Importance of the Sky

It is crazy to think that for all our lives, we have lived in this world and have never truly appreciated what was right above our heads. To us, Earth is a massive planet. But when you really put it into perspective, we are one of the smallest planets in the entire galaxy. The sky contains so much more than just thousands of twinkly little stars. It is what everybody is a part of. When we look at the night sky, we try to find all the constellations and all the stars that connect to each other to make a picture. But not many people have actually wondered why the stars connect up to make certain constellations or how they even got there. The sky is a great mystery and a wonder that we are a part of.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, eloquently summarizes one of the humanistic values of the night sky: "You could live your life at home never looking up....[but] I ... submit to you that you'll be missing a point of view, ... a cosmic perspective, because ...you'll start thinking of your own environment as all there is. And if that's how you think about where you are, then it rises to an artificial level of importance to you, whereas, when you look at the night sky and you realize how small we are within the cosmos, it's kind of a resetting of your ego. To deny yourself of that state of mind, either willingly or unwillingly, in my judgement, is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human" (qtd. in City Dark).

Like Tyson said, you'll start to think that your environment as all there is. But there is so much more than that. The Earth is a tiny piece of the entire Milky Way. Our galaxy is so large, that we cannot even comprehend how big it is. When people don't stand back and appreciate we're a part of, they lose a point of view. Some people need to simply go sit in their backyard and just look at the stars. It will really make you think about the world we live in and how important it truly is.