Shoot out the lights. Well, I haven't yet, but I'm still turning over various idle evil plots in my head for reducing the light pollution in my neighborhood, for the purposes of my (as yet non-existent) backyard observatory. The view of stars isn't half-bad here, for a city neighborhood, but there are two particularly annoying street-lights spoiling any observation to the north and northwest.

On the other hand, I am gratified by the orientation of the kitchen doors. At this point in the year, for example, a mythological drama is visible through them at the borders of night and day. Not long after sunset Orion and his hunting hounds, icons of winter, glow through the glass. When I pad down before sunrise, Scorpius, bane of Orion and denizen of the summer night, is rising - offset to the south - in the frame that was filled by Orion at the beginning of the night. The scorpion is still half-submerged in the sea of daylight, but his heart, Antares, pulses through the shadowed luster at the surface.

I have often wondered how long ago our ancestors and their cousins began to note the patterns in the sky. Birds navigate astrally; could a chimpanzee see the "obvious" constellations? (I assume our brains make patterns out of the stars in "A-list" constellations like Scorpius and Orion, even without tutelage.) Did other hominids? With precession and all the untidy relative motion in the galaxy the forms and their import would change, but how long ago did we look up in the sky, see a familiar shape in the stars, and understand that it meant that it was time to move on, or that the herds would soon be migrating, or that the rains should be here by now? Did a Neandertal ever watch a sparkling image rise in the sky, and shudder at the memento of bitter winter to come? Or rejoice at the starry prophet of plenty and warmth?

The daughter and I were discussing Bush's space-speech on the way to Tae Kwon Do lessons yesterday. After disposing of the pragmatic issues we moved on to the dreams. She enthused about being an astronaut and walking on Mars, I owned that it was a mournful realization for me that I would never leave the earth. I added that I would die a happy woman if she were ever able to do so, or, really, if I could see the first solid attempts to light out for the territories. But never to leave home at all! The human race living in its parents' basement apartment forever. That's a melancholy notion.

UPDATE: Peter Sean Bradley remembers earlier space dreams and disappointments.

Posted by Moira Breen at January 15, 2004 05:59 AM