Welcome to ATG’s “Thinker Thoughts”, an initiative intended to help us THINK more deeply and deliberately amid the hurried pace of life’s existence.
Every Friday, we’re posting our “Thinker Thoughts”, a short quote to reflect on from a recent commentary. Give it a think and let us know your thinker thoughts!
This week’s Thinker Thoughts comes from an article in the May 2017 issue of Discover Magazine, “Protecting America’s Last Dark Skies” (not available online), written by Eric Betz:
Before the spread of electricity, humans across the planet knew the stories written in the skies. Sitting around smoldering campfires, people looked to the stars and relived the tales of their heroes. Now those experiences are confined to star sanctuaries like Grand Canyon National Park…
‘Every human being once shared this experience of looking up into the night sky and seeing it filled with stars, [says John Barentine, International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) astronomer]…[t]he human brain saw patterns in those stars. And we translated all of our human hopes and our fears and our dreams and our worries onto those stars…[t]he natural night sky inspires. We are losing this thing – ‘the night’ – that has been our common shared experience for so much of the history of humanity…[a]s a result, these common stories from our past have faded like the constellations that cradled them.'”
