WHAT HAVE WE GOT TO GAIN?

Have you ever seen anyone urinate all over the shelves in a supermarket? No? Ok, I will return to that question via the stars.

I often ask people if they have seen the milky way. They usually answer yes and they are wrong.

You can’t see the thing because we are IN it.

The picture on the left [from dailygalaxy.com] is deduced from the painstaking observations of astronomers and is a best guess at how it really looks.

It is approximately 9,460,730,472,580,080,000 kilometres across and contains about 100 billion stars. Watch this for more of the basic information.

Although from where we are standing we can’t actually see the thing in its entirety, you can see part of it if you are out of town and in the mountains somewhere.

When I was in Nepal I was living quite high up [about 2,300 metres or 7,500 feet]  and absolutely nowhere near a town. It was 4 hours of difficult trekking to the nearest phone never mind anything else.

One night we were inside having our lentils and rice [daal baat] dinner and during this it got dark outside. After we had finished we walked out and I saw something I had never seen before and unfortunately haven’t seen since – the milky way.

Obviously it wasn’t like the picture above. Looking around on the internet the closest naked-eye picture I could find to what we saw is this…

It was incredible. We sat in a happy semi-awed, semi-stupefied silence for a long time just looking and ignoring the local insects who were doing their best to feed off us. The locals, who had obviously seen it before were looking, they seemed accustomed to the sight but that didn’t make them seem less happy to see it.

The thing that looks like a big cloud is in fact the plane of the milky way. Huge clouds of gas and dust in in our galaxy obscure the stars that are behind or in those clouds. These clouds are also where new stars are born.

Hmm, I think I feel a woods/trees argument approaching.

Light pollution robs us of what could justly be termed a birthright. When people think about what we might have to give up if we can’t generate power when the oil is finished they forget what we could gain, or rediscover.

Writers and storytellers from antiquity tended to talk about the stars a lot more than their modern counterparts do.  When you see photos like the one above, or better, see it for yourself, it is not difficult to understand why. They were not writing from an ignorant position because they didn’t yet have the glories of television to write about, they were writing about the spectacular display they could see every night. This is the same display that we have denied ourselves.

Question – What does all this have to do with urinating in the supermarket?

Well, I think this problem runs parallel with the problem of the kind of people you meet that think if you pluck a piece of fruit off a tree and eat it there and then it is some kind of freakish behaviour. They seem to think it is not natural unless it has come through the supermarket. Tell them it also tastes better than what you get in the supermarket and they look at you as if you have completely taken leave of your senses. They seem to think you are going to fall over dead if you eat it.

Many children have been completely cut off from the natural world. One of my relatives teaches in a primary school. She asked the kids

“Where do carrots come from?”

“The supermarket.”

“Ok, where do they come from before that?”

“A truck.”

“And before that?”

No response other than general confusion.

So think about it, we might have many things to lose like light pollution, air pollution, pesticide pollution, plastic toys that you put in the bin on Dec 26th, bags to put bags in, canine liposuction, bottled tap water sold back to us, furry dice and disposable hats – but think what we have to gain – a spectacular show every night that is also a vision of eternity. It won’t cost anything and is without commercial interruptions. Also free fruit [it grows on trees you know] and of course the small matters of drinkable water and breathable air.

No one p*sses on the shelves in the supermarket because they know that that is where their food comes from – and also because it is illegal. If people can see that our food first comes from the ground and not the supermarket we will be less inclined to pollute [p*ss on] our supply lines or allow others to do it.

The result could be some amazing things that come free and aren’t wrapped in plastic. Just compare the picture above and how much you can see in the night sky in your town or city on an average night, and think what you have got to gain.