Guess the Greek's
worldview fits with a culture filled with war and disease and where the
average life span ended in your early to mid 30s.

That's a problematic statement, because modern astronomy was
forged in an era of war, disease, and short life spans. Newton had
the leisure to develop his theories because he had retired to the
countryside to escape the plague. The Copernican theory became
a batting ball in the war between Protestantism and Catholicism
that decimated the population of Europe. Herschel went to England
to escape war in Germany. And so on.

As for the Greek myths, they arose in pre-literate times. Most of
them had settled into more or less their current form at the time
of Homer and Hesiod, right at the dawn of what we now think of
as Classical civilization. That was nearly a millennium before
Ptolemy, who codified Classical astronomy. And a very busy
millennium too, full of radical innovation. Lumping Ptolemy and
Homer together is just as valid or invalid as lumping Einstein
and Chaucer together.

It also seem pretty clear that in most cases, Greek myths were
grafted onto the constellations at a fairly late date. The Greeks
enjoyed telling those stories because they're rollicking good yarns,
full of sex and violence, just like their counterparts in the 21st
century. But most Greeks and Romans -- at least in the educated
classes -- didn't take them very seriously. And there's no reason
to think that *anybody* in Greece considered the constellation
myths to be anything more than mnemonic devices.

- Tony Flanders