In our suburban house there is no such thing as a dark night. Even on a perfectly moonless night my husband’s sleeping body is clearly outlined by the delicate hues of light pollution seeping north from Chicago. Through the window, I can even see individual leaves trembling in the slight breeze.
On a moonless night in a cabin 400 miles straight north from Chicago, I cannot see a thing. In this bedroom in the midst of a pine forest far from any source of light pollution, the darkness is so pure I cannot see the outline of my husband lying next to me. I imagine that I might have gotten into the wrong bed so I reach over to touch him to make sure that it is he and all is well.
The utter blackness disorients me, so instead I close my eyes and picture the bright shoreline of a nearby lake, a view that I have shared with the past five generations of my family. There is the pointed tip of Ives Mountain, looking like a witch’s hat, the bald spot on the Fortress, a favorite night hike to watch for shooting stars, and then the graceful curves of Huron Mountain rising behind. I mentally transpose myself to the other side of the mountains, where the outline is steep and rocky, rubbed raw and ragged by retreating glaciers. From this overview, I do not see tumbled trees or the churning life cycles beneath the mature forest; I only appreciate its comforting sense of permanence and individual identity.
On sleepless nights I get up and lie on the couch beneath the window overlooking the expanse of river. Now I look up into the overturned bowl of the night sky punctured with stars. On the Bortle scale of night quality, I am beneath a level two “a typical truly dark site.” At home, I can do no better than a level seven “suburban/urban transition” where “light pollution makes the entire sky light gray and the Milky Way is invisible.”
With the exception of airplanes, satellites and other space junk, I am looking at basically the same sky that every other human has considered across our entire evolution. It is August 12th, so I know to look to the north east to spot the Perseid meteor shower, and that later I might see the wavering Northern Lights. This sky that has been a common source of imagination, but now, for many people, the sky has dimmed. Would Van Gogh have been inspired to paint “Starry Night” under a level seven sky? Is celestial navigation a lost art? Are there any sailors who still find comfort in the North Star, knowing that it will guide them home? How many people’s only remaining connection to the Milky Way is a nougat-filled candy bar?
As I reach up and trail my fingers along the smear of the Milky Way, my sense of individual identity, so clear during the daytime, dissipates in the magnitude of the night sky. But at the same time, I realize that I have shared this experience with everyone on earth. Perhaps human self-awareness and curiosity – among our species most defining characteristics – all began by looking at the stars.
As it was in the beginning…
I imagine Ooga crouched at the entrance to his cave anguishing over his doused fire. He looks enviously at the steady flames at the cave door across the valley. In some sort of chaotic prelingual way, Ooga is the first human to ask the essential question, “What am I doing here and why do bad things happen to good people?” With no obvious explanation he looks to the sky for answers. A shooting star steaks across the sky, and then to the north he sees the thrusting Northern Lights undulating red and green flares across the horizon.
He drops to his knees in quaking fear and thinks that perhaps a small token will subdue this greater power. Ooga draws a sketch of a bull on the cave wall with an arc of seven stars across the top. This was 16,500 years ago, and this painting in Lescaux France is one of the first depictions of the stars of the Big Dipper.
Out my window I can easily spot Ooga’s seven stars, as have other cultures throughout history. The Greeks included the stars into the constellation Ursa Major. The Pawnee Indians envisioned a sick man on a stretcher, the ancient Incans a mythological parrot and the Chinese fashioned a special chariot. In our Western culture there are 48 constellations that can be tied directly to the Greeks, many by way of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. None of the star patterns bear any relation to the figures that they are supposed to represent, but they shine as an eternal reminder of their power to drive human imagination. In ancient Greece, I can imagine the ritual of parents sitting with their children on the steps of the Acropolis, pointing out the constellations as they tell elaborate creation stories. In my childhood, darkness merely signaled the time to come inside to watch Garfield Goose or the Wonderful World of Disney.
Somewhere up in the welter of stars are the five visible planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – but their identification has never been part of my education, the night sky never meriting more than a casual observation – “Wow the stars are clear tonight.” In contrast, the planets were well known to the Greeks as early as the 6th century BC, knowledge that must have taken years of painstaking observation to realize that the position of the orbiting planets changed against the background of the stars, which in contrast were fixed in relation to each other.
I think of Galileo whose careful study proved that the planets orbited the sun, upending the church-sanctioned view that the earth (and man) were the center of the universe. Galileo was placed under house arrest for heresy, and I picture him peering out of his window gazing at the planets that proved him correct. Here on my couch I am looking at essentially the same sight, but can’t possibly identify a planet. I rely on the light bulb to extend my day and shield me from the night sky; I wonder if technology has dulled my powers of observation.
Is now and ever shall be…
Once freed from the restrictions of the Christian church, scientists in the 17th and 18th centuries looked to the stars and sought to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Isaac Newton had the remarkable insight that the gravity that brought the fabled apple down upon his head was the same force that reined the planets into predictable orbits. Newton and his colleagues in the Royal Society envisioned that God had created a universe that ran like clockwork according to a set of laws that were discoverable by man. This “Theory of Everything” has been the goal of physicists ever since, to find a set of rules that links the predictable macro forces of gravity with the micro forces of sub-atomic particles in empty space.
Now when physicists look at the skies, the blackness may be as compelling as the stars themselves.
Sophisticated technology has supplanted simple observation; the work of physicists may be primarily orchestrated by computers in windowless laboratories. For example, theories of quantum mechanics predicted a sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson, but it took almost 40 years and billions of dollars to actually verify its existence using the 18 mile long Hadron supercollider that accelerates colliding protons close to the speed of light. The Higgs particle has been facetiously called the “God particle” because it is one step closer to the Theory of Everything and perhaps closer to a God’s grand design for the entire universe.
The Theory suffered a setback when research revealed that the laws that govern our universe may not apply to the multitude of universes that have been discovered, called the “multiverse.” And perhaps one of the most provocative discoveries was that if the fundamental properties of our own little universe were different in even the smallest nanosecond way, there would be no hydrogen, thus no water, thus no life. Albert Einstein brought religion and physics together when he famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe” suggesting that the exceptionally stringent conditions for life on earth are too unlikely to have occurred based on chance alone. A supernatural force or God must have created the specific physical laws that permitted life on earth. The creator of these laws may be watching in amused tolerance as humans vainly try to unravel the inner workings of his intricate clock.
An alternative theory suggests that we are living in an accidental universe where the multiple conditions required for life are just a happy fluke. I am reminded of the movie “Dumb and Dumber” where the doofus Jim Carey character asks the beautiful Lauren Holley if there is a chance that she would go on a date with him. She tells him that there is a one in a million chance. Jim Carey gives a broad smile and says, “So there IS a chance!” If there are billions and billions of different universes with different properties, by chance alone at least one must have allowed the emergence of life, and we are lucky enough to be in the position of even asking the question. Planet earth, a small chunk of rock rotating around a very nondescript star, won the cosmic lottery. Ads for the state lottery remind us, “someone has to win and it might as well be you.” And so here we are.
The stars out my window have dimmed with the rising moon. Tomorrow I head back to the suburbs and my impoverished level seven sky. The stunning photographs of distant Pluto and rivulets of water on Mars are a testament to human ingenuity and technology, but tonight I revel in my new found appreciation for the power of the simple observation of the stars; they inspire me to think not of what I am doing here, but rather my kinship and shared experience across all humanity. The night sky is the dwelling place of a cosmic spirituality that connects me to Newton, Galileo, Aristotle, and all the way back to my preliterate and prelingual ancestors. I take one last look to fill myself with wonder, awe and a curious mind and hope that it will tide me over until I am again under a level two sky.
World without end.
The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters. Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.
Every night the Ancient Greek sits at the Acropolis watching the stars *****,
And describes the constellations he sees in the night skies,
Taurus the bull, Pisces the fish and ***** the Ram with his fleece of gold,
The myths we know today are based on the stories he told.
So find a level two sky, settle in, ***** your eyes and if you can
Find the same inspiration that has touched all lives since the dawn of man.
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answers; arise, aries, raise
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