Many look to the night sky and ask what the stars are; others give them names and try to count them all; and a few go so far as to assign each a special meaning. People venture far beyond the light pollution of cities to simply look up; and our most cunning minds have even put radio telescopes in orbit to find hard answers to where they came from and how they work, crafting ever sharper theories and hypotheses to find the truth. Whether through faith or fact, what’s universally human is our interest in those tiny lights and the drive to understand them.
We vary in how deep we look, but our shared interest speaks to an innate sense of curiosity buried deep within the human psyche: an insatiable need to know, an inability to be eternally satisfied with myth and legend, and a desire for true understanding. Everyone pursues answers in their own way, with varying degrees of sense and sensibility, but to be human is to thirst for information, to hunger for knowledge, and to be drawn to enlightened understanding. Our knowledge of the stars alone could fill libraries, but in the end, perhaps the answers are less important, and maybe the stars have a deeper purpose: a simple and omnipresent reminder to ask questions.