u/Every1ThinksImBoring

One of my first coherent memories as a young child was of hearing about Halley’s Comet on the radio and of the adults in my life talking about it - I lived in light polluted Whitestone Queens, NY at the time so don’t recall getting that great a view of it, but I digress. My personal life prediction is that the return of Halley’s Comet will be one of the last memories of my life - I feel as if my consciousness came in with Halley’s Comet and that it will go out with Haley’s Comet, but that my consciousness will be back again around 2134 when Halley’s Comet is expected to make it‘s next return - at which point, I expect to run into all of you all again, my beloved contemporary cohorts!

I was reading the wiki page on these and what struck me is how the earliest ones found are about 35,000 years old, with the more recent ones being around 5,000 years old, with many being produced around 20,000 - 25,000 years ago. They aren‘t anything found in nature - the human female proportions are extremely exaggerated with missing limbs and such, so you can’t say that people were just carving things they saw; if they are a depiction of a goddess, ~30,000 years is an insanely long time for a religion to persist; and if they are a form of Stone Age erotica as some have proposed, why would a fetishization of that particular body type have existed for 30 millennia, a significant chunk of humanity history?

I’m curious if any theories as not only to what they are, but why they have such an insanely long continuity, seeming much much longer than any other style of art ever produced by humanity ?

We‘ve all heard how if you flew a rocket at 99% the speed of light to Proxima Centauri and back, the round trip would take roughly 8 years from the perspective of the astronauts on the rocket, but that many hundreds of years would have passed on Earth due to time dilation. However, I’ve heard it said that there is no “preferred“ reference frame in relativity, so it is as equally valid to say that the rocket traveled away from the Earth at 99% the speed of light as it is to say that the Earth travelled away from the rocket at 99% the speed of light. Why then would many hundreds of years pass on Earth, but not on the rocket? Shouldn‘t it be that hundreds of years would pass on the rocket, or on the Earth, depending on which reference frame you pick, Earth or rocket?

I’m not talking about sorcerers who summon demons and such to do their bidding, but rather cultists who summon dark Gods and the like for them to serve and also usually to be rewarded by. In any fiction I’ve ever seen, the first order of business for the dark entity is usually to destroy or at least punish the cultist(s) who summoned them. So has this ever worked out?