What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? - by L. M. Sacasas

The Convivial Society

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What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?<br>The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 8

L. M. Sacasas<br>Jul 19, 2026

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. I’ve thought from time to time about occasionally re-posting an essay from the archive, or even from the old blog with material going back 15 years. (Some of these pieces were read by dozens of you!) And after soliciting a bit of feedback, I’ve decided it might be a worthwhile endeavor.<br>In this case, you have one of my favorite pieces about a topic that remains deeply significant if also under-appreciated. It was first posted in January 2021(when barely a tenth of you were subscribed). I was reminded of it because the post was originally inspired by news regarding Starlink satellites, and just a few days ago it was reported that Space X has now applied to the FCC to put another 100,000 satellites in orbit. The piece has been lightly edited, mostly by having some material moved to the footnotes.<br>Cheers,<br>Michael

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.<br>To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,<br>and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,<br>and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

— Wendell Berry, “To know the dark”

Reading Dante’s Divine Comedy poses any number of challenges to modern readers. This should not, I’ll quickly add, deter modern readers from the attempt, which, in my view anyway, will more than repay the effort. In any case, one of these challenges may be the curious astronomical dimensions of Dante’s poem. You may know, for example, that each of the three cantiche that make up the poem—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—ends on the same Italian word, stelle, or, in English, stars. Moreover, the final portion of Dante’s journey, related in Paradiso, is literally a journey through what we think of as space and what Dante, and his contemporaries, imagined as a series of concentric spheres with earth its center and the realm of God beyond the farthest sphere. It’s also clear that Dante believed the starry heavens were meant to draw our eyes toward God. At one point, he refers to the stars as God’s “lure.”<br>But perhaps most interestingly, in the middle part of his journey, as he ascends the mountain of purgatory, which Dante imagines as an island in the southern hemisphere, the character of Dante displays a remarkable awareness of where the stars and planets are located in the sky at any given moment. He frequently alludes to the position of the sun relative to the constellations of the Zodiac, and he is intimately familiar with the paths of the planets (including the moon) through the sky as well as the seasonal position of the stars. Within the first few lines of Paradiso, he casually invites readers to imagine the time of year when the sun rises where four circles—the horizon, the equator, the zodiac, and the colure of the equinoxes—intersect to form three crosses in conjunction with Aries! I’m inclined to think that few modern readers would even know where to begin with such instructions.<br>I can’t speak to whether Dante’s astronomical proficiency was common in his time—after all, Dante was not exactly your average medieval Florentine—but he did have the same experience of the starry sky as human beings had enjoyed for millennia before him and centuries after. Of that much we can be sure.<br>As science journalist Jo Marchant explained in the opening pages of her recent book, The Human Cosmos, the earliest existing examples of Paleolithic art may very well have included elaborately coded depictions of the night sky. Marchant’s book goes on to explore the remarkable role the stars have played in human thought and culture since then. In short, human beings have payed meticulous attention to the stars and experienced them as a source of wonder, admiration, and even reverence. Seen in this light, our own relationship to the night sky appears as a remarkable, and perhaps tragic, anomaly.<br>The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon. I suspect that some of you reading this may be among those who have never seen the arc of our galaxy grace the night sky. For my part, I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the opportunities afforded to me to witness the undiminished night sky over the course of my four decades [plus] on planet earth.

Bruno Gilli/ESO - http://www.eso.org/public/images/milkyway/<br>I began to think about the loss of the night...