The Snark | Phaethon and the Great Cosmic Joyride

Myth or Meteor? Yes.

Once upon a time, a reckless teenager named Phaethon convinced his dad, the sun god Helios, to let him borrow the family vehicle - a flaming chariot pulled by four immortal horses - because apparently divine licensing requirements were loose in ancient Greece. Phaethon promptly lost control, zoomed too close to Earth (hello, desertification!), too far away (mini ice age, anyone?), and was finally smacked down by Zeus with a thunderbolt. Lesson learned: never trust a rebellious boy with access to an orbital chariot.

Or... was it a parable? A poetic metaphor? A teenage experiment turned planetary crisis? Or, and hear me out - was it ancient humanity’s way of processing a real-life comet strike that lit the sky, burned the ground, blacked out the sun, and rewrote the climate for centuries?

Yes. Probably that.

When the Earth Gets Fried and Frozen

The story of Phaethon hits suspiciously familiar beats if you’ve been reading any of the "maybe the world almost ended and we made a bedtime story about it" scientific papers. There's the scorched Earth - maybe not from a divine chariot, but from global wildfires caused by a high-velocity cometary impact. There's the freezing aftermath - less divine retribution, more "oops, we’ve blocked out the sun with ash and we're now all living in a disaster movie starring sabretooths."

Some researchers tie this to the Younger Dryas event, that charming period around 12,800 years ago when temperatures suddenly dropped and whole ecosystems went off-script. The theory? A comet or asteroid hit or exploded over Earth, humans stared at the flaming sky in horror, then proceeded to turn trauma into allegory. And boom - myth. (Also possibly boom - literally.)

For Writers: Myth-Building with Extra Burn Marks

If you’re a fiction writer, take notes: catastrophe breeds myth faster than you can say “hero’s journey.” Civilizations don't just record facts - they turn disaster into narrative, and narrative into sacred truth. So next time you're building your space empire, desert cult, or post-apocalyptic road trip romance, ask yourself:

• What real event might this society be hiding behind ritual and legend?

• Who burned the sky - and how did the survivors spin it?

• Is your goddess of fire just the name they gave to a comet that wiped out half the continent?

Trust me, readers love a world where myths aren't just colorful folklore - they're mutated memory, wrapped in storytelling and weaponized with meaning.

The Family Version: Your Grandma Didn’t Escape the Nazis

Now, let’s bring it home. Mythologizing isn’t limited to Greek poets and speculative fiction writers. You, too, are a tiny factory of well-crafted semi-truths.

Your great-grandmother didn’t flee the Nazis on foot across Europe clutching a baby and a violin - she actually left Poland in 1922 because she heard Winnipeg had excellent cabbage. But generations later, the story has been polished, dramatized, and Oscar-baited into family legend.

Or maybe you didn’t really have a “life-changing year backpacking through Europe,” unless “life-changing” includes three questionable hostel decisions and eating a jar of Nutella with your fingers in a train station. But hey, we tell it better every year.

This isn’t deception. It’s survival. It’s the Phaethon Protocol. Take the chaos, light it up, tell a better story.

Final Thought: Everyone’s a Myth-Maker

In the end, we all build our own constellations of memory, meaning, and meandering embellishment. Phaethon wasn’t just a reckless sun-chariot driver. He was the cosmic metaphor for what happens when power outruns wisdom. Or maybe he was a flaming rock that ruined the mammoths' weekend.

Either way, it’s a good story. And isn’t that the whole point?

The Snark