Stars can Impact Your Life!

Astrology is the study of how the positions of stars and planets supposedly influence human lives. I personally do not subscribe to this belief. But the exploration of astrology—and why humans gravitate toward it—is a topic for another day.

This article is about something far stranger, far more real, and far more unsettling:
a phenomenon that actually does link events on Earth to forces from outer space.

And unlike astrology, it has been scientifically observed, measured, and is known to create real-world anomalies that remain unsolved.

A Nose-Diving Plane, A Rogue Car, A Phantom Game World, and 4096 Extra Votes

A commercial flight suddenly nose-dives mid-air, injuring over a hundred passengers.
A modern car abruptly accelerates uncontrollably.
A gamer discovers a mysterious map area that has never again appeared in the game’s code in over a decade.
A political candidate mysteriously gains exactly 4096 extra votes.

Four very different mysteries, but all sharing one speculative culprit:

The Single Event Effect (SEE)

A SEE occurs when a high-energy particle from outer space—a neutron, proton, or other cosmic ray—strikes a semiconductor and flips a bit from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0.

This tiny flip in a microchip can create disproportionately large consequences.

It’s the same cosmic radiation that spacecraft must defend against using multiple layers of shielding and error-correcting systems. NASA’s Perseverance Rover, for example, uses radiation-hardened processors and software designed specifically to detect and correct these errors before they cascade into mission failure.

Cosmic Rays: A Hazard, A Mystery, and a Light Show Behind Closed Eyes

These particles do not just interact with electronics—they interact with us.

Astronauts have long reported seeing sudden flashes of light, even with their eyes closed. During the Apollo missions, NASA ran dedicated experiments to understand this phenomenon. The conclusion?

Astronauts were literally seeing cosmic rays pass through their eyeballs.

The descriptions were almost poetic:

tiny white spots,
fast streaks,
floating clouds,
and, once, an electric-blue flash described by Apollo 15 Commander David Scott as
“blue with a white cast, like a blue diamond.”

Just one more reminder that the universe is not a distant spectacle—it is constantly interacting with us in ways we barely understand.

A Universe of Sources, a Century of Discovery

Cosmic rays originate from everywhere: exploding stars, distant galaxies, black holes, and even the Sun. Their effects can be extremely subtle (like a flipped bit) or profoundly significant (like shaping our atmosphere).

The 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to

Victor Hess, for discovering cosmic radiation, and
Carl Anderson, for discovering the positron—the antimatter version of the electron.

The existence of antimatter itself is a reminder of how bizarre and deeply consequential these cosmic interactions can be, and how fortunate we are to have an atmosphere shielding us from most of this bombardment.

So Yes, the Universe Affects Us—Just Not the Way Astrology Claims

Whether one believes in astrology or not, there is no denying that astronomical bodies do have an impact on Earth and on us. The real question is: are we capable of predicting these impacts? Or even understanding them fully?

Astrology claims we can.
Science shows we mostly can’t.
And where astrology attempts to guess, science measures and reveals.

Which brings us to the most famous scientific test of astrology ever conducted.

A Scientific Test of Astrology (Carlson, Nature, 1985)

Physicist Shawn Carlson designed a rigorous double-blind test published in Nature (1985). Here’s the summary:

30 top astrologers participated.
Each received the natal charts of 116 people.
For each chart, they were given three personality descriptions.
Only one description was correct.
They had to match chart to person.

The expected success rate by random chance: 33%.
The astrologers’ success rate: 33%.

No better than random guessing.

Carlson concluded that astrologers likely rely on cold reading—subtle cues from in-person interactions—not on celestial predictions.

Conclusion

Astrology claims stars guide our personalities.
Science reveals stars—and cosmic phenomena—sometimes flip bits in our computers or flash across an astronaut’s retina.

One is a poetic metaphor.
The other is physical reality.

Both remind us of how intimately connected we are to the universe—
just not in the way horoscopes imagine.