Chasing Gooses – December 2020

During the night on December 21st this will happen between Jupiter and Saturn (they’ll be close before and after):

They will appear very close together, a conjunction in the language of astrology/astronomy.

Apparently they haven’t “appeared” this close together since 1623 (according to Dr. Becky). While Stellarium (astroglobe software) does indeed show them close together in 1623, they were “appearing” in the sky at the same time the sun was up.

I looked up the year 1623 on Wikipedia to see if anything interesting had occurred… maybe a global pandemic among the human population… but no, just a minor outbreak of the plague on the isle of Malta.

It was however the year a book called The City of the Sun was published… in Frankfurt. This seemed interesting at the time, but now I see it was actually written some twenty years earlier. So much for chasing that goose. The City of the Sun, is apparently an important early utopan work by a philosopher called Tommaso Campanella. He wrote it shortly after being cancelled imprisoned for heresy and sedition.

It sounds worthy of a read (or a listen to) based on his high moral standings, but I recently added a 35,000-word manifesto, titled “Industrial Society And Its Future”, to my reading pile, so it will have to wait.

The synopsis of Campanella’s book says “it is presented as a dialogue between two people” which makes me think of the ‘Dialogue In Hell Between Machiavelli And Montesquieue’. It is said to be inspired by Plato’s Republic, which is also a dialogue. It is also said to resemble the City of Adocentyn in the Picatrix, which is why the page caught my attention since I have been reading about this of late and is about ‘astrological magic’. So there you see how we have come somewhat full circle on this pursuit of gooses.

A previous video I watched about the “Rare Alignment of Planets” includes in the title the statement that it 800 years since the last such event. That would put the previous one in 1220, and dialling Stellarium into that year shows only Mars and Jupiter close together. The only previous one I remember is the one that featured in the Tomb Raider movie.

Back to the Dr. Becky video and she goes on to talk about Former Israeli space security chief coming out and saying that aliens exist (Blink 182 announced it years ago), and that humanity is not ready. Too right we’re not ready; I’ve seen the fear in people’s eyes when they see me without a mask on. We’re too preoccupied with the invention of new levels of “tier” to be able to cope with visitations from the “Galactic Federation”. Personally I think I’m ready for it but it seems they only come here to dissuade those “in power” to stop playing with nuclear weapons, and I don’t do that.

This wasn’t my first “contact” news today. Anton Petrov on his Youtube channel ‘Anton Petrov’, announced that SETI have detected “a Strange Radio Signal From Proxima Centauri”. I was recently learning about Proxima Centauri after being loaned a book on GCSE Astronomy. “Proxima Centauri is part of the Alpha Centauri star system, the closest star system and planetary system to Earth’s Solar System at 4.37 light-years from the Sun.” It is a triple star system, which I find fascinating; the Ancient Egyptians seem to have an interest in binary star systems. Anyway…

The sequence of radio waves were detected by the Parkes telescope in Australia in both April and May last year – with one official describing as the first serious candidate for contact by extra terrestrials since 1977’s legendary ‘Wow! signal’. Despite extensive analysis, scientists are yet to identify a terrestrial source for the signal – for example, ground-based equipment, or a satellite. [link]

The scientists clearly haven’t done their research: “psychologists in California were having lengthy conversations with a charming and friendly alien from somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri who came to be known simply as ‘Hands'”, back in 1957 [source].

That’s all for now folks…