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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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I'm a moderate believer in the electric universe theory, to the degree that I think it can explain a lot of strange celestial phenomena. eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles

Combine those with the fact that it's hard for people to judge the size of things in the sky without knowing what it is. The limit of stereoscopic vison is about 215m. After that your brain just making an educated guess about the size.

this is the first I've ever heard of electric universe theory, but I gotta tell you it sounds very crackpotty. The first result I found is this: https://briankoberlein.com/blog/testing-electric-universe/ which seems like a thorough debunking.

The strong version gets pretty crackpotty, but in a fun way. It's a guilty pleasure to read.

However there's a weaker take. Astronomy of the solar system was developed before electricity was understood and assumes that everything is electrically neutral. The argument is that electric charges are important with things like asteroids and planetary weather can be affected.

They predicted the first astroid lander would fail due to a difference in charge and sure enough it failed due to a mysterious flash. The one that succeeded orbited the asteroid for a few days, which would have given the charges a chance to even out.

In terms of atmospheric effects it's not a well respected theory because it hasn't developed any predictive models that work on that scale.

They predicted the first astroid lander would fail due to a difference in charge and sure enough it failed due to a mysterious flash

which one? (I am pretty sure that it is not what happened, but...)