On Earth's cosmological history: if everything was the same, except ONE thing.

here is the ONE difference.

Sometime about 4 million years ago. Our Earth was struck by another, smaller body..
An Asteroid, a comet...Not an extinction event....But there was one perpetually lingering after-effect.

A thin Veil of dust, or aerosols formed a shroud around the whole planet. Thin enough to allow the Sun to heat us.
Yet dispersive enough to not allow us to see clearly to the heavens.
The Sun not sharply defined, same with the moon..Like a headlight on a foggy night.We can see no stars, no pinpoints of light. No Planets, no constellations..

Pretend the Greenhouse effect or other meteorological effects are accounted for somehow.

What would Early man have pondered? Would we care about Gallileo? Would Stonehenge, and other great monuments have been built?

What are your thoughts on my odd question?

Edit to add...This veil is persistent...millions and millions of years or longer...Humans never get to see space.
Even to this day.

reply to post by spacedoubt


4 million years ago and Stonehenge are separated by roughly 4 million years.

I think the ancestor of man being a small lemur was either looking for food or trying not to be eaten.

Other than that, I'm not sure what the question is. I don't think dust created our atmosphere, I don't think anything then had brain capacity to 'wonder'. I never heard of an asteroid strike 4 million years ago either, not one out of the ordinary anyway.

Maybe I'm not informed about that.

Consider, land life then depended on plant life that depended on sunlight, photosynthesis. Ocean life at the bottom of the food chain is plankton, again photosynthesis feeding the largest whales and the basis like plant life on the land surface, no sun light, next to no life evolution, and we are quite sure evolution was in full swing 4 million years ago.

You are somewhat on the right track, but you have far to travel.

Read this: saturniancosmology.org... it will explain everything for you.

reply to post by Illustronic


I think you answered too quickly.
This is hypothetical, and my time frame of 4 million years ago, is to coincide with the beginnings of Bipedal Hominids, Which might have had the ability to "ponder"

Remember, this would be a thin veil, just enough to disperse pinpoints of light...And soften the edges of the sun and moon. It would still be in effect today.
.

reply to post by CaptChaos


Why travel? There is "nothing"out there.

And I'm interested in YOUR opinion.
Could there even be a Mayan Calendar?

4 million years ago I don't think our ancestors were pondering a whole lot, except maybe, "I wonder where that leopard that was over there yesterd...".

Really, they were pretty busy just staying alive. They were few and it was a very big scary world, with or without stars. It wasn't easy inventing sharp rocks.

Originally posted by Phage
4 million years ago I don't think our ancestors were pondering a whole lot, except maybe, "I wonder where that leopard that was over there yesterd...".

Really, they were pretty busy just staying alive. They were few and it was a very big scary world, with or without stars. It wasn't easy inventing sharp rocks.

Good start..go on....Remember, this would be the state of the Earth from that point to present time. (maybe I wasn't clear on that...I will edit original post)
Gods? Temples? The North star (or lack therof).
Where would we be without a view of the heavens?

reply to post by spacedoubt

Wait. What?

What if the dust cloud stayed up for 4 million years? Sorry, your "what if" sort of just fell apart. But for a rough idea, maybe you could refer to Asimov's Nightfall. Not exactly the same but yeah, with no night sky (ever) things (us) would be very different.

BTW, wrong forum don'cha think?

reply to post by Phage


This is the space forum.
So, no.

reply to post by spacedoubt

It's the Space Exploration forum. A science forum. This seems to be more of a Skunk Worksey sort of thread.
But what do I know.

reply to post by Phage


Actually you know quite a bit, from what I've read.

Some of the earliest monuments built were probably related to astronomy.
Some of the oldest names, still in use, are the names of Constellations.

reply to post by spacedoubt

Astronomy didn't really become important until agriculture showed up. So there's a biggy for your 4 million year dust cloud.

No astronomy, no large scale agriculture. No large scale agriculture, no civilization. No civilization...depends on your point of view.

And navigation.
Only a bright blob, and a dimmer blob as sources of celestial navigation.
More reliance on ocean currents.

reply to post by spacedoubt

Currents and wave patterns were only useful as a rough guide, a supplement for navigators when the sky was obscured by clouds. Western navigators had little knowledge of such subtle techniques. Without stars the Polynesians could not have made the voyages they did, a thousand years before Columbus cheated with his compass. Without a reliable method of wayfinding the Pacific islands would have remained untouched by humans until those with that high technology made their way there.

reply to post by Phage


That makes sense, I've seen some documentaries on Polynesian seafaring. Currents, floating vegetation, wind patterns, and in some cases even smell. But maybe, just maybe, an inquisitive polynesian in looking for better ways of navigating would have noticed the magnetic powers of the lodestone BEFORE others. Giving them a navigational advantage,

Then I was thinking about agriculture. The big bright blob. would still go through it's seasonal highs and lows.
And the little white blog would get dimmer and brighter every month, So out of interest of successful growing.
These would be tracked, notated and followed by some.

The basic question seems to be, "What if there were no stars in the night sky?" and the dust cloud is just a mechanism to explain that. Another [remote] possibility is an encounter or series of encounters that cause the Sun and its attendant planets to be ejected from the Milky Way galaxy ~2 billion years ago.

Stonehenge and other, similar agricultural aids would still work. Their main puprpose is to track the Sun as it appears to move north & south, following the seasons (see analemma), so I don't see agriculture as being affected.

The night sky would be black except for some faint fuzzy patchest that would have to wait for telescopes to resolve them as collections of... little points of light. The invention of spectroscopy would be needed to establish them as stars.

A big question is whether we could see the outer planets, or were they lost in the ancient encounter (along with the Oort cloud & Kuiper belt, which would mean no comets)? Seeing the moons of Jupiter & Saturn provided visual evidence that the Earth was not the center of everything. The phases of Venus & Mercury, along with changes in their angular size, as they orbit the Sun also provided evidence for Galileo.

(Aside: I remember a very early Terry Pratchett book, Strata where he made "one small change" to our Solar System by giving Venus a large moon (like ours) that was naked-eye visible from Earth. Geocenterism never took hold because the evidence against it was readily visible to all.)

Without Mars or the outer planets, Tycho wouldn't have had much to study. Kepler would have been left without a mentor, and would not have had Tycho's measurements of Mars' path through the sky. He almost certainly would not have come up with the equations for elliptical orbits. Newton probably would have still come up with his laws of motion, but his Law of Gravity was built on Kepler's work. It would have probably been more difficult to formulate with so few visible examples on which to test it.

Without the Law of Gravity, science takes a strong hit. The philosophical effects of it were profound because it showed us that the universe was not solely subject to the whim of the gods. There were rules and we could figure them out. Although Galileo established the experimental method, all of physics rests on the Newtonian revolution.

reply to post by spacedoubt


VERY interesting idea. ...Maybe the pondering would have gone inward instead of outward - and led to more focused investigations of the unseen and invisible, as well as a better understanding of "self" instead of "place."

S&F

reply to post by Saint Exupery


Excellent answers.
Stonehenge, for tracking the bright blob.
And surely all the other things you've said would have been slow, or even never developed.

I remember my first view of a non light polluted night sky.
We lived near Washington DC, and Baltimore on the other side. Smack dab between them.
plus all the suburbs in between.
We went camping in the mountains of West Virginia...Away from lights, and a little higher in elevation.
So many more stars, and then the glow of the milky way. It was a bit like that veil had been lifted.
I'll never forget it. OR how friggin cold it was that night,,,

reply to post by soficrow


Contemplating our Earthly navels.
I'd could imagine the microscope being our tool of the trade.

What do you think we'd think was above the veil...Or would we care?

reply to post by spacedoubt


Most likely the dominant society/science would be looking inside self, the earth. The rebel/heretics would be doing the math, postulating the existence of a larger universe (based on tides, etc) - and getting burned at the stake.

Both directions, with their discoveries/truths would be valid - and far down the road, would come together.