Astrology

Nature and all Natures laws lay hid at night;

God said, let Newton be, and all was light.

                                                        -          Alexander Pope

India is a country full of mysticism. People here love to believe in the celestial beings and how they can or will affect the course of actions. One such ancient study is the Astrology, which is defined as (according to wikipedia) the study of the celestial bodies interpreted as affecting personality, human affairs, and natural events.

I have always been very fascinated with this branch of study and given any opportunity would like to hear the course of events about to occur in my life due to the changes occurring in outer space. A horoscope plays a vital role in the astrological study. A horoscope is a chart or diagram which represents the  Sun, Moon, planets, and the constellation of stars, their angles, proximity to one other and other sensitivities at the time of an occurrance of an event particularly at birth.This chart allows the astrologist to study and predict the course of events to follow in the individuals life span. This chart is one of the first and important possessions in the life of an individual, particularly in India. Most key decisions in the life of an individual is based on the horoscope and its predictions. 

Today I read that only 6000 stars can be seen with the naked eye from earth and only 2000 at any point of time. With a binocular or a standard telescope the number varies from about 30000-50000 and with an extremely heavy duty telescope about ten billion stars in multiple galaxies. But all the stars and planets are some light years away and a star burns for billions of years and dies off very quickly and only a few stars explode.This is a fact which I had probably known while I was in 6^th grade or maybe earlier but the enormity of it never sunk in before today. 

Coming back to my dilemma, the people I know who predict the future by reading the constellation and planets and their positions, what position are they referring to? The one that we see today, is something that happened 2 light years away to say the least. So they are predicting my future or Julius Caesar’s? Also what is the probability that a star seen on the day of my birth was actually live and shining  on that day? For all we know,it would have long exploded. So my future is being predicted by a star which actually doesn’t even exist!  Not to mention that the experts who predict are not the best astronomists and all of them I know have never touched a telescope leave aside use one. So the information they have about the planetary positions is something that is already documented.

And here we are only talking about our solar system which is a minuscule part of the galaxy and the universe, where every second there is a birth of a new star and maybe every month a creation of another solar system. What about those movements? Just today there is a news flash about a discovery of another planet. So how does that affect our horoscope now? Or since the discovery is only today, maybe the effect it has in shaping the future will also be applicable to people born after today.

With due respect to the people who dedicate their lives to this study, one last question, why do we hear only few of the names repeated again and again in the horoscope? Except of the 9 known planets and a dozen stars is there nothing that is affecting our future? I have heard a million times if not more, that the stars are bad and so this is happening to you; and so this is affecting you. Are the stars not equally bad for everybody? What if you were told that there is a star which exploded some 4.5 light years away (which BTW is the closest known star to Earth) so we have about 450 years to continuously sit and watch the end of ourselves. Would that nullify all your prediction as this one star would then bring all the animate and inanimate objects of earth under the same category which spells DOOM.