“The night sky will be the television of the post-apocalypse.” This is a statement I came up with years ago while contemplating what would happen if a disaster brought about the end of civilization, as we know it. My whole life I’ve had the nagging suspicion that something big was going to happen, that would change everything we knew, and make us all have to fight for survival every day.
I don’t know if I was naturally born paranoid or if I’m just a bit pessimistic when it comes to seeing us last very long as a species. Either way, I’ve been learning as much as possible since I was a young child to insure that I would be able to survive a major disaster. I started out by reading animal tracking and wilderness survival guides by Tom Brown. Then I moved on to learning how to make homemade fallout shelters and what foods to grow and at what time of the year to grow them. Luckily, my father helped me learn a lot about wild edible plants. I still get a craving for sautéed dandelions with tiger lily shoots from time to time.
I never really obsessed with weapons training other than some martial arts and archery. For some reason, I never really saw an end-of-the-world scenario involving the need to shoot other people. Maybe I’m a bit naïve. I guess I always thought that if the apocalypse came, it would either be relatively minor and everyone would HAVE to work together, or it would be so damn bad, we’d all be dead within a week or two.
But assuming we all weren’t dead, what is the one thing that people all over the world would have in common? The sun, the moon, and the stars of course. In ancient times, heroes were made and cast upon the stars. Hopes and dreams were embodied in legends about the sun and the planets, and how they affected mankind. Navigation, timekeeping, seasonal planning, and storytelling all were intricately tied in to the sky above. The sky was as much a part of life as food, shelter, and water.
In modern times, hardly anyone notices the night sky, aside from astronomers and a few hobbyist stargazers. Periodic meteor showers or lunar eclipses will bring out a few curious teenagers or stoned college students, but for the most part, most of society has forgotten about what lies outside of this planet. I guess it’s not surprising that funding for space exploration has been severely slashed over the years. We’re just not looking up anymore as a species. Of course I guess it doesn’t really matter, considering most of the starlight is blocked out and obscured due to light pollution from our cities. Unless you live way out in “the sticks”, streetlights and strip-mall lighting, combined with pollution, blot out most of the stars in the sky.
But let’s just assume that something horribly disastrous happened that knocked our collective “dicks in the dirt” so to speak. Without electricity, television, internet, or World of Warcraft, we’d all have to find something else to do with what little spare time we had left at the end of the day. Eventually reading by candlelight, and steamy, post-apocalyptic, no-bath-havin, sex would loose its appeal and people would start to look forward into the future for the great unknown. People would look to that untapped void of magic, hope, and possibility that all humans have looked to since the dawn consciousness. The night sky.
So if something horrible ever does happen to us all, and you find yourself eating a squirrel and drinking a three-year-old orange Faygo by the campfire, just remember, no matter what, we’ve all got something in common. The stars above. And that, my friends, is why I believe, “The night sky will be the television of the post-apocalypse.”
In the wise words of Jack Horkheimer, “Keep looking up!”
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