What happens when I look for stars in a dark night

It has been my favourite hobby lying on open land and watching the starry night above us. When I look at the stars the feelings I have very divine feelings about the world and universe. Sometimes it makes me feel connected to the outside world. No matter how far apart I am from someone we both always look at the same stars. Sometimes it feels supernatural. I believe deeply in astrology and obsess over it. So, when I look at the stars, it feels as though I am looking at my own “higher-power”

Sometimes looking at the stars brings out emotions that I have buried. Often times, I get really emotional, and feel as though the world is against me. It happens often, and it takes a toll on my everyday mood. I seem bitchy and cold as I am told, when in reality I am alone and desperate to lean on someone. When I look at the stars all the buried emotions that depress me, and sadden me come out and I usually feel like crying until my tear ducts run dry.

Sometimes it makes me feel connected to my grandfather. When my dad was a child, my grandfather “gifted” my dad with a specific constellation like an umbrella Grandpa had lot of interest in Astronomy. When I look in the sky and find this constellation, I feel like my grandpa is looking at me. It also feels as though, I can just hear my dad explaining to me anything he knew about. I get the sense that I'm floating through a vacuum under a tiny bubble of oxygen around a small rock in a small solar system within a smallish spiral galaxy twirling around the gravitational lynchpin of a supermassive black hole.

I'm wary for the small size of this tiny bubble around this tiny rock, and feel a sense of fragility that, although unlikely at any given moment, it could all be snuffed out in an instant by a chance encounter with another, even tinier rocky object that just happens to cross our path at the same time and space where my little rock happens to be, and results in the complete destruction of humanity and the biosphere as it currently stands.

I feel a sense of the finite lifespan of the universe. At the prospect that eventually all the galaxies and stars and planets will drift so far apart, and will lose so much energy into the empty vacuum of space that the universe will end as a cold, dark space filled with scattered matter that can't be seen for the lack of light after the last star runs out of fuel. This will be the death knell for all life in the universe. If humanity somehow survives that, then I feel a sense of finality for non-interstellar human life in 6 billion years when our sun runs out of hydrogen and expands into a red giant that will either expand to consume the Earth directly, or reach so close that it melts the entire surface. If we haven't left the Earth for other planets by this point, we will end here for sure.

And then all of this is tremendously optimistic for the lifespan of humanity, because if we can't figure out how to live on this planet without destroying the very environmental processes that make it habitable in the first place, then we will eliminate ourselves from contention long before any of the other things can happen, probably within the next few hundred years, which would frankly seem to be a terrible waste of the potential of the species. And it's not about going after business, it's not about shaming people, or saying that humans can't build things or utilize resources, it's about being smart about how we do so.

It's about recognizing that in order to support life the Earth requires a healthy biosphere, and that biosphere requires us to respect the environment and other life forms on the planet to seek ways to survive together and make things work for everyone involved. It's about valuing the health of the Earth as equally as our own health, and taking seriously into account how to create societies and businesses that can accomplish their goals without sabotaging the survival of the species. Anything short of that is shortsighted and dooms humanity to an early and tragic death.

I think about what the ancient ancestors of humans must have thought as they looked at the night sky. I think that the wonder and awe that I feel at that view is no less than theirs was millennia ago. I have a strong desire to know, maybe a need to know. But know what? I have this sense that all answers are out there, that that is where all knowledge is. And yet it is so unreachable. And not just unreachable by me but unreachable by humankind.

However in this knowledge comes a kind of resignation, an acceptance of my place in the universe, an understanding that there are things unknowable in my limited existence. But I am not distressed in this but rather I experience great pride. I am proud to be a part of something so grand and proud that I can recognize this fact. And there will come a night when I will be looking at the stars for the last time and on that night I am certain I will not be any smarter about what it truly is that I am looking at than I am now. Cheers!