“We’ve been lied to.” I whispered those words to my son and daughter as they shivered in the high- desert cold in the middle of the night. I had just roused them from their beds and led them outside to view the night sky in southern Utah. We had come there to visit Zion National Park and were staying at a nearby campground. We were also standing in one of the few places in America where you can still see the night sky in nearly pristine condition, uncontaminated by light pollution. The stars had not been depopulated by street lights and porch lights and headlights and neon lights. We could see the hazy band of the Milky Way clearly, and I suddenly realized that I had not seen that in many years. I was not sure my kids had ever seen it.
There were just so many stars!
When the kids were very young, I had brought them out into our driveway one night and explained that billions of stars filled the sky. But my words had felt more like an article of faith than a tangible reality. In fact, the suburban star-scape had seemed completely countable. Like strings of white Christmas lights hanging in the rafters of a dimly lit Mexican restaurant. It might take some work, and some sort of system, but you could do it. However, staring up at that night sky in Utah, the claims of astronomers seemed completely credible. Likely even. Even more incredible, that night sky had a sense of depth that is lost in the suburbs. Ceasing to be a flat and featureless boundary layer, it had transformed into a real landscape, a place.
When considering the ancient civilizations and their fascination with the night sky, any modern city dweller or suburbanite might be forgiven for wondering what that was all about. The Egyptians aligned the pyramids with a star formation. The Mayans built celestial observatories. The astrological signs and their corollary constellations stretch all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. If not earlier. Serpent Mound in Ohio seems to correlate with tracking various objects in the night sky. And arguments have been forwarded regarding the utility of Stonehenge as a kind of celestial calculator. This fixation with the stars, and the monument building that so often accompanied it, is often presented as key evidence by ancient alien astronaut theorists. And the origin myths that imagine our ancestors coming from the sky only seem to confirm those impulses. If nothing else, the ancient fascination with the stars strikes the modern sensibility as strange or unwarranted, even obsessive.
But if we are to have any chance of stepping into the shoes of our ancestors, of understanding what motivated them, then we need an accurate understanding of what they saw. If the ancients had seen the washed-out night sky that most of us see today, it would, indeed, be strange for them to invest their time, scholarship, religious cosmology, and public works in such a scene. However, they enjoyed an open window into the cosmos that most of us rarely see. And after seeing that sky in the American southwest, their attention and veneration seems completely natural.
As the sun withdrew each day, the curtain would have risen on a complex and beautiful scene. And almost certainly, from almost the beginning of sentient reflection, men and women would have quickly seen that the pageant was not static. The lights moved. It all moved. The sun, the moon, the intricate patterns of stars. How could you not seek meaning there? How could you not dream of ways to explain it? How could you not wonder if there was causality in those motions? How could you not wonder if Answers (the big kind) lurked within such complexity, especially once you had glimpsed the presence of order, the existence of pattern? In other words, the pristine Utah sky offered a sense of continuity between my modern imagination and the imagination of our ancestors, a kind of intellectual and aesthetic connectedness that is much less accessible wherever light pollution exists.
“We’ve been lied to.” I did not mean those words in an accusatory fashion. I don’t blame Edison and Tesla, nor do I blame all the individuals who enjoy the fruits of electrification. But I did mean it. Upon reflection, I meant that our technological advances have literally obscured our view of the universe (a cruel irony in the age of space exploration) and for the most part, we have not even realized it. Standing in that campground, shivering in the high-desert cold, I saw that we had, one ambient lumen at a time, hid something from ourselves, something that our ancestors had seen every night. We had eroded our visual heritage as planetary travelers without even knowing it.
I miss having access to that night sky. I would like to look up into that sky tonight and feel both inconsequential and part of it all. I would like to feel connected to the human race through both time and space by looking up into a magnificent nightscape and feeling equally awed by it. Of course, memory and imagination can surpass a great many obstacles, but even so, I wish I could see the sky more clearly tonight.