A Brief History of Everything Wireless Blog: The Power of Prediction, part 2

The Power of Prediction, part 2

2026-08-18 [Petri]

Total solar eclipses are events that only a small portion of the World’s population has ever had a chance to witness without actively chasing them.

Imagine the panic that ancient people must have felt when the Sun first appears to dim gradually in the middle of the day, colors changing to sunset shades and air turning cooler.

Then suddenly a brief diamond ring flashes up at the Sun, followed by an almost total darkness that brings the brightest stars and planets visible around the eerie orange-reddish flaming hole in the sky that has now replaced the familiar source of light and heat.

And just as your fear of the end of the World peaks, the process reverses and the Sun turns back to its normal self again, like nothing ever happened.

Unless you were extremely lucky, you would have never witness that again, as total solar eclipses happen at the same area on the average of every ~400 years. But you will surely remember it for the rest of your life.

Therefore such events are impressive enough to make it to any written notes of the period, and historians can therefore pinpoint the actual occurrences and compare them to their modern model of the Universe.

And unsurprisingly, these events can be mathematically matched with the recorded history, hundreds, or even thousands of years back.

Similarly, we already know that another totality will occur again in Southern Spain and North Africa next year. And the next in Southeast Asia and Australia in 2028.

And so on.

As I wrote in my book, being able to predict such occurrences is yet another thumbs-up for science: the eclipses can only be predicted if you accept the fact that the Earth is a ball, orbiting another huge ball called the Sun, and having another, slightly smaller ball called the Moon orbiting the Earth.

To calculate the next time and place, you just apply the known orbital mechanics of these celestial bodies, honed by detailed observations and refined theories over several centuries.

By coincidence, the apparent visible sizes of the Sun and the Moon are almost exactly the same, despite their very different distances and physical sizes. Therefore, when they align properly, you will get these moments of totality that are one of the most mesmerizing events the Nature has to offer.

This reproducible prediction of total solar eclipses that can be witnessed in wildly varying locations on the Earth roughly once per year should be another nail in the coffin for absurdities like the Flat Earth Theory, “theory” being used in the loosest sense of the word here.

Simply put, if your fad "theory" of the day can’t explain something that provably and repeatedly happens, while another theory can do it with a couple of seconds’ precision and define the edges of the event down to a kilometer, thus convincing tens of thousands of people like me to travel to experience those events, maybe you should re-evaluate your beliefs?

But as I wrote earlier, even paying such folks to experience such “unexplainable events” isn’t enough to convince them.

Faith beats facts. Even what you see with your own eyes is eventually ignored.

Sadly, the cancer of such idiocracy is not limited to Flat Earthers, and it seems to be spreading:

We now have prominent countries under the command of absolute know-nothing amateurs who ignore experts and use the political power given to them to dictate the science and healthcare policies “by a gut feeling”, to the detriment of tens of millions of their citizens.

This huge step backwards has already lead to a re-arrangement of “brain power flows” on Earth: intelligent people looking for job opportunities are seriously rethinking their desired destinations and avoiding these newly created “spheres of ignorance”.

And the supporters of these charlatans see this as a positive move towards some "purity" in places that have historically had the widest diversity on the planet.

Other sad and very concrete results of this newly-found idolization of idiocy are the re-occurrences of supposedly extinct diseases, killing and maiming the innocent kids of the voters of these demagogues, left and right.

The voters themselves did get their immunization shots while they were young, but are now willfully putting their own kids in danger, thanks to the never-ending flow of misinformation and growing wave of pure superstition.

It the words of Carl Sagan:
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

The most puzzling phenomenon here is that many of the richest individuals on the planet who have made their great wealth based on all this science are inclined to support leaders that drive these destructive policies.

This is happening even when it is obvious that such "not-so-brave new world" would gut their own future prospects in terms of access to finance, inventions, available intelligent work force, societal stability and even environmental safety for the parts of the planet they live in.

Instead, they spend money on high-tech bunkers.

But no bunker, however well-equipped, will save them from the consequences if things turn really bad: the angry mob with pitchforks will find the air filters, sooner or later.

If concentration of wealth leads to these high-net-worth individuals actively promoting the deterioration of our planet, maybe it is time to rethink our tax policies?

Luckily at least Europe, Australasia and China seem to be somewhat immune to what can only described as “active cultivation of ignorance”, as they still largely rely on the opinions of scientist that have first-hand information on the subjects that need immediate nationwide decisions.

So there is still hope: in the end, when push comes to shove, it will always be only the hard scientific facts that matter: Nature has no mercy.

Trying to explain away the surrounding reality and keeping a fake media bubble alive will be so much harder when the unavoidable consequences eventually hit the population en masse.

An empty slogan that does not survive any closer scrutiny will only take you so far.

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