Thoughts
by
William Orson Harris III
Astrology represents one of mankind's first systematic attempts to understand our universe and the forces that shape it. Regardless of opinion on its scientific veracity, it will always be our first model for proto-physics. Every major branch of humanity has developed their unique version of Astrology many of which persist to this day such as Chinese Astrology, Anglo-European Astrology or commonly known in the western world as just Astrology, and Hindu Astrology as well as numerous others. Many are still undergoing revision in the modern-day, for example, there have been attempts to add two new constellations to Western Astrology, Cetus – The Whale, and Ophiuchus – the Serpent, which would change the total number of Astrological Houses from the historical 12 to 14.
Why Astrology is Wrong
Astrology, in general, is an artifact of an Earth-centric worldview. All of its methodologies and deductions come from observing the sky from the Earth. The houses of each constellation are defined from an Earthly viewpoint with significant events being defined when a planetary object enters or leaves one of these houses. This world view fails to take into account the Earth itself. For some, the notion that human beings will one day colonize and live on other planets is an eventual certainty. This leads to the question of how to perform an Astrological analysis for the first child born on Mars or the Moon. If, for example, the child were Martian then there would be two major changes to his horoscope; the first being that Mars is now the reference point and hence will be a missing element, namely that Mars cannot be in any of the Martian child's houses. Also, there will be a new previously undefined element in the child's horoscope, specifically, the child will now be able to have Earth in one of its houses which is an undefined element with unknown and unaccounted for properties in general astrology.
We can further extend this thought process to if/when mankind leaves the solar system and perhaps even the galaxy. It would be possible for mankind to spread so far that even the old constellations themselves are no longer visible with the most powerful telescopes, rendering those constellations meaningless. Such people would be faced with entirely new constellations and planets all with undefined meanings and correlations. If these humans wanted to attempt to re-define Astrology for their new location, say for example Kepler 22b, and any work they produce would only apply to that specific location in the Universe.
Why Astrology is Correct
As we have seen from the previous section the differences between any two Astrologies from even relatively close locations in the Universe cannot be the same and many will likely even the antithetical and every new Astrology would have to be unique to its location in Space-Time. This leads us to the Space-Time theory and the General Theory of Relativity. There are many notions on how to define spatial and temporal dimensions but for simplicity's sake, I will assume the usual 3-dimensional space with the Cartesian metric defined on it and an additional dimension to account for time co-ordinates. Under General Relativity, just as Matter and Energy are equivalent so are Space and Time. It is impossible to travel through one without traveling through the other and in some similar fashion to E=mc2 as the matter-energy equation there is undoubtedly a corollary equation for the relation between Space and Time. If we take this 4-dimensional approach then every point in space is unique, every point in Time is unique. One of the more interesting corollaries of General Relativity is the impossibility of simultaneity. Under General Relativity no two events can happen at the same time, this is counter-intuitive but is mainly accounted for by the fact that the spatial coordinates (place) count as part of the Space-Time location vector so just as no two objects can occupy the same space, no two events can happen at the same time. This means every point in space is unique, with its own special identity and properties, and that all the points in the Universe, and throughout time are interacting and linked with each influencing and changing the others.
Through the previously mentioned model, we once again discover the first principles that the first Astrologers were attempting to answer. If we take any arbitrary metric to aggregate entities (i.e. Galaxies, Stars, Planets, People) in Space-Time then it is certain that those entities are linked to the observer, and influence those observers and conversely. This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that Astrology is true in the sense that every point in either Space or Time has its unique Astrology. Indeed, there must be an infinite number of Astrologies all of which are correct, depending on the arbitrary time or spatial scale you use to resolve them.
References
“Astrology.” Wikipedia, 18 Dec. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Astrology&oldid=995044442.
“Chinese Astrology.” Wikipedia, 21 Dec. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.phptitle=Chinese_astrology&oldid=995552491.
“General Relativity.” Wikipedia, 19 Dec. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=General_relativity&oldid=995196637.
“Hindu Astrology.” Wikipedia, 22 Dec. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hindu_astrology&oldid=995661595.