We live in what feels like dark and anxious times – but there’s still lots we can learn from the stars

American naturalist William Beebe, considered one of the founders of ecology, tells of an astronomical rite he used to follow with colonel Roosevelt in his home on Long Island. After an evening of discussions “around the fringes of knowledge”, Beebe and the future president of the United States would go out into the night and search for the Andromeda galaxy, a smudge of light easily missed even in the utterly dark skies of the 1890s, and the most distant object in the universe visible with the naked eye. 

When they had contemplated Andromeda at some length, one of them would recite:

That is the spiral galaxy of Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way.
It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It is 750,000 light-years away.
It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.

What would we lose if we could not stargaze? Or indeed, what did we lose, now that the “perpetual presence of the sublime”, as Emerson called the stars, is hidden by the orange haze of light pollution for most of us? 

• It’s my job to search for extraterrestrial intelligence among the stars. This is what I’ve found
• An interstellar, alien meteor collided with Earth. This is what happened

To understand the role that the stars have played in the making of our species, we must imagine how different we would be had we been fated to live on a planet without stars – one covered in clouds everywhere and all the time. Without a clear sight of the night sky, our ancestors would not have been able to use the stars for navigating, both overland like native peoples of Australia used to do, nor across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, where Polynesian master navigators regularly undertook the 4,000-miles-long trip between New Zealand and Tahiti.  

Without the phases of the moon following a 29.5-days long cycle, ancient calendars – all moon-based – would not have been invented. A prehistoric baboon bone from 17,000 years ago featuring 29 human-made notches appears to be one of the very first such time-keeping devices, which might have been used to keep track of both the moon and the female cycle at the same time. This would make of women not only the first astronomers, but also the first mathematicians.

Without the maddening irregular movement of the planets (from a Greek word that means “wanderer”) to puzzle about, we would not have had astrology, responsible not only for naming the days of the week we still use today, but also for thousands of years of obsessive observation of the sky. All of this neck-craning awe would then fuel the scientific revolution of the 17th century, when astronomy was born out of astrology, and would become the midwife of science, giving rise to modern physics as we know it. 

But the night sky gave us more than all the science and technology that underpin our lives today. Spirituality and religious beliefs were often defined by the heavens, where the highest and most powerful gods were thought to reside. Even our mysterious supremacy over the Neanderthals who had roamed across Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before our ancestors trotted out of Africa 50,000 years ago, might have been gained thanks to a secret weapon hidden in plain sight above their heads. The night sky might have offered star-savvy Homo sapiens crucial evolutionary advantage over our Neanderthal cousins, thus sealing their fate and propelling us towards today’s star-driven planetary domination.

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We now live in what often feels like dark and anxious times. Accelerating climate change, vast loss of biodiversity, increasing political polarisation and terrible conflicts threaten our survival, and that of the planet, because of the very technology that the stars helped us bring forth. Some are turning to the stars as an escape hatch, in the hope of colonising Mars and from there, one day, the galaxy. But their plans are delusional: there is no planet B, and the prospect of leaving an ecologically compromised Earth behind is not only technologically unfeasible, but morally bankrupt. 

Instead, we should look at the stars for a different kind of inspiration. In recapturing the sense of awe and wonder that our ancestors experienced under dark skies, and in contemplating our smallness in the vastness of an inhospitable cosmos, like Teddy Roosevelt used to do, we have a potent antidote to the hubris that has led us to the brink of self-destruction. 

Let the stars speak to us once again. Their silent message, connecting us to all generations of humans, is that our sparkling blue marble is a preciously rare home in the immensity of space. It is high time for us to become good ancestors, and take better care of Earth, the only home we’ll ever have.  

Roberto Trotta is an astrophysicist and data scientist.  

Starborn: How The Stars Made Us – And Who We Would Be Without Themby Roberto Trotta was named BBC Radio 4 book of the week, and is out now (John Murray Press, £10.99).You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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