At the Bay Area Solstice, I heard the song Bold Orion for the first time. I like it a lot. It does, however, have one problem:

He has seen the rise and fall of kings and continents and all,
Rising silent, bold Orion on the rise.

Orion has not witnessed the rise and fall of continents. Constellations are younger than continents.

The time scale that continents change on is ten or hundreds of millions of years.

The time scale that stars the size of the sun live and die on is billions of years. So stars are older than continents.

But constellations are not stars or sets of stars. They are the patterns that stars make in our night sky.

The stars of some constellations are close together in space, and are gravitationally bound together, like the Pleiades. The Pleiades likely have been together, and will stay close [...]



The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 19th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YMakfmwZsoLdXAZhb/constellations-are-younger-than-continents

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.