The historical significance of looking up and seeing light patterns slowly move across the dark sky is enormous: it was where the first human civilizations made their first discoveries.
The night sky is the origin of mankind's first concepts of time, cosmology and theology (Egyptians associated the afterlife with the night sky). The very earliest known long-form writings such as the Pyramid Texts [1] are fundamentally rooted in astronomical observations.
I remember a mostly deaf person I knew for a while. It was pretty amazing-- she could mostly understand what I said through reading my lips and what little hearing she had. She could also speak pretty well.
She told me that she could feel the beat of music -- literally the vibrations. When I asked her about bird songs, she said she had never heard them. I was momentarily dumbstruck. Day-to-day, I take bird songs for granted, but when I stop and think about it, they are some of the most beautiful, mysterious, transcendent things I've ever heard. And she'll never know...
Makes you wonder what other sensory experiences we humans are missing out on.
The historical significance of looking up and seeing light patterns slowly move across the dark sky is enormous: it was where the first human civilizations made their first discoveries.
The night sky is the origin of mankind's first concepts of time, cosmology and theology (Egyptians associated the afterlife with the night sky). The very earliest known long-form writings such as the Pyramid Texts [1] are fundamentally rooted in astronomical observations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Texts