Why Were Ancient Civilizations Obsessed With Watching the Sky?

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]You think they knew it was going to happen?

[00:00:02]>> I think we could make a strong argument that somebody did know.

[00:00:05]>> How so?

[00:00:06]>> Earth was blasted around 12,900 years ago by a multi-impact event.

[00:00:12]Ancient peoples all over the world were such obsessive sky watchers. Every year on June 30th, Earth crosses this stream of cosmic debris and then on the next circuit around, boom.

[00:00:26]>> Gotcha.

[00:00:27]>> Direct hit.

[00:00:27]>> Do you think about that? how humanity may have survived or sought refuge.

[00:00:33]>> Well, you want to turn back to mythology?

[00:00:35]>> Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.

[00:00:38]>> If we were faced with something like if we can go back to now what's almost certainly a a real >> strictly mythology.

[00:00:46]>> Okay. So, here we got mythology.

[00:00:48]>> Mhm.

[00:00:48]>> And here we have scientific evidence that Earth was blasted around 12,900 years ago by a multi-impact event. Okay.

[00:00:59]>> A smaller version of what happened to Jupiter. Okay. Now, people, we've been around, modern humans have been around for probably a couple hundred thousand years. So, the event that happened, it's called the Younger Dus. Younger Dus was a uh initially it was a a an extreme climate event that was uh documented in Europe. Well, since then we've learned all kinds of interesting things. One is that the the mass extinction of the great megapana that lived during the ice age. There was, you know, over 100 species of megapaa that did not survive the end of the ice age, right? I mean, when was the last time you saw a woolly mammoth rose roaming around the forest of Tennessee?

[00:01:45]>> It's been a minute.

[00:01:46]>> It's been a minute. But 12,000 13,000 years ago, you had several species of elephants living here in Tennessee.

[00:01:54]>> Interesting. You don't think about elephant, you think elephants, you think Africa, India, but you don't think North America, North An elephant is a probacidian, meaning it has a long snout, a long nose.

[00:02:06]Up until the end of the last ice age, there were four species of probacidians living in North America.

[00:02:12]Think about that. They're all gone now.

[00:02:15]What happened to them? Well, there's different theories. One theory which I think considered to be ridiculous is that they were hunted to extinction by nomadic tribes of of hunters. But given that the estimates for the human population at the end of the last ice age and we're talking 12 to 15,000 years ago roughly those estimates of human total global human population range between 5 and 10 million. Estimates for total number of mammoths 12 million.

[00:02:47]Wow.

[00:02:48]>> 12 million mammoths.

[00:02:50]>> That's just an estimate, but it's probably in the ballpark.

[00:02:53]>> Now, let's say you got 10 million people. How many of those people, now that's every that's women, children, elderly. How many of those are going to actually be hunters? And hunters that are willing that are capable of taking down a mammoth?

[00:03:06]>> It's 25% or less.

[00:03:08]>> What?

[00:03:09]>> 25% or less.

[00:03:10]>> That's probably about right. Yeah. So, what does that leave? couple of million people were able to exterminate every mammoth on Earth in less than a thousand years.

[00:03:23]No way. No. And then when we look at the circumstances under which we find those mammoths and other extinct animals, that's not, you know, I mean, we find them frozen in perafrost.

[00:03:35]>> So it was, so nobody really sought refuge. It was just luck of the draw where you were on the >> Well, now you get down to a really interesting question. I think that the plausible scenario might be that you had survivors of two types.

[00:03:52]Those who survived by the luck of the draw and those who survived because they they knew it was h going to happen. They planned for it. They prepared for it.

[00:04:02]And >> you think they knew it was going to happen? I think I think we could make a strong argument that people there somebody did know.

[00:04:10]>> How so? How would they have known?

[00:04:12]>> Well, see this is where we now get into why ancient peoples all over the world were such obsessive sky watchers and how did the how did astronomers were able to predict this impact on Jupiter a year in advance. Now, I think that we could make the argument that there was whatever you want to call them, a priesthood or whatever, whose job it was to monitor the skies for generation after generation. And typically, one of the things that would happen is that impacts, you know, right now we could think of Earth, we could think of Jupiter, and there are streams of stuff traveling between the two, almost like cosmic pingpong or something. Right.

[00:05:03]right now. Every year on June 30th, and two times, right around late October, early November, late June, early July, Earth crosses this stream of cosmic debris that's called the torid meteor shower. The peak of that, now it takes to fully cross the stream takes a couple of weeks, right?

[00:05:33]But the Tangusa object. Okay. Now, okay. If this is where if I come back, we can look at some really cool graphics.

[00:05:44]>> Pull them up.

[00:05:46]>> Well, if you'd like.

[00:05:48]>> I don't know if I've got that open, but when we do the break, I'll I'll pull some stuff up. Okay. Um, picture this.

[00:05:54]You've got this stream of debris coming in from Jupiter, coming around the sun, and going back out to Jupiter. The whole stream takes between three and four years to make an orbit around like this.

[00:06:07]Right now, here comes the Earth. It crosses the stream twice, right? Once in late October, early November. When it crosses at that time of year, it's crossing in such a way that if you were to look up the stream, you'd be looking out into space. You'd be, in fact, you'd be looking towards the constellation of Taurus.

[00:06:34]That's where it gets its name, the Torid meteor shower after the constellation of the bull. Now, that stream comes in, comes around the sun. Now, if Earth is crossing there in the late in in late June, early July, and you're looking up the stream as these things are approaching, you're looking almost directly towards the sun. So, you don't see them. That's what happened on July June 30th, 1908 is that thing came from around the sun. And the people that did see it in the last few seconds, they described things like it looked like it was being born out of the sun or the sun spit it out, you know, and they see this thing suddenly in the sky and then it gets brighter than the sun and then the damn thing explodes.

[00:07:22]And you had people 40 miles away from the epicenter of the explosion who were literally like blown blown off their feet and thrown 20 30 feet in the air.

[00:07:35]>> Interesting.

[00:07:35]>> Yeah. I mean that was how the pressure wave that went out from that. Right.

[00:07:40]So um what I'm leaning towards is the idea that you had people who were watching the skies and predicting this and one of the reasons now again showing graphics would be to explain this it would be much easier but when you look at and make these predictions of like when they made that prediction back in 93 that this thing was going to hit Jupiter they use things they use a set of uh information called commentary elements or the orbital elements right and what they need to know is I'm excited to introduce to you the newest member of my family we call him Stanley we got Stanley this past Christmas and pretty quickly my focus became making sure he was safe while still giving him the freedom to actually be a dog I went looking for the top rated GPS GPS fence, the number one. And that's how I found Spot-on. Stanley wears their Nova collar. With Spoton, I set up a GPS fence for Stanley right on my phone. No physical fence, no leash. I just walk my property line or draw it on the map, and that's the boundary the collar recognizes. I can create multiple fences, save them, and adjust them whenever I need to. So whether we're at home or traveling, Stanley always knows where his boundaries are. Another thing that stood out to me is these collars are designed right here in the USA and assembled in New Hampshire by a team that's been working with high precision GPS technology for years. And you can tell a lot of attention went into making this thing reliable. The Nova Collar uses a dualband GPS system connected to more than 150 satellites along with an antenna that's over five times larger than typical GPS fence collars that keeps the boundary accurate even around trees, terrain, and changing conditions.

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[00:10:36]the the shape of the the orbit, its tilt relative to Earth's orbital plane, and several other things, right?

[00:10:45]Well, the things that modern astronomers used to count the tools they use, the conceptual tools they use to make that prediction are all the things that you can identify by using the ancient standing stone circles and observatories. I think all these things all over the planet were observatories.

[00:11:05]by which they were able to calculate cosmic motion to a high degree of precision. And if you saw an object circling, you know, in that orbit and just like with the the the uh Shoemaker Levy 9, that thing had been circling Earth and and Jupiter, but nobody had seen it, right? It had been doing it how probably dozens of times and nobody had seen it.

[00:11:34]But what happened is that every time it went out to Jupiter, Jupiter's gravity was sucking it in a little closer, a little closer, a little closer until finally it got so close it passed within that ro limit, ripped it apart, and then on the next circuit around, boom.

[00:11:51]>> Gotcha.

[00:11:51]>> Direct hit.

[00:11:52]>> Gotcha. Now, maybe there were ancient people with enough sophistication to see things in the sky multiple orbital periods before impact.

[00:12:05]>> Very interesting.

[00:12:06]>> Uh-huh.

[00:12:07]>> No matter where you're watching the Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcast and Spotify and leave us a review.