[vhcr]

Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated. Of course the position of the stars and planets influence people's lives, that's called the seasons.

I think the same when they ask people if they think dinosaurs co-existed with humans, of course the answer is yes, as birds are dinosaurs.

[midoridensha]

I can easily argue the opposite of your assertions, simply by picking different definitions.

The "stars and planets" do not influence peoples' lives through the seasons, only the Earth and its relative position to the Sun do, and when someone talks about the "stars and planets" in the context of astrology, they mean other stars and planets besides the Earth and Sun.

Dinosaurs do not co-exist with humans, and never have: "birds" are the distant descendants of some of the "dinosaurs", but are not part of the same group. (I'm pretty sure any dictionary definition of "dinosaur" does not include modern-day "birds".)

[zmgsabst]

From Wikipedia:

> Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird

Bird are in the dinosaur clade, ie the biological group defined by the dinosaur family.

Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that humans are mammals.

[badcppdev]

I'm not going to argue with your clear reference but I will reference this article: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-rept... which adds a bit of useful context.

"So a reptile is any animal descended from the original group called reptiles. Both birds and mammals share ancestors sometimes referred to as reptile-like animals (Reptiliomorpha), but it's not very common for people to talk about mammals as reptiles."

[zmgsabst]

That’s because mammals aren’t reptiles:

Mammals are from Synapsids[0] and dinosaurs (and modern reptiles) are from Sauropsida[1] — with the commonality being that amphibians split off first [2]. We can draw disjoint clades, which we cannot do for birds and dinosaurs. Beyond that, you’re just talking about tetrapods in general [3]. Reptiliomorpha has multiple names, precisely due to this — eg, pan-amniota.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropsida

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod

[erfgh]

If birds are dinosaurs, aren't some dinosaurs birds? So we can claim that birds existed 200 million years ago.

[vhcr]

Your logic is flawed, it is true that birds are dinosaurs, and it is also true that some dinosaurs are birds (literally birds). But it is not true that birds existed 200 millions years ago. The oldest known bird fossils are around 160 million years old.

[erfgh]

Why? If birds are dinosaurs then some dinosaurs are birds. So the ancestors of those dinosaurs are also birds and we can go further and further until the first living thing which was also a bird. So its descendants were also birds. So every living thing is a bird.

[yjk]

If humans are vertebrates, then some vertebrates are human. It is wholly possible (and indeed true) that a specific subset of vertebrates (those that existed 200 million years ago) and another subset (humans) are disjoint.

[Alex3917]

> Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated.

It's not. The definition of astrology is literally the study of how bodies in space affect life on earth.

And if you don't believe in astrology, how exactly do you explain tides?

[AlexandrB]

This is silly. Astronomy and physics perfectly explain the tides. Just because there's another belief system that also claims to explain the influence of celestial bodies on the earth, doesn't mean I need to believe in it to explain the tides.

[Alex3917]

Astrology is a subset of astronomy, since astronomy is the study of things in space. But the part of astronomy that deals with how things in space affect life on earth is astrology. It's literally the definition. You can't just attribute a bunch of random bad things to astrology and then change the definition to make it fit your preconceptions. Literally just type "astrology definition" into Google.