Looking at the Stars

By Bobby Neal Winters

The days are getting longer.  This has been so since before Christmas, but the daily changes have been so small as to avoid notice.  But around the middle of February--around Saint Valentine’s Day--the daily changes become larger.

Winter is not over, but we can see the end from here.

The calendar was a gift to us.  It enabled anyone who was able to read a little and to mark off days to know what season it was.  Before that you had to watch the sky. You had to know about the stars.

In the Bible, God creates Light, the Day, and the Night, a few days before he creates the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.  The Sun rules over the Day and the Moon rules over the Night, and the stars are just sort of thrown in.  Later the stars are identified with Angels, God’s messengers.

To say that stars are God’s messengers is quite a natural thing from my point of view.  They tell us of the coming seasons.  Let us consider my favorite stars, those in the constellation Orion.

Orion is the Hunter.  They say you can see his bow.  They will connect the dots and say it’s there, but I can only really see the three dots of his belt.  There have been times when I’ve been in the dry, clear air of the desert when I’ve seen a sword hanging down from his side, but in the thick air of southeast Kansas, I’ve not been able to see it.

The thing about Orion is that he disappears over the summer.  On the first of June, he rises at about a quarter to seven.  On the first of July, he rises at about a quarter to 5.  He backs his way across the night all summer long so that he will be able to hunt all night long in the winter.

Some ancient mind looked up at that random pattern of stars, named it, and remembered it; made up stories so as to remember it; and noted its behavior in connection with the seasons.

Then passed it on down.

There were doubtless those who asked, “Why are you wasting so much time staring up at the sky?  You could be chewing leather, making pots, or chipping flint.”

But those who carried the information, kept staring at the stars.

There is something about us that likes to do it.  The stars are pretty.  They become prettier when you know their names and their stories.  We get the reward of beauty when we look at them.

They do bring us God’s knowledge when we look up at them.

Since Galileo and the telescope, we’ve been bringing stronger instrumentation to looking at the stars.  We’ve created ever more sensitive instruments to measure their motions and the light they give off.  By doing this we’ve determined that there are planets that circle around those other stars.

We ask whether there is life on those other planets?  If so, is there intelligent life?  And if so, how is that intelligent life like us?

In my more cynical moments, I wonder if there is intelligent life here.

In science fiction, there is a trope of humans populating the galaxy by sending out colony ships.  Or perhaps the Earth is doomed, and they send out spaceships that are modeled on Noah’s Ark.

Maybe that will happen.  Who knows?

For my part, I think that we will ooze out into space.  First we will do mining, but the miners will need food.  To get the food, we will set up farms.  In setting up farms, we will begin the process of setting up an ecosystem.  The ecosystem will spread along with us.

We will step by step spread that ecosystem everywhere it can be spread: To the asteroids; to the moons of the gas giants; to the Kuyper belt; to the Oort cloud.

At some point in the far future, our nth-power great grandchildren will be hopping the rogue planets that travel among the stars like the ancient Polynesians hopped islands.

Then, after tens of thousands of years, they will come to other suns and start it all over.

Then--maybe--they will think back on the ancients and all of their whimsical thoughts and silly stories.

In the meantime, the days are getting longer.  Summer is coming. It will be here one day, I promise.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )