What have we lost now that we can no longer read the sky?
January 16, 2016 10:18 AM   Subscribe

For most of human history . . . [i]t was unthinkable to ignore the stars. They were critical signposts, as prominent and useful as local hills, paths or wells. The gathering-up of stars into constellations imbued with mythological meaning allowed people to remember the sky; knowledge that might save their lives one night and guide them home. Lore of the sky bound communities together. On otherwise trackless seas and deserts, the familiar stars would also serve as a valued friend. That friendship is now broken.
posted by jason's_planet (40 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
"So, have we lost the sense of wonder? I doubt it, even though we neglect it much of the time. I’ll end with an excerpt from the poem ‘Roan Stallion’ by Robinson Jeffers, which captures the notion that it’s our sense of wonder that ‘fools us out of our limits’, and that science is the ‘fence vaulter’ chasing ‘useless intelligence of far stars’..."
posted by clavdivs at 10:38 AM on January 16, 2016


This is wonderful. Looking up at the sky for too long scares me, a little - I get the sort of eerie feeling that I'm tiny and being watched - but I've gotten to just lay down and look up in some amazing places, and deal with the fact that I am tiny and insignificant, and then just concentrate on watching giant historical fires in the sky from very far away, and that's pretty incredible.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:39 AM on January 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


I know seeing how big and vast the world is can make one seem insignificant, but on the other hand I think how precious and valuable is every cell in the human body, that through some magic of science or fate or will does amazing things for us to be.... all the while likely knowing nothing of what it's deeds are doing for us who experience life as humans.

When we have that sense of purpose, of serving something greater... I like to think there could be so much more going on in this universe than we know, and that perhaps, every single drop of love, down to the atomic level, can influence the large and the great for the better.

We think that because we so often disregard beings beneath us that beings far above us in consciousness would see us as meaningless, but I think it could be quite the opposite. A bird might not be able to care about a cell, but a human can actually use a microscope to see. A human might still not care all that much, but perhaps, beings who have achieved higher awareness and intelligence and knowledge of the experiences of all beings, would in fact have GREATER capacity to care about the minute sparks of consciousness than even we can.

It's at least possible, the stars do not use our size nor our limitation to minimize our worth, in the way our human minds view things.
posted by xarnop at 10:56 AM on January 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


Excellent essay that I will need to return to to better digest. Also, check out the comments. They are consistently thoughtful and rancor-free.
posted by sapere aude at 11:13 AM on January 16, 2016


This sad nostalgia piece needs a happy scientific companion essay on how wonderful our expanded sense of the universe is today. Such phenomenally detailed views of the stars from things like the Hubble Telescope, the Sloan Deep Sky Survey, or the WIMP's map of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Not to mention practical marvels like a pocket sky atlas on a smartphone. Yes the accomplishments of traditional celestial navigation were impressive, but I'd much rather have a $50 GPS unit on a boat than a sextant. Also it's nice to be able to see more than just 6000 stars.

A good dark sky is still lovely. When I moved up to the Sierra foothills I set myself up with a bunch of amateur astronomy stuff. By far the best tool is some inexpensive 10x50 binoculars. If you have some idea where to look, there's a whole lot of hidden beauty accessible with some very simple technology.
posted by Nelson at 11:17 AM on January 16, 2016 [9 favorites]


"Love is as rare as a star."

"I thought the stars were anything but rare, uncle."

"That's because you never went out to find one for yourself, Katey. They would prove a few miles apart then."

"But it would be big enough when I did find it."
posted by straight at 11:25 AM on January 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


We have lost a part of our selves in the process. Knowing where you are in the world is fundamental to knowing who you are. The development of our sense of spatial relationships – the ongoing discovery of where I am – is deeply entwined with memory formation. Neuroscience studies reveal that this is because forming the knowledge of place, and building that sense of our relation to other parts of the world, requires the brain to combine several different sense modalities.
Are we really arguing that the average person ten generations ago had a more complex sense of place because they memorized star maps? Compared to a kid today who can tell your every bus transfer needed to cross town, can show you the exact route she walked to school on a 3D globe of the earth accurate to meter scales, and has met people from radically different countries across the globe by the time she enters kindergarten? (Not to mention all the astronomical information she'll have access to later on.) That's gonna take a little more effort than throwing in the word "neuroscience."

"If I went out tonight and looked up, where would I find Hercules X-1?" is the least interesting question one can ask about an X-Ray source. The reason the grad student was flummoxed was because he'd been spending time asking and answering much more compelling questions, and didn't have a weird nostalgic obsession with looking at stars with his eyes. (A better response would have been to ask how knowing where the source is located on the sky would have improved the audience member's understanding of the world in any way. Or, less, diplomatically, "who the fuck cares?" But, flummoxed is a good start.)

None of my criticism should be taken to imply that looking at stars isn't a great thing to do. Stars are awesome. Go look at them. Memorize them if you like. Write poetry about them. Just don't waste my time telling me that I'm looking at them wrong. And don't mistake your own nostalgia for other people's alienation. It makes for tedious essays.
posted by eotvos at 11:26 AM on January 16, 2016 [28 favorites]


A better response would have been to ask how knowing where the source is located on the sky would have improved the audience member's understanding of the world in any way. Or, less, diplomatically, "who the fuck cares?"

Either of those answers would have been snide and alienating. "I don't know" is an answer with no shame in it; discussing why exactly he didn't know would have been interesting.

I don't exactly like ingenuous waving-away of questions, myself. The article reminded me a little bit of how some people will tell me, after I explain why a movie or a book didn't work for me, "You're so strict," or "Why can't you just turn your brain off and enjoy it?" Nonetheless, he's right that everyone should have a chance to have a personal relationship with stars. I personally get great comfort from seeing Orion and Cassiopeia every night, or if that's not possible, at least Jupiter or the moon.

I saw a trending piece about some astronomers drawing up a constellation for David Bowie. I don't know that it's any more lasting than the "star registry" is, but I believe this kind of commemoration and outreach would do great good for science education.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:35 AM on January 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


I first started learning constellations when I worked for a team of astronomers one summer. Then I travelled home to visit my parents, looked up and was shocked and almost horrified to see that the stars were the same, just the same, without the slightest change in perspective after a journey of a thousand kilometers. There's a difference between knowing that the stars are impossibly far away and experiencing it, seeing it with your own eyes. I've never felt so vividly the smallness of the earth.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:38 AM on January 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


Just don't waste my time telling me that I'm looking at them wrong. And don't mistake your own nostalgia for other people's alienation. It makes for tedious essays.

Thank you. I had a response that was similar to yours that had more vitriol in it, but deleted it. This article uses vague handwavy references to neuroscience to hide the hoary fear of technology corrupting the soul. Which is a cliche when Socrates complained about it.
posted by zabuni at 11:39 AM on January 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


Either of those answers would have been snide and alienating. "I don't know" is an answer with no shame in it; discussing why exactly he didn't know would have been interesting.
An excellent point. I agree completely, and apologize for letting my snark run wild. (I still claim my answer would have been appropriate if the author had been the one asking the question and if he'd done it after writing this essay. But that's a very different context.)posted by eotvos at 11:44 AM on January 16, 2016


"I'm used to studying the position of stars in relation to the Earth or the sun, not so much in relation to where I'm currently standing."
posted by straight at 11:57 AM on January 16, 2016


Indeed, knowing where the Horsehead Nebula in Orion's belt is generally less useful than knowing where the K-mart is. But finding K-mart on my Google's drive-by feature never twisted my sense of place into a breathless fugue.

Decades ago I lay on my back looking at the summer sky--a thing I'd done ever since I can remember. I loved looking at the night sky. My mother and brother knew a few of the constellations, and they showed me how to find them, how to find the North Star, how to read the movement of the season by the position of the Big Dipper. They showed me the rhythm of the passing moon. My first, most wrenching, epiphany was when my brother explained how the moon didn't rise and set the same way the sun did. I knew it was the Earth turning into the sun that produced the sunrise, but I hadn't the slightest clue that the Earth overtook our moon's flight. He put some marbles in the dirt one night at the sunset of the new moon, showed me the orbits. He said, "You and the moon are racing around a track in the same direction, and you are going faster. For the next two weeks I watched the face of the moon gain ground as our Earth lapped her: the Moon is a few degrees higher in the sky, and a bit fuller every successive sunset.

Then, sometime during my junior high school years I was at a high camp in the Sierras, lying on my back on a rock the size of a city block, looking at the sky. I loved the Milky Way in those days, because I knew the fog of stars to be not fog, but a shower of stars like our sun, spread out over an impossible distance, and I was looking toward the center of our galaxy. I had just that year noticed concept of light speed. I had just been informed that every star I could see was in our galaxy. I had not yet discovered the little smudge of Andromeda.

Now, this was in the late autumn. Orion was coming up on the eastern horizon, and the three stars in the belt had been one of my touchstones. One of my classes had informed me that the three stars in Orion's belt were at different distances from the Earth: by millions of light years. That night I tried to transpose the stars, tried to imagine how they might look if I were to move to their flank. Millions of light years. I used to watch row crops and orchards flash by as we drove past the fields, how they lined up diagonally if you looked at them one way, up and down if you looked at them straight on. This shift in apprehension was too much for the stars in Orion's belt. It began to dawn on me that the scale I was seeing was much vaster than I could ever apprehend.

Even the notion of scale was laughable. My brother and I often went to the hills to camp, and hunt either pigs on the coastal range, or deer in the higher foothills of the Sierras. He taught me to find the North Star, then place a stick or a rock on that side of the campfire, so that the next morning I could orient my body's notion of which way was which. This is a useful thing to know when tramping around in the forest. Okay, I always carried a compass, and I knew how to use it, but that's not the same thing as having a feel for it. Knowing when the Moon would rise also has a few uses. I guess you can find that with some app, but I didn't have that app in my head in those days, so the continuity of days served me well.

I don't know how discovering a visceral connection to the Earth, Moon, and stars ends up being tedious. For me it was a blossoming. I can see how someone singing the benefits would seem to be flinging neeners to the unwashed, but really, that's not the point. I liked the article because I have, for example, been exposed to the skills of Polynesian navigators, and they are awesome. Compared to these guys, I have my head in bag and cotton balls in my ears.
posted by mule98J at 12:33 PM on January 16, 2016 [25 favorites]


My grandfather, born in 1922 in a tiny village on a tiny island in the South Pacific, once told me he'd been taught how to steer by the stars using traditional Polynesian navigation techniques. He taught me how to get onto the front foot and play a good forward defensive, how to flick my wrists and glance the ball to leg, but he never passed on anything about the stars.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:47 PM on January 16, 2016 [8 favorites]


The human race has mistakenly overestimated the importance of the stars since the dawn of consciousness. From Stonehenge, to astrology, to the recent Pluto flyby, people have wasted time, money and resources trying to squeeze some meaning or value out of our celestial neighbors. All for naught. Aside from celestial navigation (no small thing, I grant you), the stars, planets (excluding the sun) simply have no effect on human life, except to serve as symbols, metaphors, and sense-of-wonder provokers. If people had simply ignored the stars for the first 500,000 years of human history, then took note of them long enough to explore the world from, say 1400-1900, it would have made absolutely no difference to human progress. If ancient peoples had invested as much energy in developing the steam engine, say, as they did to studying the night sky, who knows how much more technologically advanced we'd be now?
posted by Modest House at 1:14 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Are we really arguing that the average person ten generations ago had a more complex sense of place because they memorized star maps?

I think I would be pretty comfortable arguing that the average person ten generations ago (at least in the now-developed world) had a more complex and functional sense of place and spatial/temporal relationships within the landscapes they inhabited. Knowledge hung partly on the stars, sun, moon, and weather patterns, along with plants, wildlife, landmarks, water, and so on. It seems somewhere past trivially obvious to observe that we have abstracted ourselves from most of this first-order awareness of place and cyclical time.

The human race has mistakenly overestimated the importance of the stars since the dawn of consciousness. From Stonehenge, to astrology, to the recent Pluto flyby, people have wasted time, money and resources trying to squeeze some meaning or value out of our celestial neighbors. All for naught.

Troll harder.
posted by brennen at 1:29 PM on January 16, 2016 [6 favorites]


I was a nervous and science nerdy kid. I had books on the constellations, etc, but going outside... I couldn't really see most of them.

Then in highschool, after an evening which involved a modest quantity of grass, when I was cutting through my old public school grounds, I decided to just lay on a hill and LOOK at the sky. And suddenly, there they were - the constellations. I could see depth and shape in the patterns of stars, and objects began to suggest themselves.

True story. From that point on, I could make out constellations.

I don't get to look at the night sky as much as I'd like. I'm game, but there's city light pollution, and my wife hates bugs or the cold.

The night sky is beautiful. That's enough.
posted by Artful Codger at 1:30 PM on January 16, 2016


Stars are pretty cool. Being able to see them well can be awe inspiring; although, personally, I prefer to be able to see more than a foot in front of me when walking at night.
posted by yeolcoatl at 1:38 PM on January 16, 2016


I think it's Vygotsky who talks about coming across a Russian peasant staring at the stars. Falling into conversation he found the man knew absolutely nothing about them, so he gave him a quick resume about planets and stars, and pointed out a few of them.

"Don't you think it's amazing that science has managed to calculate the vast distances between us and these stars?" he asked.

"That doesn't surprise me so much," said the peasant, "what I can't understand is how anyone managed to find out their names."
posted by Segundus at 1:47 PM on January 16, 2016 [19 favorites]


I thought there would be more in this about the problem of light pollution. I had the sad thought recently that because I moved to New York City after high school, it has therefore been nearly THIRTY YEARS since I have seen the Milky Way.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:38 PM on January 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


One of the only benefits of the winter, and taking the dogs for their morning walk when it is still dark, is being able to look at the stars. I don't know too many of the constellations, I know orion, the plough, some others, but just watching them, appreciating them is worth it.
posted by Fence at 2:55 PM on January 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


Wow a nonsensical lament at our increasing reliance on technology couched in some anachronistic mysticism for astrology....
posted by mary8nne at 3:13 PM on January 16, 2016


Is it even true, though? We can read the sky. That I can lead a full, rewarding and successful life not knowing how to read the sky (among other things) is a truly remarkable accomplishment that we have achieved.
posted by 2N2222 at 3:57 PM on January 16, 2016


"Wow a nonsensical lament at our increasing reliance on technology couched in some anachronistic mysticism for astrology...."f

Hi, I'll be your guide through the tour. Let us begin with 'Lament'. I understand this word. So did the author in citing Robinson Jeffers and my first link is not accusatory of the author lifting it from another science person. So, the historical antecedents that got us to this miserable age of space exploration are based on a system were the stars work for you, or against you.
Some called them scholars some witches now we have a 1-800 to take care of that, plus those little storefront gigs.

I feel as if I should question the history of the magnet.

I had the privledge of spending my long summer in travel and the view in upper-lower Michigan sure beats Flint or Ann Arbor.
Growing up there, I was lucky ito know some folk who went to Upper to watch stuff. God what an explosion!
"There's a meteor, a satellite, planets", your head swims.
It's like a movie.

Then some Canadian said:
"This, that's just a preview kid."

We stare because not out of mere specualtion but possibility that we are still alive and there is more then our mere amusement or selfish needs...and the disparate need for a 200% increase in spending on 'space'.
posted by clavdivs at 4:58 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Our friends just moved out to the country. If you still love and miss them, you know where they live. Go visit them. It's worth the 3 hour drive. Reminisce and stay up all night with them any time you like.
posted by apiaryist at 5:17 PM on January 16, 2016


This is an interesting thread of responses. I concur with those who believe that the stars do not rule our lives, but am flummoxed by the vitriol directed at those who value loving the night sky and even taking that connection with the universe into our inner lives. I do not look at my horoscope, but I do look at who I am as a product of who my ancestors were...and I do not think that my human ancestor's obsession with the stars was merely a cultural whim; that hard-wired connection between ourselves and the universe is something I love about ourselves, as humans. We understand that there is more. Plus, the navigation thing, the orientation thing: I love noticing how the Little Dipper rotates around the sky every morning a little more as I pick up the paper each dark morning.
posted by kozad at 5:48 PM on January 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


The human race has mistakenly overestimated the importance of the stars since the dawn of consciousness .... If ancient peoples had invested as much energy in developing the steam engine, say, as they did to studying the night sky, who knows how much more technologically advanced we'd be now?

Thus, taking a machine gun to everything that didn't make our ancestors get their heads out of the stars and hurry up and make our modern world exponentially more of a dystopian technology-entangled hellscape than it already is.
posted by blucevalo at 5:58 PM on January 16, 2016 [3 favorites]


Wow, I really don't understand why this made some people as angry as it did. Maybe some of us just like looking at the stars because they're pretty and they fill us with a sense of awe at seeing something so much grander than ourselves?

Jeesh, next week it'll be about how clouds obviously don't resemble anything that closely and we'd all be better off learning C++.
posted by teponaztli at 8:04 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

--Amiri Baraka
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:19 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Living almost all my life 30 miles west of NYC, I never saw the Milky Way until we visited relatives in rural Ireland. I was amazed. My husband knows much more about astronomy than me and can name stars and constellations, but I can always find Orion's belt, and find the beauty of the night sky, especially where it can be clearly seen without light pollution, an inspiring sight.
posted by mermayd at 4:56 AM on January 17, 2016


If people had simply ignored the stars for the first 500,000 years of human history, then took note of them long enough to explore the world from, say 1400-1900, it would have made absolutely no difference to human progress.

That's not really true though. Pre-modern astronomy is intimately tied to the development of mathematics and science in cultures from Babylonian to Arab to Mayan to Chinese to European to Indian. A whole lot of innovations in arithmetic, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus all come from the calculating to figure planet orbits. Also the development of scientific skills: observation, inference, testing and reworking theories. You can't talk about the development of a rational European school of thought without looking closely at the Copernican revolution. It's true that the belief the stars affected human life had a lot of silly and harmful consequences (ie: most of astrology.) But the clockwork universe ended up being a fantastic learning ground for science.

What annoyed me about this essay wasn't its celebration of naked eye astronomy. I like looking at the sky too! What annoyed me was the tone of luddite nostalgia, the idea that things are worse now. If you're truly interested in the heavens, astronomy is way, way better now than ever before. I may not have an awesome night sky above me, but I have access to millions of high quality images of the heavens in spectral ranges way outside of human perception, all the way up to X-ray. I can even rent a robotic telescope with high quality image collection in a perfect dark sky for $20/month. That sure beats gazing misty-eyed at the Milky Way and wondering if it really is just lactation.
posted by Nelson at 7:22 AM on January 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


...the stars, planets (excluding the sun) simply have no effect on human life, except to serve as symbols, metaphors, and sense-of-wonder provokers.

I think you grossly underestimate how central symbols, metaphors, and sense-of-wonder provokers are to human consciousness. While I don't share the article's embedded reactionary romanticism, the perspectives it discusses must be understood in order to properly understand wide swaths of history, culture, and religion.
posted by kewb at 7:42 AM on January 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


That's not really true though. Pre-modern astronomy is intimately tied to the development of mathematics and science in cultures from Babylonian to Arab to Mayan to Chinese to European to Indian. A whole lot of innovations in arithmetic, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus all come from the calculating to figure planet orbits. Also the development of scientific skills: observation, inference, testing and reworking theories. You can't talk about the development of a rational European school of thought without looking closely at the Copernican revolution. It's true that the belief the stars affected human life had a lot of silly and harmful consequences (ie: most of astrology.) But the clockwork universe ended up being a fantastic learning ground for science.

Good points. I stand corrected. However, I would question the incremental value of new celestial knowledge. The Pluto fly-by, for instance. I appreciate having my curiosity satisfied about what Pluto actually looks like, but the expense of all that ....
posted by Modest House at 9:38 AM on January 17, 2016


Why should all knowledge be useful? Isn't it worth finding how a spider survives on a glacier, or how clusters of galaxies interact for the pure joy of knowing?
posted by monotreme at 2:30 PM on January 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


I wonder if the fellows here touting the benefits of incuriosity could provide a reasonable rubric for determining what areas of inquiry are valuable and which aren't. Keep in mind that this rubric has to somehow avoid whig history — you can't just define worthwhile fields of inquiry based on 21st century technical applications, because until the 21st century people didn't have information about 21st century technical applications, just like we don't have information about 27th century technical applications or whatever.

A good test case for your rubric might be number theory; until the advent of digital computing, it was widely hailed as the most perfectly useless field of inquiry possible. Now, of course, as Donald Knuth famously said, "...virtually every theorem in elementary number theory arises in a natural, motivated way in connection with the problem of making computers do high-speed numerical calculations"

I front like I know this quote off the top of my head, but I totally stole it from Wikipedia.

All that aside, though, even bracketing off the question of how people with so much retrospective certainty about what is or is not valuable can actually provide an in-the-moment method for determining what's worth being curious about and what isn't, I... well, I thought better of Mefites. I simply cannot believe that so many of you otherwise intelligent and articulate people have fallen for the ridiculous myth of outer space.

It's a hoax, guys. An ideological mystification. Absurd on the face of it.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:53 PM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


If everyone was like me, we'd have an hour or so set aside each night where people turn off non-essential lights to facilitate stargazing.
posted by wheloc at 4:48 AM on January 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Every night before I go to sleep I look out to see if the stars are visible. The more nights I go without seeing stars the sadder I feel.
posted by Gadgetenvy at 11:58 AM on January 18, 2016


Wow, I really don't understand why this made some people as angry as it did. Maybe some of us just like looking at the stars because they're pretty and they fill us with a sense of awe at seeing something so much grander than ourselves?

Yes, but this article portrays those who do so as better than their "non-enlightened" counterparts. The neuroscience in the article portrays those who are not looking at the stars as stunted.

We have lost a part of our selves in the process.

Am I lesser because I do not have that wonder? Have I lost a part of myself? Or am I just different? This piece drips in superiority.
posted by zabuni at 1:58 PM on January 18, 2016


The human race has mistakenly overestimated the importance of the stars since the dawn of consciousness.

Haha. Yeah right. The stars are not important at all in helping still existing indigenous cultures work with seasons so they know when the emu eggs are being laid, or the murray cod are running. No need for stars at all when they show you how to walk across a continent or when to prepare for winter. Of course stars are unimportant as illustrations, analogies and metaphors for 20,000 years of continuous cultural stories that have been sustained through ice ages, island making and ecological change. Yep. Stars are pointless for the oldest continuous culture on earth.

Ah. The human race Some people have mistakenly overestimated the importance of the stars their own uninformed opinions since the dawn of consciousness.
posted by Thella at 10:21 PM on January 18, 2016


Good points. I stand corrected. However, I would question the incremental value of new celestial knowledge. The Pluto fly-by, for instance. I appreciate having my curiosity satisfied about what Pluto actually looks like, but the expense of all that ....

Putting a nuclear powered robot on Mars, f'rinstance, cost 1/10th of the cost of air-conditioning US military facilities in 2011.

Handwringing about the terrible, terrible wastage of humankind's expensive space exploration programs is either deliberate trolling or ignorance of the fact we're barely scraping the surface of space with a budget that may as well be buttons and string relative to what we spend dropping Hellfires on mud-brick compounds or on coffee back at home ($40b a year just in the US, fact-fans).

There are a great deal of things I'd count as misallocation of human potential, intelligence, economic output and effort. Space travel and science isn't one of them, and wouldn't be even if we doubled, tripled or quintupled what we spend on it as a species.

That said, while I enjoyed this essay, it was a bit meandering. Good read though, thanks for posting.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:18 PM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


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