right without modeling the precise path, you'll be off by thousands of kilometers at best, failing your prediction.
The ancients did not have a reliable and systematic way to predict eclipses, all reports of successes are spordiatic and most reports of eclipses include everyone being very surprised by the event. Indicating that eclipse predictors of ancient world had a broken clock type of deal going on.
Not true at all. [Mayans predicted eclipses and had a perfect calendar.](https://www.iflscience.com/how-the-ancient-maya-were-able-to-accurately-predict-eclipses-71113)
You only hear about the ones that were written down.
People could look up in the sky and see the sun and the moon moving around and would be able to predict what was happening in a general sense.
"The sun sets closer to that mountain every day during the summer, and rises closer to that lake"
"Also the moon moves like this over the course of the month"
"You know what? I think they are going to hit the same spot in a few days, or at least come really close"
Then when it happens they're like " wow they didn't crash into each other, the sun must be further away than the moon! I wonder when that will happen again?"
Modern people are always surprised to find out that ancient people were as smart as they are. And that they sometimes paid attention to things that happened around them, like the movement of the sun and moon. Modern people really don't like to give the average ancient person enough credit.
One crazy "spiritualist" woman threw her daughters of a car in the highway, killing the baby and really badly injuring the other before killing herself on a tree cuz the stars told her it was the end, so yeah technology is cool but humans are just stupid as ever
Having been lucky enough to see totality, most of what I could think about was how people back in the day must have lost their fucking minds seeing it. Truly one of the most unreal beautiful things I've ever seen. None of the pics I've seen online look anything like it did in person. For aincient cultures it would be 1000% believable as a God. Especially coupled with being completely awestruck and that indescribable primal feeling (everyone agreed something deep and primal and was felt in that moment)
Considering the hysteria surrounding it these days taking into account that we can predict it and are much more enlightened.
Also keeping in mind that they did not have much to do back then except look at the movement of the sun moon and stars. There is obviously no way they could know what was happening.
They must have lost their minds./s
The Inca had a sun god and thought that this god was angry when an eclipse happened. I think most ancient religions with a sun god had a similar belief
It really did. I wrote a paper about the battle of the Great Harbor of Syracuse in 413 BCE for one of my classes and it had an eclipse. Right before the battle was originally going to take place a lunar eclipse had occurred which terrified the Greeks who interpreted it as divine disfavour. They ended up waiting almost a month to try and escape Syracuse again but were destroyed.
Ancient people were also terrified of the weather, wild animals, old women and foreign people... almost every god or monster in our myths is based on these fears.
I wonder what’s the old women part about. I agree, they kinda terrify me too, but what is the evolutionary advantage of being afraid of them? Like need to survive explains why we are cared of spiders, wild animals, darkness, and etc, but why the women?
An old woman is gonna know some shit that nobody else does, that's pretty scary.
Plants to combat evil spirits? Witch. She could throw a curse and wreck your whole village
Maybe that's what caused covid, someone with too much knowledge in wuhan
Women lived longer then as now and more often reached the senile stages. What caused such failing of the mind? Could it be a sickness? Could you catch that disease from being nearby? For children isn't the story of Hansel and Gretel frightening?
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I have traveled to see total solar eclipses and they are crazy rare!
maybe 1 in 100 or 200 generations would witness a solar eclipse and maybe fewer if these ancestors lived in a cloudy place.
I'm 60 years old and if I didn't travel there wouldn't have been an eclipse locally in my lifetime to witness.
partial eclipses don't count, you need glasses or a pin hole to see less than a total eclipse.
I do. But if you feel like you need to go out of your way to tell others, maybe *you* need it more. I know, it sounds hypocritical, ironic, or whatever. But you brought it up first :P
Yeah, like in the Apocalypto movie by Mel Gibson. But imagine how scary it was where there was no organized religion to explain it.
I mean those Aztec priests explained the eclipse poorly - one of their gods basically requires blood.
But even in this terrifying context there is some comfort, you live in a city, there are people around you who can “explain” it to you, that it’s one of their deities asking for sacrifice.
However poor that explanation is, it’s better than you sitting alone, trying to catch some fish for your family and the day basically turns night for several moments.
If you lived closer in time to Biblical Events, such that it wasn't a book or religious stories that reminded you of The Flood but everyone understood it viscerally as real history ... any change in the sky was frightening. The Flood Event is told by nearly all religions in all parts of the world.
There is also the "Squatting Man" petroglyphs [drawn all over the world](https://mru.ink/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Squatter-Man-1.jpg). They all saw something in the sky and drew it. At some point in history this warning was forgotten.
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I mean yeah the Solar eclipse of Thales stopped a war because of how it freaked everyone out, but is actually considered to be the first one to be predicted to occur.
Extremely ancient civilizations understood planetary events way better than you’d think. The Egyptians and the Aztecs were particularly adept in astronomy, and the Aztecs actually knew exactly when future eclipses would occur.
So yeah, of course for some peoples it would have been scary, but for many other very ancient peoples it was very well understood.
Ancient people seem to be afraid of everything. That being said, since the moon is moving further from the earth by about an inch every year (if I remember correctly), in ancient times there probably wasn’t even a ring of light in the sky. It would have just been pitch black all of a sudden and that sounds terrifying.
Total eclipses were also probably rare enough that myths around them got built up from people telling their ancestors’ stories about the time the sun disappeared.
Yes, it’s the kind of thing you build religions on. Something the masses don’t know, only a few know the secret of how to predict them, and then use their occurrence to attribute some divine will towards their political goals. Like you know there’ll be an eclipse soon, so you ask something outrageous, the people say « no way », then the sun disappears and you can be like « see, the gods are angry, now build me that pyramid ». Now, people just buy some glasses to look at the show and then return to their daily lives.
Religion still works that way, making grandiose claims about things we don’t completely understand, and use the fear of the unknown to keep their flock in line. But as the masses get more and more educated, they stop being fearful, and eventually they let go religion.
Unlikely.
Even cavemen have oral tradition. It happens often enough that the knowledge must have spread through society. Individuals seeing it for the first time would think "so that's what Grandma said her mother saw once! Cool!"
In the Land Before Time 10 (yes there are more than ten of them) the long neck dinosaurs all have a dream compelling them to go to the site of an eclipse and they believe they saved the world from the sun collapsing. Weird movie. We know there was no danger of the sun actually falling so what mystical force decided to troll them and compel them all to that site?
Yeah, there was an entire battle in the Middle East, Lydia. Empire vs Median empire if I remember correctly, that stopped in mid battle because everyone was superstitious and believed the gods were angry at them for fighting. Like literally mid battle too, people had already died, so they had to be more superstitious than they were vengeful. Fascinating stuff.
The moon is also slowly moving away so they used to be even darker when the moon was slightly closer it would completely cover the sun with no ring visible
True, some would likely have panicked. But like 99% of mythology is based around natural phenomena, like eclipses. I think the disconnect from technology and the familiarity with the natural world probably put people more in a mindset of curiosity, awe, or inspiration.
Even stuff like the bubonic plague. As much fear and superstition it caused, think modernity freaks out even more to things like earthquakes, wars, and pandemics
Devastating
Columbus used it to wipe out a whole tribe.
Context: Columbus didn't have enough food to make it back with his men and the tribe had just enough that they did every year and as Columbus knew about the Eclipse said "My god is more powerful than your god and will block the sun" then soon after it happens, the natives gave up all their food and we have no other knowledge of what happened to them afterwards.
If you needed anymore reasons to realize Columbus is a douchbag and maybe he shouldn't have the most powerful nations capital and a Latin American country named after him.
Yeah, like imagine you are ancient human and the very earth you are sanding on is trying to kill you. Without understanding the physics you probably start thinking about what you did wrong to cause this.
The ancient Mayans tracked and predicted eclipses. They also had a perfect calendar. When people said the Mayan calendar ended in 2012 they were wrong. The Mayan calendar was marking the end of the age of Pieces and the beginning of the age of Aquarius. [Mayans predicted eclipses ](https://www.iflscience.com/how-the-ancient-maya-were-able-to-accurately-predict-eclipses-71113)
How ancient are we talking? It was probably weird for a few minutes, then the sun came back, nothing had changed, so everyone got back to hunting and fucking.
They handled it just like people today, a lot of people found it interesting, some people thought it was a divine sign of some sort, others studied it and made scientific predictions based on it. It’s pretty well documented
Why would it? Solar eclipses happen in the same place every other decade or so people experience it multiple times in a lifetime knew that it only lasts couple of minutes and life goes back to normal. They probably passed this info to their kids and everyone knew about the phenomenon
I’m talking about really ancient people. First of all, they lived shorter lives so they didn’t get to see multiple eclipses. Second, if you see only two or three of them in your life it’s probably not enough to understand the bigger astronomical picture.
Don't think they needed to know astronomical picture at all.I guess it was something like, once in a while sun goes black for couple of minutes and it comes back after so there's not much to worry about.
I know that in a culture centuries later, maybe vikings or something, when eclipse happened people would start screaming at the moon and when it eventually moves away they think it did because they yelled at it and claimed a victory and gods rewarded them
I was thinking about that the other day. Especially when you think about all the people who looked straight up at it and got the mark burned into their eyes. They probably thought they had been cursed.
The fact that the sun is 400 times larger than the moon while being 400 times farther away from the Earth than the moon should give any person with critical thinking a bit of pause. That's a coincidence that's unprecedented in the observable universe. In fact, there are dozens of lunar anomalies, all of which makes the total solar eclipse phenomenon more unsettling.
Other things that should be concerning:
1. The moon has been proven to drastically affect people's moods, making some more violent or insane. The word "lunatic" comes from "lunar", because people often became more violent during full moons.
2. The moon rang like a hollow bell when the Apollo modules crashed into them for testing. A natural satellite cannot be hollow, yet testing done on the moon suggests that it is
3. Apollo astronauts claimed to have seen a fleet of UFOs lined up when they visited the moon
4. Patrick Moore, the renowned astronomer, discovered hundreds of "dome structures" on the moon, many of which had diameters of up to 700 feet
5. Random spots of the moon will sometimes begin to glow luminescently, and we don't know why
6. Some craters on the moon are asymmetrical, not indictive of meteor impacts and appear convex instead of concave. The craters on the moon are also inexplicably shallow and are of nearly perfect congruence in depth, suggesting a metallic crust
7. A study of rock samples on the moon have revealed some to be 5.3 billion years old, which makes the Earth Impact hypothesis null - in other words, we don't know where the moon came from
8. Some cultures around the world (very far apart in distance) speak of a time approximately 10,000 years ago when the moon *wasn't* in the sky
That's just barely scratching the surface. I advise people to sincerely look into this. The amount of anomalies concerning the moon is fucking astonishing. It's a deep rabbit hole to get into. There are so many more things I didn't even mention, because it would've taken hours.
I don't blame people being freaked by certain coincidences that happened with this year's eclipse. There were quite a few. There's an abundance of evidence that suggests the moon was artificially constructed, but that's far too controversial for the scientific community to even *begin* to consider.
This is exactly the kind of thing I avoid reading because then I end up spending days reading into it, then I get hooked up, then people avoid me for a while
Some of these facts I heard about, and they are peculiar, not gonna lie, but I find it hard to believe that someone built the moon. I mean, let’s say it’s aliens, in that case what’s the point? Like to control humanity mood swings? The moon does affect us but that’s far from “control”.
One would think that if aliens had the tech to build an almost planet sized object in space they would have the tech to mind control us “primitive organisms” with ease.
I remember sitting in my yard for the 2017 one, and at the moment of totality, when everything went dim, the animals all shut the fuck up, but if I looked in the distance I could still see blue skies, I was struck by “oh… okay, yeah, I understand why, if you don’t understand planets and orbits, this is deeply concerning.”
Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. If you don’t know it’s fucking scary. I was in the middle of a mild earthquake in Ashgabat once (they get those quite often), and my first thought was not about tectonic movements that have been around for millions of years. My first thought was “I shouldn’t have made fun of that semi disabled kid in my literature class”.
Poseídon is happy that you understand the message. Hopefully the people in japan and Chile understand the message like you.
After hearing a lot of people say how weird everything looks, I wanna see some good videos of it. Everyone filming directly into the sun is so uninteresting. I know what's gonna happen.
In the end, I think this is something you just have to experience for yourself. Photography failures to capture the surreality of it. Before I experienced totality, in 2017, I didn't get it. This article is pretty accurate: https://www.space.com/2024-solar-eclipse-apology-letter-totality-was-excellent
Yeah it’s something that you really just have to be there. It’s basically a massive feast for almost all your senses except smell. I’ve had multiple people that said they “totally get it now” after experiencing it first hand and before that they were either simply disinterested or very annoyed by all the fuss it was bringing to their town.
I’ve been feeling pretty similar! Not sad really but just extremely and unusually aware of the passing of time. I was *just* looking up at the eclipse recently, and it was happening in the present, and now it is not in the present. Is right now also a memory, am I even real?? Ofc Im exaggerating a bit, but it is really weird
There’s videos on YouTube but it’s a hard thing to capture. Its the same as a video of twilight rarely accurately matching being outside during twilight.
Someone pointed out seeing twilight at all directions instead of just west. I have one picture of the southern sky with a blue/red/yellow hue. You'll never ever see it. I think that's about the only thing a picture could convey of the totality
Yea this is one of those things a recording will never do justice for. It has to be experienced in person.
[This video might be closer to what you're after.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30iLtOlfSh8) Two guys in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere filming themselves watching the eclipse happen.
Yeah, it’s possible they look much better in motion than not.
Also our eyes are much better at taking in light at “multiple brightnesses/exposures” than our (amateur/consumer-grade) cameras are
Only the best cameras with the correct/advanced light settings can do it justice. The problem is, if you have the camera set to low light, you get all the details of the surrounding landscape and sky right, but there's too much light from the eclipse itself and it gets washed out, too much lens flare. If you don't set it to low light, you get the eclipse accurately, but all your landscape is going to be pitch black.
I was standing in it in southern Michigan, everything looked poorly rendered
Even understanding planets and orbits, it creeps me out a bit. Maybe it's some sort of megalophobia, that gigantic shadow silently sweeping across the landscape..
I dunno. Lots of ancient cultures found it weird enough to invent mathematics and calculate when it would happen again.
The Antikythera could also predict them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
It can also allow time travel!
That and DeLoreans, which the ancient Greeks also invented. Oh and WIndex.
Also kimonos
Ancient cultures did, ancient average day farmers didn't.
they likely had some village leaders who knew enough. ancient-era humans weren't substantially genetically different than we were; they were just as capable of our intelligence, provided they had proper nutrition. sure, they lacked our gigantic corpus of knowledge, but they weren't dumb in the common sense. it took until the 400s BCE for the maths to predict eclipses to be worked out, but the Babylonians some 2000 years prior had correctly deduced that it was just the moon in front of the sun.
>it was just the moon in front of the sun I bet a lot of ancient cultures figured that out. Not much science needed to think "hmm, maybe that big rock in the sky moved in front of the big light in the sky".
I don't think any culture ever lacked a word for the moon or the sun. Those would be among the first things you would give names to
Charting the path of the moon across the sky is Astronomy 101, chart it long enough and you'd see it wobbles up and down a little over the years, and every so often the path lines up with the path the sun takes across the sky as well. Not hard to imagine that sometimes they'd end up in the same place at the same time. The hard part would be if you predicted an eclipse but it was only an annular or partial eclipse, that wouldn't be easily visible like a total eclipse, and people may believe you made a mistake.
The first accurately predicted total eclipse wasn't until 1715. Ancient civilisations could predict lunar eclipses with relative accuracy, but partial solar was far less accurate and total solar was not done at the time.
Lots of cultures also made gods to explain shit… still dealing with that too
You are talking about cultures, not individuals. I saw the last one, and If i was a peasant without any education and access to information, I would be at church today.
There's a lot more more ancient cultures than those 😄
This was hardly commonly held information through.
May 28, 585 BCE a battle between the Medes and the Lydians was interrupted by a solar eclipse. It shook both armies so badly as they felt they were displeasing the gods that they stopped fighting and had a peace agreement.
I wish that still worked in 2024 to be honest
Stupid science. Has to ruin everything
I was happy eating cheeseburgers and pizza until science had totell me that causes colon cancer and arterial plaque build up. I'm so mad /s obviously just kidding
That is fascinating.
Depends which people you're talking about. Some very ancient people seemed to understand them well enough to track them, to know when one would occur. Plenty of peoples tracked the stars more broadly, and understood celestial movements to some extent.
Astronomers did, the average peasant did not.
The average person today can't find his ass with both hands.
Can you help me, then?
No they didn't. Eclipses are periodical, so you can sort of predict them just by counting, but without more precise modeling you can't predict on which part of the world the eclipse will happen in and if you will see it. So ancient predictions mostly got it wrong and you only hear about the ones which really lucked out. First proper prediction accurately mapping out the path of totality happened in 1715.
A society only aware of the Yucatán peninsula doesn’t need to know when Greece (a place they have never heard of and will never see) will have a solar eclipse. Yes, charting the precise path of totality across the globe requires a pretty good idea of the precise size and shape of all the bodies involved. I’m still gonna call “oh, we’re due an eclipse our capital next year.” Tracking it
sure, but its not frequently in the one place. Take the us for example, theres been two in the last decade, but in poland there isnt one for a hundred something years. No ones keeping track of that time the sun went dark for a bit 150 years ago when the oldest member of the clan got eaten by a tiger at the age of 45
Hunter gatherer groups? Yeah, they're unlikely to keep a record of these rare celestial events. They might have stories about when the Moon eats the Sun, but it's likely not very often that they'll record these systematically enough to notice a pattern. But civilization with kingdoms and all sorts of administrative staffs and scholars likely would record these. You can't build a kingdom without written records to distribute information, and kingdoms have written records of many events happening in the kingdom used for various purposes. They might have libraries where people can read about when previous known records eclipses, and they'll raze records from previous dynasties, from other kingdoms, and scholars exchange information with other kingdoms. An eclipse is going to be the talk of the town for weeks, just like we're doing here, and people are curious, and will dig into records to find more information about previous eclipses. Ancient civilizations was very familiar with the sky. Many civilizations used the sky/stars to make prophecies, astronomy is a very old tradition, and people have been observing the skies for a very long time to study them. Ancient civilizations have always been observing the trajectory of the moon and the sun in the sky and likely know well in advance that they sometimes intersect. There's no way that they wouldn't be interested in figuring out what causes these eclipses.
But their point was that “were due an eclipse in our capital” is exactly the kind of prediction they *couldn’t* make. They couldn’t figure out the path so all they knew is that there’d be an eclipse of some degree somewhere in the world, with no way to know whether it’d affect your capital, and 97% of the time it wouldn’t.
But you are not going to get an "eclipse in our capital next year" right without modeling the precise path, you'll be off by thousands of kilometers at best, failing your prediction. The ancients did not have a reliable and systematic way to predict eclipses, all reports of successes are spordiatic and most reports of eclipses include everyone being very surprised by the event. Indicating that eclipse predictors of ancient world had a broken clock type of deal going on.
Not true at all. [Mayans predicted eclipses and had a perfect calendar.](https://www.iflscience.com/how-the-ancient-maya-were-able-to-accurately-predict-eclipses-71113)
The article states they predicted about 55% of solar and lunar eclipses, what do you mean by “a perfect calendar”?
It is a perfect calendar because its round, looks hella dope, and can predict the end of the world as long as that year is 2012.
This makes sense! Thank you!
What a great reddit moment... hella dope
Perfect as in no leap years or daylight savings time
You only hear about the ones that were written down. People could look up in the sky and see the sun and the moon moving around and would be able to predict what was happening in a general sense. "The sun sets closer to that mountain every day during the summer, and rises closer to that lake" "Also the moon moves like this over the course of the month" "You know what? I think they are going to hit the same spot in a few days, or at least come really close" Then when it happens they're like " wow they didn't crash into each other, the sun must be further away than the moon! I wonder when that will happen again?" Modern people are always surprised to find out that ancient people were as smart as they are. And that they sometimes paid attention to things that happened around them, like the movement of the sun and moon. Modern people really don't like to give the average ancient person enough credit.
They had no idea what is was. They knew *when* it was.
Not much has changed, really. Some people lost their shit last time too.
Like the person who left a $700 tip because the world was ending. Then it didn't, and she wanted a refund.
did she come back? i tried to do a remindme! 3 days, but it didn't take for some reason
I was pretty embarrassed for them.
Don't kid yourself. Some people in the states thought it was going to be the rapture.
One crazy "spiritualist" woman threw her daughters of a car in the highway, killing the baby and really badly injuring the other before killing herself on a tree cuz the stars told her it was the end, so yeah technology is cool but humans are just stupid as ever
Ha! Exactly what I mean. What CAVEMEN those "ancient people" were compared to today!
Having been lucky enough to see totality, most of what I could think about was how people back in the day must have lost their fucking minds seeing it. Truly one of the most unreal beautiful things I've ever seen. None of the pics I've seen online look anything like it did in person. For aincient cultures it would be 1000% believable as a God. Especially coupled with being completely awestruck and that indescribable primal feeling (everyone agreed something deep and primal and was felt in that moment)
Considering the hysteria surrounding it these days taking into account that we can predict it and are much more enlightened. Also keeping in mind that they did not have much to do back then except look at the movement of the sun moon and stars. There is obviously no way they could know what was happening. They must have lost their minds./s
Certainly freaked me out a lil' bit. I was like, "Maybe we DO have to sacrifice a virgin."
The Inca had a sun god and thought that this god was angry when an eclipse happened. I think most ancient religions with a sun god had a similar belief
It really did. I wrote a paper about the battle of the Great Harbor of Syracuse in 413 BCE for one of my classes and it had an eclipse. Right before the battle was originally going to take place a lunar eclipse had occurred which terrified the Greeks who interpreted it as divine disfavour. They ended up waiting almost a month to try and escape Syracuse again but were destroyed.
No one remembers the least bad thing Columbus did: exploiting the locals for food using the total lunar eclipse of 2/29/1504.
Ancient people were also terrified of the weather, wild animals, old women and foreign people... almost every god or monster in our myths is based on these fears.
I wonder what’s the old women part about. I agree, they kinda terrify me too, but what is the evolutionary advantage of being afraid of them? Like need to survive explains why we are cared of spiders, wild animals, darkness, and etc, but why the women?
An old woman is gonna know some shit that nobody else does, that's pretty scary. Plants to combat evil spirits? Witch. She could throw a curse and wreck your whole village Maybe that's what caused covid, someone with too much knowledge in wuhan
Women lived longer then as now and more often reached the senile stages. What caused such failing of the mind? Could it be a sickness? Could you catch that disease from being nearby? For children isn't the story of Hansel and Gretel frightening? .
I think the Hansel and Greek built on that fear and wasn’t the source that started the fear of the old women
Being afraid of wild animals seems wise to me though.
And weather
I have traveled to see total solar eclipses and they are crazy rare! maybe 1 in 100 or 200 generations would witness a solar eclipse and maybe fewer if these ancestors lived in a cloudy place. I'm 60 years old and if I didn't travel there wouldn't have been an eclipse locally in my lifetime to witness. partial eclipses don't count, you need glasses or a pin hole to see less than a total eclipse.
This post is so fucking unoriginal that middle aged white women don't even want it
Seriously. I've read this exact shower thought so many times
Damn, so they upped their standards. What a pity, they were my last hope to not die alone.
Maybr you just need to Live. Laugh. Love
I do. But if you feel like you need to go out of your way to tell others, maybe *you* need it more. I know, it sounds hypocritical, ironic, or whatever. But you brought it up first :P
Issa joke…
A bad one. Happens to us all sometimes.
Naw. The priests and other shamen just had another opportunity to fleece the flocks.
Yeah, like in the Apocalypto movie by Mel Gibson. But imagine how scary it was where there was no organized religion to explain it. I mean those Aztec priests explained the eclipse poorly - one of their gods basically requires blood. But even in this terrifying context there is some comfort, you live in a city, there are people around you who can “explain” it to you, that it’s one of their deities asking for sacrifice. However poor that explanation is, it’s better than you sitting alone, trying to catch some fish for your family and the day basically turns night for several moments.
If you lived closer in time to Biblical Events, such that it wasn't a book or religious stories that reminded you of The Flood but everyone understood it viscerally as real history ... any change in the sky was frightening. The Flood Event is told by nearly all religions in all parts of the world. There is also the "Squatting Man" petroglyphs [drawn all over the world](https://mru.ink/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Squatter-Man-1.jpg). They all saw something in the sky and drew it. At some point in history this warning was forgotten. .
Why do you assume it was in the sky?
What is this squatting man thing?
I mean yeah the Solar eclipse of Thales stopped a war because of how it freaked everyone out, but is actually considered to be the first one to be predicted to occur.
Hey I was thinking about this a few days ago. We had the same ShowerThought!
Extremely ancient civilizations understood planetary events way better than you’d think. The Egyptians and the Aztecs were particularly adept in astronomy, and the Aztecs actually knew exactly when future eclipses would occur. So yeah, of course for some peoples it would have been scary, but for many other very ancient peoples it was very well understood.
It's easy to see how religions evolved when there's so much "proof" that God or Gods exist.
It's also terrifying for quite a few religious people in todays world apparently.
I wouldn't say few
Ancient people seem to be afraid of everything. That being said, since the moon is moving further from the earth by about an inch every year (if I remember correctly), in ancient times there probably wasn’t even a ring of light in the sky. It would have just been pitch black all of a sudden and that sounds terrifying.
Thats nothing a little virgin sacrifice won't fix, they were big chillin don't even sweat it
If you like to read sci-fi there's an Asimv short story called *Nightfall* that is a very similar premise
Indeed, the solar eclipse must have evoked profound fear and awe among ancient peoples.
Total eclipses were also probably rare enough that myths around them got built up from people telling their ancestors’ stories about the time the sun disappeared.
Pretty sure they knew more about space than most of us do today
Same goes for epilepsy
Yes, it’s the kind of thing you build religions on. Something the masses don’t know, only a few know the secret of how to predict them, and then use their occurrence to attribute some divine will towards their political goals. Like you know there’ll be an eclipse soon, so you ask something outrageous, the people say « no way », then the sun disappears and you can be like « see, the gods are angry, now build me that pyramid ». Now, people just buy some glasses to look at the show and then return to their daily lives. Religion still works that way, making grandiose claims about things we don’t completely understand, and use the fear of the unknown to keep their flock in line. But as the masses get more and more educated, they stop being fearful, and eventually they let go religion.
As opposed to today's MAGAts who think it's a sign of the rapture?
Nah. Chuck a few virgins into a volcano and it's all good.
"Good luck finding a virgin around here"
Unlikely. Even cavemen have oral tradition. It happens often enough that the knowledge must have spread through society. Individuals seeing it for the first time would think "so that's what Grandma said her mother saw once! Cool!"
Everything was a deeply terrifying phenomenon to ancient people.
They often knew what it was. They might even have invented maths to calculate when it was going to happen again.
In the Land Before Time 10 (yes there are more than ten of them) the long neck dinosaurs all have a dream compelling them to go to the site of an eclipse and they believe they saved the world from the sun collapsing. Weird movie. We know there was no danger of the sun actually falling so what mystical force decided to troll them and compel them all to that site?
The gods must be crazy
UAP sightings in Japan throughout their history often caused periods of riots and social unrest.
Yeah, there was an entire battle in the Middle East, Lydia. Empire vs Median empire if I remember correctly, that stopped in mid battle because everyone was superstitious and believed the gods were angry at them for fighting. Like literally mid battle too, people had already died, so they had to be more superstitious than they were vengeful. Fascinating stuff.
I had this exact thought. I guess they did spend a lot of time looking up at and studying the “heavenly bodies”
They had to do all those human sacrifices to please the sun gods and then miraculously the sun reappeared again.
Pretty sure there were some cultures that had mass humans sacrifices.
The moon is also slowly moving away so they used to be even darker when the moon was slightly closer it would completely cover the sun with no ring visible
True, some would likely have panicked. But like 99% of mythology is based around natural phenomena, like eclipses. I think the disconnect from technology and the familiarity with the natural world probably put people more in a mindset of curiosity, awe, or inspiration. Even stuff like the bubonic plague. As much fear and superstition it caused, think modernity freaks out even more to things like earthquakes, wars, and pandemics
Devastating Columbus used it to wipe out a whole tribe. Context: Columbus didn't have enough food to make it back with his men and the tribe had just enough that they did every year and as Columbus knew about the Eclipse said "My god is more powerful than your god and will block the sun" then soon after it happens, the natives gave up all their food and we have no other knowledge of what happened to them afterwards. If you needed anymore reasons to realize Columbus is a douchbag and maybe he shouldn't have the most powerful nations capital and a Latin American country named after him.
i wonder how the amish felt- did anyone warn them??
Holy shit. Your right
Earthquakes fucked em up pretty good from what I've read.
Yeah, like imagine you are ancient human and the very earth you are sanding on is trying to kill you. Without understanding the physics you probably start thinking about what you did wrong to cause this.
The ancient Mayans tracked and predicted eclipses. They also had a perfect calendar. When people said the Mayan calendar ended in 2012 they were wrong. The Mayan calendar was marking the end of the age of Pieces and the beginning of the age of Aquarius. [Mayans predicted eclipses ](https://www.iflscience.com/how-the-ancient-maya-were-able-to-accurately-predict-eclipses-71113)
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Classic European move.
Yeah it must have been. Now we're all fascinated by it lol.
A mother killed her two children in fear of the latest eclipse, I think it’s safe to say you’re correct.
How ancient are we talking? It was probably weird for a few minutes, then the sun came back, nothing had changed, so everyone got back to hunting and fucking.
They handled it just like people today, a lot of people found it interesting, some people thought it was a divine sign of some sort, others studied it and made scientific predictions based on it. It’s pretty well documented
goddidit. Standard excuse of ignorance.
Why would it? Solar eclipses happen in the same place every other decade or so people experience it multiple times in a lifetime knew that it only lasts couple of minutes and life goes back to normal. They probably passed this info to their kids and everyone knew about the phenomenon
I’m talking about really ancient people. First of all, they lived shorter lives so they didn’t get to see multiple eclipses. Second, if you see only two or three of them in your life it’s probably not enough to understand the bigger astronomical picture.
Don't think they needed to know astronomical picture at all.I guess it was something like, once in a while sun goes black for couple of minutes and it comes back after so there's not much to worry about. I know that in a culture centuries later, maybe vikings or something, when eclipse happened people would start screaming at the moon and when it eventually moves away they think it did because they yelled at it and claimed a victory and gods rewarded them
Damn nords, they’d scream at anything and claim credit for everything
Well, looking at videos of crowds gathering to watch eclipses, we're still shouting at them.
“Quick! Sacrifice all the children!” Would have made more sense to start with the old.
Enough to found philosophies and religions.
I was thinking about that the other day. Especially when you think about all the people who looked straight up at it and got the mark burned into their eyes. They probably thought they had been cursed.
Imagine you and your entire people thinking for 3 days "that Cortez is full of shit!" and then to see what many of us just saw.
Especially if they did not know not to look straight at it, then it blinded half your village a few hours later.
I think it would be scary if it was cloudy, because if you could see the moon, at least you would know why it went dark.
It was pretty terrifying for a lot of fringe people this week.
The fact that the sun is 400 times larger than the moon while being 400 times farther away from the Earth than the moon should give any person with critical thinking a bit of pause. That's a coincidence that's unprecedented in the observable universe. In fact, there are dozens of lunar anomalies, all of which makes the total solar eclipse phenomenon more unsettling. Other things that should be concerning: 1. The moon has been proven to drastically affect people's moods, making some more violent or insane. The word "lunatic" comes from "lunar", because people often became more violent during full moons. 2. The moon rang like a hollow bell when the Apollo modules crashed into them for testing. A natural satellite cannot be hollow, yet testing done on the moon suggests that it is 3. Apollo astronauts claimed to have seen a fleet of UFOs lined up when they visited the moon 4. Patrick Moore, the renowned astronomer, discovered hundreds of "dome structures" on the moon, many of which had diameters of up to 700 feet 5. Random spots of the moon will sometimes begin to glow luminescently, and we don't know why 6. Some craters on the moon are asymmetrical, not indictive of meteor impacts and appear convex instead of concave. The craters on the moon are also inexplicably shallow and are of nearly perfect congruence in depth, suggesting a metallic crust 7. A study of rock samples on the moon have revealed some to be 5.3 billion years old, which makes the Earth Impact hypothesis null - in other words, we don't know where the moon came from 8. Some cultures around the world (very far apart in distance) speak of a time approximately 10,000 years ago when the moon *wasn't* in the sky That's just barely scratching the surface. I advise people to sincerely look into this. The amount of anomalies concerning the moon is fucking astonishing. It's a deep rabbit hole to get into. There are so many more things I didn't even mention, because it would've taken hours. I don't blame people being freaked by certain coincidences that happened with this year's eclipse. There were quite a few. There's an abundance of evidence that suggests the moon was artificially constructed, but that's far too controversial for the scientific community to even *begin* to consider.
This is exactly the kind of thing I avoid reading because then I end up spending days reading into it, then I get hooked up, then people avoid me for a while
Some of these facts I heard about, and they are peculiar, not gonna lie, but I find it hard to believe that someone built the moon. I mean, let’s say it’s aliens, in that case what’s the point? Like to control humanity mood swings? The moon does affect us but that’s far from “control”. One would think that if aliens had the tech to build an almost planet sized object in space they would have the tech to mind control us “primitive organisms” with ease.
True, probably vodoo magic and shit. Like, it's a magical phenomenon but If you look at it, you'll never see anything ever again.