While I am confident there is a rational scientific explanation for the hexagon of Saturn, it is undoubtedly an incredible synchronicity that the storm exists. Saturn being the sixth planet from the sun it has historically been associated with the hexagon within occult symbolism since well before humans could have verified such a storm exists. Truly a remarkable find and fact of our solar system.
> Saturn being the sixth planet from the sun it has historically been associated with the hexagon within occult symbolism since well before humans could have verified such a storm exists.
By who? There can't be a traditional association for the obvious reason that, until fairly recently, there were only 5 planets and there was no way to know which of them were how far from the Sun.
In Antiquity the planets were believed to move around the Earth, not the Sun, so they estimated the distances from the planets to the Earth.
While there was no way to estimate a numeric distance, they have correctly estimated which planets are closer and which are more distant, based on their angular speed on the sky.
So it was always correctly believed that Saturn is the farthest from the Earth, because it has the slowest angular speed, followed by Jupiter, then by Mars.
It was believed that there are 7 special celestial bodies, adding the Sun and the Moon.
However I am not aware of any association between Saturn and the number 6.
Saturn and Jupiter became associated with black lead (i.e. lead) and white lead (i.e. tin), because Saturn is less bright and it moves slower on the sky than Jupiter, like the lead is less bright and also heavier than the tin.
That's a good point, especially as the Earth was regarded as the center of the universe. Ptolemy apparently had to put Mercury and Venus inside of the Sun's orbit [1] (note that if you replace 'inside of the Sun's orbit' with 'between the Earth and the Sun', you get a proposition that holds then and now! Ptolemy had to deal with the fact that Mercury and Venus do not stray far from the Sun.)
Nevertheless, in that model, Saturn ends up as the outermost heavenly body, other than the stars, presumably because it has the longest period. Even so, it does not count as the sixth unless you include either the Sun or Moon, but not both.
In that Wikipedia article, "prehistorically" is improperly used.
"Prehistoric" means before the appearance of written records, which means before the 3rd millenium BC (when there are many Egyptian and Sumerian/Akkadian written records).
There is no evidence that the planets (i.e. excluding the Sun, Earth and Moon) were known prehistorically.
The evidence is actually that 4 planets, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, have been discovered, as correctly written in the Wikipedia article, only in the 2nd millennium BC, in Babylonia. That is a historical time not prehistorical.
The only planet known in prehistory was Venus, because it is much brighter than any star, so its movement on the sky is obvious, but it was known as 2 distinct stars, the Morning Star and the Evening Star.
Only very late it became understood that there is actually a unique celestial body that appears in 2 forms.
This discovery was made in Sumer, probably in the 3rd millenium BC, or maybe as early as the 4th millenium BC. (This Sumerian discovery is reflected in the legend of Inanna, who descends in the underworld, then she returns to the heavens, like the Evening Star disappears and then returns as the Morning Star).
This knowledge has propagated to other places only very slowly.
For example Homer mentions some stars and constellations and also both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, but there is not the slightest hint that he or the other Greeks of the 8th century BC might have known that those 2 "stars" are in fact the same body.
Yeah, the use of 'prehistory' seems not great in this context; there's a fundamental problem of how we would know which bodies were known prior to the existence of a writing system.
But there are a number of things that make these very discoverable: They are visible with the naked eye, all lie in the ecliptic plane, and behave a bit strangely if you watch them over time. Mars is a bit red, and absolutely stands out... And of course Venus can't be ignored. Once you've noticed Venus and Mars, finding the others is a matter of looking a bit harder.
Using stars for navigation or for measuring the passage of time involves observing them consistently, which leads one to notice 'odd' things. So I wouldn't at all be surprised if the planets were known in, say, prehistoric Polynesian cultures... The appearance of mathematical astronomy in Babylonia tells us that the movement of celestial bodies is approximately the first scientific knowledge a civilization will bother to write down.
> The appearance of mathematical astronomy in Babylonia tells us that the movement of celestial bodies is approximately the first scientific knowledge a civilization will bother to write down.
In fact, we know (from ruins) that the Chinese were practicing astronomy at a time well before our first written records of them.
It is a certainty that the planets were known to all prehistoric cultures; I don't know what adrian_b is thinking.
There exists no evidence whatsoever that any prehistoric culture was aware about the existence of planets.
Of course they would have noticed Jupiter and Mars when they are brighter than the stars, as extra stars in known constellations, but there is no evidence that anyone realized that the extra bright star seen once in a certain constellation is the same with the extra bright star seen next year in another constellation.
Because it was not yet understood that the planet sightings are the same bodies that just move on the sky, they were thought as stars that appear or disappear randomly.
Like I have said, not even Venus, the brightest body on the sky after the Sun and Moon, was recognized as a single star, but it was believed to be 2 different stars until 6000 years ago in Sumer and until as late as 2600 years ago in Europe.
Noticing a bright star on the sky is not the same with knowing its nature.
The next 4 planets after Venus have been discovered in Babylonia because they began to make written continuous records with the positions of the stars during many years.
Only then, after comparing the written records accumulated after many years, it was realized that the planets are not stars that appear and disappear randomly, but they move in continuous trajectories on the sky, with definite speeds and if you know their position at some time you can predict their future position at another time, because they never stray from their path.
So only after the Babylonian discoveries it became understood that the stars are divided in fixed stars, wandering stars a.k.a. planets, which have predictable trajectories, and the comets, which are the only stars that appear and disappear randomly.
With all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking about, and you're asking us to believe things that cannot possibly be true.
Some cultures remained prehistoric much later than others. Here's some evidence from one of them:
> what information we do have tells us that [Australian] Aboriginal people were close observers of planets and their motions, noting the relative brightness of the planets, their motions along the ecliptic, retrograde motion, the relationship between Venus and its proximity to the Sun, Venus’ connection to the Sun through zodiacal light, and the synodic cycle of Venus, particularly as it transitions from the Evening Star to the Morning Star.
> Indigenous cultures around the world, particularly the many hundreds that exist in Australia, maintain complex astronomical knowledge systems that link the positions and motions of celestial objects and to navigation, calendars, subsistence, and social applications
> The Sun, Moon, and visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) were known to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These cultures paid careful attention to the motions of solar system bodies through careful observation, which was recorded and passed to successive generations through oral tradition and material culture. Aboriginal and Islander people distinguished planets from the background stars, noted their changing positions in the sky, their changing positions relative to each other, their proximity to each other along the zodiac of the ecliptic, and their dynamic relationship to the Sun and Moon.
All cultures observe the sky closely, and all of them identify the planets, which are one of the most interesting -- and obvious -- phenomena in the sky.
Show me the Sumerian astronomical records that describe Jupiter as being two different objects.
The written astronomical records that are known appeared a few hundred years after the Sumerians no longer existed, in the 2nd millenium BC.
The Sumerian language is sometimes used by the Akkadian scribes in all kinds of documents, including in astronomical records, but it was already a dead language.
Thanks for the linked paper, it is interesting.
It shows that there are cases when the identity of the planets may be discovered using only detailed oral traditions.
However, that is a quite unlikely event and it happened very seldom in other cultures.
Even if the stories of the Australian aborigines have been interpreted correctly, there is no way of knowing if they had already recognized some planets 10 thousand years ago or only 500 years ago, for the first time.
In order to recognize even the more obvious planets, i.e. Mars and Jupiter, based on oral stories, there must be a habit to recall things that happened long ago, during the last few years, while always mentioning that when that happened, the reddish bright star Mars was in a certain constellation or Jupiter was in some another constellation.
When telling such old stories, you can notice that now a similar star, which might be the same, is in another position.
This is possible, but even in prehistoric cultures it was seldom thought interesting to mention which was the exact star pattern on the sky when something happened.
The normal story pattern was to be more vague about such things of low interest and say just that some event took place e.g when a certain constellation became visible soon after sunset, instead of also describing how many stars were visible in the constellation and which were their individual characteristics.
Such special interest in precise star description might have characterized the Australian aborigines and maybe also the Polynesians and other people who depended on astronomical navigation, but it was unusual at most other people.
In any case the identification of the brighter planets based on oral memories is much more likely to happen in a dry climate, where you might notice the planet every night and recognize it even if it has moved slightly and after seeing it during many months you may realize that it actually is no longer in the same place.
In climates with more frequent clouded skies, it is less likely to recognize when you see again a planet that it is the same as that seen some time ago, because by the time when its position has changed enough its brightness might have also changed, so there is no apparent reason to believe that a new star of different position and brightness is the same as the one previously seen, unless you have seen all the intermediate steps of position and brightness.
This might explain why some planets might have been discovered by Australians based on only oral memories, while no such cases have been seen in Europe or Asia.
Venus changes its astrological sign (ie, moves 1/12th of its way through the sky) roughly monthly, and Mars changes about every two months; noticing these changes doesn't require a complex multi-generational oral tradition. Jupiter and Saturn are slower, but still complete a full cycle within a person's lifetime.
Which is to say, these are noticeable differences for individuals, especially any who are using the fully-evolved intelligence of a human brain staring regularly at the sky instead of a smart-phone.
I don't know how you got into this state, but suffice it to say that most of your comment is quite flagrantly false. It is clearly not worth trying to talk to you.
I thought we weren't able to chart their orbits and thus know their orderings until the last few centuries. I'm sure we recognized them as being brighter than stars, visible as more than points of light, with non-sidereal motion, and we gave them names. But I don't think we knew Saturn was 6th "prehistorically".
"... an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day. He was influenced by the concept presented by Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – 385 BC) of a fire at the center of the universe, but Aristarchus identified the "central fire" with the Sun and he put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.[2]"
You are being too rational. There is, of course, an explanation for why people knew of the hexagon in ancient times:
> Some theorists believe in the very distant past the planets were arranged much differently. This would have been back in the Golden Age, when shit was good and Saturn wasn’t pissed off from hearing that prophecy yet. Supposedly this was when Atlantis thrived and Saturn hung stationary in the sky directly overhead. This theory comes from the people over at the Thunderbolts Project, who have also proposed many other radical new ideas such as the universe being electric and Saturn being a second sun. The theory that we live in a binary star system has correlations with the Nazi’s belief in a Black Sun.
I see now that your comment was mostly about the order of the planets. Not about how people hundreds of years ago knew there was a hexagon on the planet.
Hum, I just realized that those polar storms would turn easily into the hexagon if they just lose power (or would be covered by another layer of material over it). Both are probably the same phenomenon. More strong in Jupiter, less in Saturn. Tornados would explain also why is a tall shape
The hexagon should gyrate slower (with less energy) than the jupiter storms. Neptune should have also the same process but is colder I'm not wrong, so maybe it has less energy and is not so easily visible.
Another fun scenario to consider: if you could hop in a time machine and show these pictures to your favorite historical figure with occult interests (Pythagoras, Plato, Newton, John Dee), they wouldn't be surprised at all. "Oh yeah, we've known about that one FOREVER!"
I doubt they knew about the hexagonal storms, i dont have any idea if any 2000 y/o figures at all had any idea about planets, but maybe this could be a humorous rick and morty plot twist.
To change the subject almost completely to "weird things Plato argued", Plato recounted an interesting myth about the origin of sexes in the Symposium, that essentially humans were once male and female, with 4 arms and 4 legs and 2 faces, basically two people fused back-to-back.
If you examine human phylogeny, you will see that this isn't exactly true, but it's kinda close. Female and Male sex organs are derived from one structure in fetal development, the "gonad", which resolves into one or the other organ later during development. The full structure of male and female sex organs are actually rather visually similar (if you remove them and isolate the organ from the body, of course).
But the proto-humans or duplex-humans, not sure what its called, were too fast/strong/versatile because of these extra limbs and extra brain, Plato sort of inserting here the notion that maybe because they had 4 arms they were sort of 2x as strong/fast, these critters began scaling mount Olympus with the intention of challenging the gods, and it made Zeus a little nervous, or really i guess recognize that there would have to be a solution, even though he did not want to destroy the humans, he couldn't allow this challenge to continue.
Resultantly, Zeus decided to split the humans in two This would weaken the humans but allow them to continue most of their mortal endeavors. As a side effect, instead of vying for the power of the Olympians, they would be too rapt with lust, love, procreation to challenge the gods any longer.
Kind of cute I guess, that since they were separated in such a fashion, humans would forever yearn for wholeness that can come only from reunion with their actual other half :P
Thanks Zeus. You've really ruined a lot of my weekends.
Plato wrote a lot about love relationships between men. Is a typical grooming tale that he was teaching to his alumni. Is easy to follow the dots here.
Actually in the Symposium it is Aristophanes who tells this story, as a deliberately funny and absurd way of explaining how crazy love is. It features both heterosexual and homosexual couples (these are just halves of four-legged creatures that were male/female or male/male or female/female respectively). The real argument of the Symposium is that Alcibiades' love for Socrates leads him towards the true good, which is philosophy.
As mentioned already, ancient peoples didn’t know that Earth is 3rd planet from the sun and Saturn is 6th.
But Saturn also has a ~30 earth-year long year, which means it goes about 1/12 of the way around its orbit each Earth year, relevant to hexagons which have symmetry axes at 12ths of a turn. (No idea if this is the source of any association between Saturn and hexagons.)
Er, wait a sec, that doesn’t make any sense. Chalk it up to tiredness.
With a ~30 Earth-year long year, Saturn of course goes about 1/30 of the way around its orbit each Earth year; this would just as closely relate it to a pentagon as a hexagon. It’s Jupiter with a ~12 Earth-year long year that would go about 1/12 of the way around its orbit each Earth year.
Saturn and Jupiter together have orbits that return to about the same state every ~60 years.
I'd say the locals went a bit overboard with their tourism billboard, but I suppose 27,600 km across isn't too big relative to the distance it might be seen at.
Note that the idea of "6th planet" implies the ancients had placed the Earth in the 3rd rock position, which is news. It has nothing to do with a positional order.
Saturn is the alchemical Lead, with symbol: .
But speaking of "syncronicity", consulting my copy of C. G. Jung's Alchemical Studies, on pages 226-8 he writes:
"But the most important of all for an interpretation of Mercurius is his relation to Saturn. Mercurius senex is identical with Saturn, and to the earlier alchemists especially, it is not quicksilver, but the lead associated with Saturn, which usually represents the prima materia. In the Arabic text of the Turba quicksilver is identical with the 'waters of moon and Saturn'. In the 'Dicta Belini', Saturn says: 'My spirit is the water that loosens rigid limbs of my brothers'. This refers to the 'eternal water' which is just what Mercurius is. [...] Like Mercurius, Saturn is hermaphroditic. Saturn is 'an old man on a mountain, in him the natures are bound with their complement [i.e. the four elements], and all this is in Saturn'. [...] the Gnostic teaching [is] that Kronos (Saturn) is a 'power of the colour of water' which destroys everything, since 'water is destruction'.
"Like the planetary spirit of Mercurius, the spirit of Saturn is 'very suited to this work'. One of the manifestations of Mercurius in the alchemical process of tranformation is the lion, now green and now red. Khunrath calls this transformation "luring the lion out of Saturn's mountain cave'. From ancient times the lion was associated with Saturn. Khunrath calls him the 'lion of the Catholic tribe', paraphrasing the 'lion of the tribe of Judah' -- an allegory of Christ. He calls Saturn 'the lion green and red'. In Gnosticism Saturn is the highest archon, the lion-headed Ialdabaoth, meaning 'Child of Chaos'. But in alchemy the child of chaos is Mercurius.
"The relation to and identity with Saturn is important because Saturn is not only a maleficus but actually the dwelling place of the devil himself. Even as the highest archon and demiurge his Gnostic reputation was not the best. According to one Catholistic source, Beelzebub was associated with him [i.e. Mercurius]. Mylius says that if Mercurius were to be purified, then Lucifer would fall from heaven. [...] Khunrath says: 'Good with the good, Evil the the evil.'"
Based on that, we can see that the occult Hexagram -- closely related to the 11th ("Peace") and 12th ("Stagnation") Hexagrams of the I-Ching -- is a reference to the intertwined trinities of Good (white triangle) and Evil (black triangle), which depending on the orientation (per the I-Ching) denote either positive or negative spiritual transformations.
Hexagons sometimes occur in nature as a result of heat dissipation patterns, like basalt columns when they cool, and oil when heated on an extremely uniform flat surface forms into a honeycomb like pattern of hexagons.
I think those usually don't happen as a single shape though, rather when there is crowding of material and it finding optimal entropy path, you end up with a bunch of them.
Dunno why, but a quick glance at that article made me go "oh, it's just wave interference" and all the "look at the weird geometric shape at the pole of this planet" things suddenly made perfect sense.
... I mean, that might not actually be the explanation, but that's the intuition those bucket-photos brought to mind.
[EDIT] Clearly the "just", above, is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but you stretch some waves into a circle and then squish them down (say, against a point, like a pole) and you're gonna get polygon-ish shapes, right? The particulars are probably complex, but the notion that you'd get "artificial"-looking shapes at poles seems natural, now.
the most recent publication with "hexagon" in the title from the quoted scientist, Leigh Fletcher, is:
R. Hueso, A. Sánchez-Lavega, J.F. Rojas, A.A. Simon, T. Barry, T. del Río-Gaztelurrutia, A. Antuñano, K.M. Sayanagi, M. Delcroix, L.N. Fletcher, E. García-Melendo, S. Pérez-Hoyos, J. Blalock, F. Colas, J. M. Gómez-Forrellad, J.L. Gunnarson, D. Peach, M.H. Wong (2019), Saturn atmospheric dynamics one year after Cassini: Long-lived features and time variations in the drift of the Hexagon, Icarus, Volume 336, 113429
Contact your representatives. Every message they get about a project or program, they assume that there are 1000 (or some proportion more) who support it but didn't write in.
Fun fact, relevant to said XKCD: while it's not possible to construct a 3-dimensional convex polyhedron using only congruent, regular hexagons as faces, as the soccer ball example shows, it is possible to do so using a combination of congruent, regular hexagons and congruent, regular pentagons.
That's obviously not news, so, here's the fun part: such a polyhedron must always have exactly 12 pentagons. The proof of this isn't hard, and is based on Euler's formula, V - E + F = 2. See https://math.stackexchange.com/a/18347 for details.
