Part I

The sun and Earth, now

The live link: what the Sun is doing, and what reaches us.

Space weather on Earth.

The sun as NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory sees it, minutes ago; tap a bright region to see what it has done.

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Look at it in

Numbered regions

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Flares, solar wind and magnetic storms.

Flares reach us in eight minutes and can black out radio. Eruptions and solar wind arrive in days and, when their field turns south, set off magnetic storms: aurora, GPS errors, strain on satellites and grids. The chart runs back to 1932; drag to explore.

The solar wind's structure, read with the heart's tools.

The last seven days of the wind at the L1 spacecraft, minute by minute, taken apart the way a heartbeat record is: how its fluctuation is spread across time scales (the spectrogram), how that scaling holds from minutes to a day (DFA, the α1 and α2 of heart-rate variability) and how unpredictable it is at each scale (sample and multiscale entropy). The same mathematics, a different body: a stream of charged gas leaving the sun at 300 to 800 km/s, turbulent all the way down.

How to read itWhat each measure is, what it means for a wind, and how it differs from a heart

The spectrogram is the week from left to right, and the wind's time scales from bottom (hours) to top (minutes). The power at each scale is multiplied by f^5/3, so a wind obeying Kolmogorov's turbulent cascade looks level, and brighter means more fluctuation at that scale than the cascade alone would give. Eruptions arriving from the sun, and the boundaries between fast and slow wind, show as bright columns across many scales at once. Dark columns are gaps in the feed.
The spectrum is the week's average. The magnetic field's turbulence falls close to the −5/3 line; nearer to −1, at the longest scales, the wind carries the sun's own structure, as a heart's 1/f carries the body's regulation.
DFA asks how the fluctuation grows with the window. Its slope is α. In heart-rate variability α1 runs over 4 to 16 beats; the wind has no beat, so here it runs over 4 to 16 minutes. For a turbulent cascade theory gives α ≈ 1.33; a healthy resting heart sits near 1, the edge between randomness and rigidity.
Sample entropy is how often a pattern of two minutes, once seen, fails to repeat in the third (m = 2, tolerance 0.2 of the spread): low is regular, high is unpredictable. Multiscale entropy repeats it on the series averaged over 1 to 20 minutes; the area under that curve is the complexity index, as in Costa's work on heartbeats.
Through the week, α1 and sample entropy are measured in 6-hour windows, hour by hour, like the 5-minute windows of a heart record.
What it is not. A wind's time series is a slice through structures blowing past one spacecraft, not a rhythm made by a body. These numbers describe the wind; any link to a heart or to the random source would need its own test, registered before it is run.

Part II

Cycles

Where we are in the Sun's rhythms, and every sunspot counted since 1700.

Where we are in the cycles.

Every dial is one of the sun's rhythms, or the sky's, with today marked on it, computed from the records above. Under each: what is known to change through that cycle, from measurement, and how sure we are.

The hypothesis: a quiet sun brings disorderRegistered 15 October 2026 by Altus · the test in full: what held and what did not

The hypothesis, as registered

Periods of low solar activity go with more disorganised crisis, while periods of high activity go with more organised upheaval. It is stated here so it can be tested on the historical record and on the years ahead.

The claim, in parts that can each succeed or fail

H1, quiet sun and disorder. Periods of low solar activity, at both the 11-year minimum and the multi-decade grand minima, show more disorganised crisis: famine, epidemic deaths, state collapse, banditry and unrest without a coordinating movement.
H2, active sun and organised upheaval. Periods of high activity show more organised upheaval: revolutions with a programme, mass political movements, constitutional change, and faster innovation.
H0, the null. Once climate, volcanoes and record-keeping are accounted for, the rates of both kinds of event are the same across solar phases.

Chizhevsky's four phases already point the same way for H2 (Wikipedia); Parker's seventeenth-century Global Crisis is the strongest single case for H1 (Ohio State).

Coding rule, written before analysis. An event is organised if a named group, programme or leadership directs it and it produces a lasting institutional change; otherwise it is disorganised. Two coders label each event without seeing the solar data, and their agreement is reported.

Three tests

Grand minima, about 1000–1900. Disorganised-crisis rates inside the four dated grand minima (Wolf, Spörer, Maunder, Dalton) against the 50 years before and after each. Few cases: suggestive at best; its value is the long reach.
The 11-year cycle, 1700 to now. Every minimum and every maximum lined up as year zero, event rates averaged from five years before to five after. H1 predicts a disorder peak near minima; H2 an organised-upheaval peak near maxima, perhaps a year late, as Dewey noted for Chizhevsky's data.
Out of sample. The method and lag fixed on data before 1900, then run once, unchanged, on 1900 to now.

Chance is judged with sunspot series that keep the cycle's shape but scramble its timing, since both solar and social series run in long swings, and all tests are corrected together for multiple comparisons. The controls: volcanic eruptions (the main driver of the Little Ice Age's cooling, which began before the Maunder Minimum, Wikipedia), climate, the record's density (far more events are written down after 1800), population, the clustering of wars and crises, and Europe's weight in the early record.

What would support or refute it, decided now

Supports H1: disorganised-crisis rates higher within two years of minima than elsewhere in the cycle, beyond the chance band, after the volcanic and climate controls, and the same direction in the post-1900 check.
Supports H2: organised-upheaval rates peaking within two years of maxima, under the same conditions.
Weakened: the effect appears before the controls and disappears after them, pointing to climate or volcanoes as the real driver.
Refuted: no difference beyond chance, or the effect reversing after 1900.
Mixed: one half holds and the other does not; each is reported on its own.

The forward prediction

Cycle 25 peaked around October 2024 and is expected to reach its minimum around 2030 (Wikipedia), which gives the hypothesis a live test: under H1, the global rate of disorganised crisis in the two years either side of that minimum is higher than in 2022–2026, around the maximum. The threshold is the effect size the historical test finds, written down with a date before 2027; it resolves once the minimum is officially dated, and no later than 2033. One forward cycle is a single data point: it can embarrass the hypothesis more easily than confirm it.

The century cycle and great-power rotations

Four of George Modelski's five global wars, the wars that handed world leadership from one power to the next, fall inside or at the edge of a long solar low; one does not.

Global war	New leading power	The sun	Fit
1494–1517	Portugal	Spörer Minimum, 1450–1540	inside
1579–1609	Netherlands	no grand minimum	miss
1688–1713	Britain	Maunder Minimum, 1645–1715	last third
1792–1815	Britain, second cycle	Dalton Minimum, 1790–1820	near-exact
1914–1945	United States	just after the weak cycles of 1900–1913	edge
next?	contested	after the cycle 24 low (2008–2019); the century swing now rising	open

Why this is weaker than it looks. The sun was in a long low for about 200 of the 495 years from 1450 to 1945, roughly 40%, so a 25-to-30-year war overlapping one by chance is common: four overlaps in five is roughly a one-in-three outcome under chance alone (a rough estimate, to be replaced by the proper test). Modelski's war dates are his own choices, and the Dalton overlap comes with the Tambora eruption of 1815. The windows are to be dated from the solar reconstruction first, then compared with independently dated lists of hegemonic wars.

Steps

Lock the hypothesis: date it, the coding rule, the tests and the thresholds
Choose the volcanic series and the famine and epidemic chronologies
Build the event list and have two coders label it blind to the solar data
Run the 11-year test on 1700–1899 and fix the lag (1755–1899: the counted cycles)
Run the grand-minima test
Run the out-of-sample test once, unchanged, on 1900 to now
Publish the results here, nulls included, with the forward threshold
Revisit after the cycle 25 minimum is dated

Most of the solar, war and crisis series already feed this page; the volcanic series and the event coding are new work. Sources: Chizhevsky and Maunder Minimum, Wikipedia; Parker, Global Crisis; Solar cycle 25, Wikipedia; Modelski's war dates via the P2P Foundation.

The record

Every sunspot counted since 1700.

Yearly counts from 1700, monthly from 1749, daily from 1818: the international sunspot number, begun by Rudolf Wolf in Switzerland in 1848 and kept today in Brussels. The sun's eleven-year cycles are numbered from 1755. Since 1932 every day's strongest magnetic storm is known too; the strongest show as marks along the top. Drag or pinch to move through time.

Tap a marked moment.

Before 1700 the record goes on, in other hands: telescope drawings from 1610, Chinese court astronomers' sunspots from 165 BCE, Assyrian tablets reporting a red glow in the 7th century BCE, and in tree rings and ice, the sun's activity for twelve thousand years. That deep record is being gathered now, every entry with its source and how sure we can be of it.

Part III

The planets

From the Sun out to the planets, where they are, and how eight traditions read them.

The sky

The planets now, and how eight traditions read them.

Where every planet really stands, computed from the orbits JPL publishes, and the frameworks people built to read that sky: Babylon's omens become the Greek horoscope, India's lunar mansions, China's Jupiter years, the great conjunctions that Abu Ma'shar timed history by, the Maya count of Venus, and Kepler, who kept only the angles and heard the orbits as music. Every reading below is what its tradition says, named as such; what controlled tests have found is at the end.

Moment

What controlled tests have found. Natal astrology has not passed a controlled test: in Carlson's double-blind study (Nature, 1985), astrologers matched charts to personality profiles no better than chance; Dean and Kelly (2003) found no support across more than a hundred traits, and 2,011 pairs of "time twins" born minutes apart were no more alike than strangers. Gauquelin's Mars effect for athletes, the best-known positive result, did not appear where hospital staff recorded the births. Cycle readings of collective history and the reflective use of a chart lie largely outside these tests; the observatory tests the first in the open, with the questions below, and leaves the second to you.

Part IV

Correlations and studies

What others have found between the Sun and life on Earth, measured and claimed, and the markets' four-year pattern.

Markets

Stock markets and the sunspot cycle, four years apart.

Every year's stock-market return set against the sunspot number at every lag, from fifteen years before to fifteen after. The strongest match, in New York and in London alike, is with the sunspot number four years later. The grey band is what chance gives at each lag, from sunspot series with the same rhythm but random timing; look at 31 lags and one will stand out, so the number under each chart says how often chance alone produces a match as strong as the best one seen.

Loading the records…

US real returns each year, and the sunspot number four years later

Returns: R. Shiller, S&P composite in real terms, 1871–2025; Bank of England, A millennium of macroeconomic data, London share prices 1709–2016 (nominal). Sunspots: SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium. Analysis: 2,000 phase-randomised sunspot series per chart (tools/sun-human/analyze.py).

The sun and us

Six hundred years of the sun beside our wars, crises and markets.

Since Herschel compared sunspots with the price of wheat in 1801, people have looked for the sun's cycle in human life. Here first is what has held up, each drawn from the measurements themselves with the sunspot cycle behind it, and how sure the science is; then every record laid along one line of time for you to look for yourself.

What others have found

The sun's eleven-year cycle reaches us mostly through what it does to the space around Earth and to our technology. The firmest links are below, drawn from the data; the claims about markets, wars and moods follow, all sixty, with what became of them.

The cycle, measured at Earth

Where it reaches us: technology

Climate: small

Markets, wars, moods: sixty published claims

All sixty studiesSixty published studies, 1801–2026

Sixty published studies from 1801 to 2026, read for this page, the critiques and failed repeats listed as studies of their own. How deeply each was read is marked: in full, the abstract, or a description.

Six hundred years, laid out

Drag or pinch to move through time; point at a year to read every record at once, tap a dot for its story.

Sources

Images: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (AIA and HMI science teams), rendered through Helioviewer (ESA and NASA). The sphere wears the image exactly as taken from Earth's side; the half facing away from us has no image and is drawn dark, and the glow around the edge is shown only while you look from Earth's direction.

Regions, flares, solar wind: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (Solar Region Summary, GOES-18 X-ray sensor, real-time solar wind propagated to Earth). Eruptions and their links: NASA's DONKI, by the Community Coordinated Modeling Center's forecasters; an arrow is drawn only where they published the link. Kp: GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam (CC BY 4.0). Dst: World Data Center for Geomagnetism, Kyoto.

Sunspot number: WDC-SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels (CC BY-NC 4.0). Shown freely and without charge, with thanks.

The sun before 1700: Usoskin, Solanki, Krivova et al. (2021), annual sunspot numbers 971–1899 rebuilt from radiocarbon in tree rings, Astronomy & Astrophysics 649, A141 (via CDS VizieR); grand minima after Brehm et al. (2021), Nature Geoscience 14, 10–15. Great storms: the catalogues and papers cited on each mark.

Wars: P. Brecke, Conflict Catalog 1400–2000 (Georgia Tech; Brecke 1999); Correlates of War (Sarkees & Wayman 2010, inter-, intra- and extra-state wars; non-commercial terms); the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and PRIO (UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset v26.1, Gleditsch et al. 2002; UCDP Battle-Related Deaths; PRIO Battle Deaths, Lacina & Gleditsch 2005; UCDP data CC BY 4.0); Project Mars (Lyall 2020, CC0); deaths per 100,000 people as compiled by Our World in Data (CC BY 4.0). Their counts differ in what they count, battle deaths or every death, and are drawn apart, never added.

Crises: Reinhart & Rogoff, This Time Is Different (2009) and the Harvard Business School Global Crises data; Laeven & Valencia (2018), IMF; Jordà, Schularick & Taylor, Macrohistory Database R6 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0); Garber (1989) on the tulips; Frehen, Goetzmann & Rouwenhorst on 1720; the size of a crisis where its source gives none is the fall in GDP per person from the Maddison Project Database 2023 (CC BY 4.0), our calculation and marked so.

Markets: L. Petram, Dutch East India Company share prices 1602–1698; Bank of England, A millennium of macroeconomic data for the UK (London 1709–2016), joined to the OECD's share prices (CC BY 4.0) from 2017; Yale International Center for Finance, New York Stock Exchange 1815–1925; R. Shiller, S&P composite and its real price from 1871. Nominal prices unless marked real.

What others have found: total solar irradiance, the community composite by G. Kopp (methodology of Dudok de Wit et al. 2017) and TSIS-1 (LASP LISIRD), with the NOAA Climate Data Record of TSI (Coddington, Lean et al. 2024, doi:10.25921/k2ff-p712); the 10.7 cm radio flux from the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory and Natural Resources Canada (Tapping 2013), via GFZ Potsdam; cosmic rays from the Oulu neutron monitor, with thanks to cosmicrays.oulu.fi and the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, and Climax via the NMDB database (www.nmdb.eu, EU FP7 contract 213007; University of New Hampshire); the aa index (Mayaud, Menvielle & Chambodut 2023, ISGI, doi:10.25577/9z05-v751, CC BY-NC 4.0) and NOAA NCEI; aircrew doses from the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) annual reports; TDRS-1 upsets from Wilkinson et al. (1991); storm and flare days computed from GFZ Kp and NOAA GOES; grid, insurance and satellite figures from NERC (2012), Schrijver et al. and Fang et al.; climate figures from the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.

Several of these are offered for research and non-commercial use. They are shown here freely, without charge and with full credit, and we are asking their keepers' permission; a keeper who prefers otherwise will be honoured at once.