It’s easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they’d happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?
Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.
I agree that in themselves, the events I listed don’t much suggest that the world ends, the game reboots, or first contact occurs this year. The astronomical and historical propositions—that there’s something unlikely going on with calendars and the location of modernity within the precessional cycle—are essential to the argument.
One of the central ingredients is this stuff about a near-conjunction between the December solstice sun and “the galactic center”, during recent decades. One needs to specify whether “galactic center” means the central black hole, the galactic ecliptic, the “dark rift” in the Milky Way as seen from Earth, or something else, because these are all different objects and they may imply different answers to the question, “in which year does the solstice sun come closest to this object”. I’ve just learned some more about these details, and should shortly be able to say how they impact the argument.
You’re still cherry-picking. There have been loads of conjunctions and other astronomical events that have been taken as omens. You could argue that the conjunction with the galactic center is a “big” one, but there are bigger possible ones that you’re ignoring because they don’t match (eg if the sun was aligned with with CMB rest frame, that would be the one you’d use)
Why pick out those events?
It’s easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they’d happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?
Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.
I agree that in themselves, the events I listed don’t much suggest that the world ends, the game reboots, or first contact occurs this year. The astronomical and historical propositions—that there’s something unlikely going on with calendars and the location of modernity within the precessional cycle—are essential to the argument.
One of the central ingredients is this stuff about a near-conjunction between the December solstice sun and “the galactic center”, during recent decades. One needs to specify whether “galactic center” means the central black hole, the galactic ecliptic, the “dark rift” in the Milky Way as seen from Earth, or something else, because these are all different objects and they may imply different answers to the question, “in which year does the solstice sun come closest to this object”. I’ve just learned some more about these details, and should shortly be able to say how they impact the argument.
You’re still cherry-picking. There have been loads of conjunctions and other astronomical events that have been taken as omens. You could argue that the conjunction with the galactic center is a “big” one, but there are bigger possible ones that you’re ignoring because they don’t match (eg if the sun was aligned with with CMB rest frame, that would be the one you’d use)