What do the stars mean to you?

If you were one of the first people on earth, the stars were likely mysterious lights in the sky. Sort of a backdrop, up high, to your own hard existence, which consisted mainly of trying to find something to eat avoid being attacked and eaten by some wild animal or even some other early human.

Somewhere along the way, maybe once you'd figured out the survival thing and had a warm cave to live in, and maybe even found some others like yourself you could hang out with and one in particular you wanted to have sex with and who bore your kids and who shared your group's sense of "safety in numbers," you might have started to look around with an esthetic sense.
I mean, once you had a sort of community -- each one looking out for the interests of the group -- and a sense of at least some safety, it might have been time to really take a good look at your environment.

The animals you killed were kind of interesting, as was the forest/jungle, so you started to use the earth's clays and pigments to sketch pictures of them and maybe of each other. Why? Who knows? Who knows where art comes from? The human brain, of course, but was it programmed in from the beginning?

In other words, once you were more or less secure from attacks and able to spend a whole day not trying to kill something or keep from being killed, did you turn to art because you somehow needed to? Or here's a novel thought: maybe it was the women, trapped with young'uns in the cave, who produced all that art. Never thouht of that, huh? Makes sense, though. Smart but primitive women, bored in the cave, hearing nothing but tales from their nearly-mute hubbies about the hunt, turning it all into cave art. I like that idea.

Back to the primitive male (and female). You had a fire, you had a family and a tribe of like-minded individuals. You had enough food for a while. You'd looked around you, so why not now look up? After all, there it all was, spread out every night: millions of pinprick lights up there in the darkness. Yes, there was the moon in the night, and the sun in the day, and you could make up stories about them, but the stars presented a unique intellectual problem: why were they there? So tiny and so many of them!

Just for decoration? Not likely. They must mean something. So you made up stories about the way they were organized, in shapes and patterns, that mirrored your own primitive life: the hunter, the bear, the this or that. (Little did you know that your categories would enable latter day charlatans, astrologists, centuries in the future, to make a living interpreting people's lives based on those dubious arrangements.)

But somewhere along the line of human evolution, very smart people started to look at the stars in a different way. Maybe they really were like our sun, but just further away. Much further away. Maybe they were all blazing bodies of gas that originated when our universe did and were still out there in space, so far off that they only appeared to be those pinpricks in the sky but were really enormous furnaces that could swallow our whole solar system without even a burp.
Early astronomers got in big trouble with the Catholic church over this and had to recant to save their lives. (Do I hear the Catholic church apologizing? I'm listening.)

With the advent of astronomy, the study of stars became a real science, albeit one not observed under a microscope, where every intricate detail is delineated, but one only studied from a long way off. Still, with the advances in instruments and theories, we've come to think that the stars are very old and do lead us toward an understanding or where we all came from (if not why).

If you look up at the stars tonight from your backyard -- with your eye or through a telescope -- you will get just a general impression of what they mean. Most of them are tiny blurs. But, even at that low level of magnification, they are beautiful. Silver/white pinpoints of light that you know are so much more. They're huge and full of fire almost not imaginable to us here on Earth. They are indeed mysterious. We don't know why they're there or what they should mean to us. Do they have planets circling them? We don't know. If not, why not? And if not, why do they exist?

And here's the really mind-boggling part: There are millions upon millions of them! Sort of like grains of sands on all our beaches. What's that all about?

We don't know.

I'm good with that. Are you? I love the mystery.

You want to be convinced that we humans are clueless about the universe that spawned us?

Go outside tonight and look up.