AaS! 213: How Were Ancient Astronomers So Good?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
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Summary
How were ancient people able to predict eclipses so well? How did they make predictions without modern science? What were they able to discover? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Come on, everyone, let's hop in our time machine. |
| 0:11.2 | By the way, I built a time machine. |
| 0:12.4 | And we're going to spend the weekend showing off our fancy technology to our primitive ancestors |
| 0:17.6 | and convince them that we're wizards or whatever. |
| 0:20.6 | And because they're superstitious |
| 0:21.9 | idiots, I'm assuming that they'll eventually want to murder us for our witchcraft, but by the time |
| 0:27.5 | that happens, we'll already be on our way back home, so it will work out great. For our first stop, |
| 0:33.1 | we're going to set the clock back about, I don't know, let's say a thousand years. And let's put |
| 0:38.7 | ourselves, I know, I know, along a caravan route on the Silk Road. And let's not go to a major |
| 0:45.0 | city like Constantinople or Beijing. Let's go somewhere in the middle of Nowheresville, |
| 0:50.0 | like modern-day Uzbekistan. So here we go. Now we're here in the middle of Central Asia, |
| 0:56.1 | around the year 1000. And yes, it happened that quickly. If you think traveling through time |
| 1:01.5 | involves flashing lights and complicated machines, then you've been watching too many movies. |
| 1:05.7 | And to show off our technological prowess, we brought along our smartphones. And we're going to show them |
| 1:13.5 | to these wandering traders to impress them. But we're a little bit limited, aren't we? We can't call |
| 1:20.0 | anyone. We can't text anyone. We can't go on Snapchat. We can't access the internet in its |
| 1:26.6 | vast store of useless and occasionally useful |
| 1:29.3 | information. Okay, okay, okay, that's fine. What can we show off? I know, maybe we could take some |
| 1:35.0 | selfies. Maybe let them play Mario card or something. We can pop out a little virtual keyboard |
| 1:40.7 | and type down what they're saying. And you know what? They may not be all that |
| 1:46.0 | impressed. You know, writing things down, well, they got that already. Taking pictures, they got that too. |
| 1:51.1 | It just takes a little slower. Maybe Mario Kart will really wow them, but that's assuming they |
... |
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