Context: Solar eclipse 2024: Millions in North America will view what promises to be a blockbuster
We reflexively attribute significance as a function of the extent to which astronomical facts can be rendered intelligible by the transient communicative adaptation we more readily recognise as culture, as language and as the variously dissimulated fidelity of partial models and limited comprehension.
The event itself becomes a celebrity as subject for millions of appropriately excited eyes and brains, rendering us all much like those accidental voyeurs recently seen posing for drive-by selfies with a digital thermometer reading unprecedented high temperatures in Death Valley. Not so much a 3 body problem as it is the indefatigable (and plausibly inevitable) instinct to assert and self-validate semiotic self-significance in and as the things which quite blindly occur to us in life.
Observations of humanity, an occasional series: when engaging spectacle it is generally and almost always done so in ways that assert ourselves and our shared experiences as pivotally significant, even when such events do anything other than confirm an acquired unconscious bias towards human exceptionalism. Notice that, in defining and describing a system of interest, we generally only inflate, validate and self-amplify (as signal of) the systems of description through which we might come to know and understand it.
Daedelus Kite 