How gullible can people be!

I was looking for something to write about, and it appeared right in front of my eyes, in the shape of an advert - for "professional" horoscopes. Indeed, in this day and age, people actually pay other people good money so that these latter can tell them their future, based on the relative positions of planets and stars that are many light years away and apart.

Now a light year is a long, long distance. It's more than 9 million kilometres, for a million times. A modern passenger plane would have had to start a flight earlier than the appearance of mankind on earth, more than a million years in the past, and keep on flying up till today to go that far. And that's less than a quarter of the way to the nearest star, which is 4.3 light years away. Most stars that we can see in the night sky are dozens and even hundreds of light years distant. No one has ever and will ever be able to show how the position of some (but not all) of the planets against the backdrop of distant stars as seen from planet earth, that some remote ancestors on dope imagined had the shapes of bulls and virgins, should have any effect whatsoever on human affairs. I don't think the people who are duped into paying money for a horoscope ever pause to reflect on this reality.

"Send an sms to thingummy to receive your horoscope", says an ad each morning on the Italian Canale 5, whose repeated morning news in brief includes a horoscope, thus elevating the channel to trash status. The same can be said of numerous other TV programmes, websites, newspapers and publications the world over.

Astrology should be outlawed, as should all adverts with false claims about the products they're trying to sell. It's an activity aimed at extracting money from gullible people, and purports to offer a service that is entirely fallacious. As such, it is therefore sheer fraud, pure and simple.

Oh why, but why don't people take an interest in astronomy instead? It's such a fascinating universe, provoking profound reflections on the meaning of our existence and our place in the cosmos! I really can't understand how people can be so shallow. Could it just be a lack of education? It's such a pity, and so frustrating.

What's your star sign? I don't have any, thank you very much.