• joneskind@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    How many centuries of science progress do you think we lost with this “awesome coincidence”?

    A bigger or smaller moon in the sky would have probably made the mechanism of the solar system a little more obvious for sure.

    • jpeps@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’m guessing basically 0 years, honestly. Both are visible in the sky at the same time, so I’m not really sure what being different sizes would clarify.

      • joneskind@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I think too much order lead to a loss of information.

        Of course they are visible at the time so we know they are not the same. But the way we Humans generalize concepts around ridiculously little set of data makes me think that most of people must have looked at the sky, decided they were the same type of things that have definitely always been there, and just forget about it. “Nah we good, those are Gods. Don’t think about it and don’t make them angry”.

        This is the type of coincidence that is blinding in a way. People naturally give way too much attention to random things. There are literally tons of textbooks examples of events that look totally improbable, but will in fact appear constantly (meeting someone who knows someone you know in an airplane, meeting someone with the same birthday at a wedding etc).

    • vrighter
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      6 months ago

      we have gained from this awesome coincidence. A solar eclipse was used to prove einstein’s theories the first time. This coincidence was exactly what they needed to observe the stars which appear very close to the sun, without the sun’s light washing them out, and measure how much their light was bent by the sun’s mass. Too big or too small and it would have taken much longer to prove.

      • joneskind@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        This event might have been harder but how many would have been easier to solve earlier in our history?