DECEMBER 11th - Aurora Foretold the End



So it’s December 11, 1719 in New England. You’re minding your own business, maybe stoking the fire so your nether regions don’t get frostbite, when you look outside and see green, blue, and red light floating in the sky. You promptly lose your shit and think the world is ending. Not that I can blame you. This was the first recorded sighting of the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights. And while I’m not sure what the average IQ was in 1719, I’m certain that people didn’t have the context of knowing there was a perfectly natural scientific explanation for why the sky was changing colors. Johnny Blacksmith couldn’t just pop on Google and discover that "an aurora is a natural light display brought about by energetic charged particles outside the atmosphere colliding with atoms from the upper atmosphere which causes ionisation of the atmospheric particles and results in optical emissions" (thank you, History Channel and Wikipedia). Basically a bunch of stuff you can’t see crashes into a bunch of other stuff you can’t see and that collision creates something you can see. But none of that information was readily available in 1719. Johnny Blacksmith was probably trying to avoid dying of Smallpox or Malaria, and for all he knew the sky was bringing forth the Wrath of God because of that time when he was twelve years-old and stared at Miss Fortenberry’s neckline when her bonnet and scarf came untied. Eventually, after more sightings people realized that the colorful display was not an omen of impending doom, which allowed the Uptight Colonial Puritans to loosen up a bit. And that trend continued over the next 300 years, going through multiple manifestations--the lawless frontier, free love, etc., coming to a final culmination of debauchery when the Fox Network decided to air Temptation Island and civilized society ceased to exist, effectively making the Uptight Colonial Puritans correct when thinking the lights were bringing the End. So thank you, Aurora Borealis, you beautiful, weird phenomenon. You didn’t foretell the end human existence, just a bit of human decency. Perhaps people should have taken you a little more seriously. But then who could have seen the Kardashians coming?

This day has been Marked.

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