A sweeping inquiry into how the night sky has shaped human history
For as long as humans have lived, we have lived beneath the stars. But under the glow of today’s artificial lighting, we have lost the intimacy our ancestors once shared with the cosmos.
In Starborn, cosmologist Roberto Trotta reveals how stargazing has shaped the course of human civilization. The stars have served as our timekeepers, our navigators, our muses—they were once even our gods. How radically different would we be, Trotta also asks, if our ancestors had looked up to the night sky and seen… nothing? He pairs the history of our starstruck species with a dramatic alternate version, a world without stars where our understanding of science, art, and ourselves would have been radically altered.
Revealing the hidden connections between astronomy and civilization, Starborn summons us to the marvelous sight that awaits us on a dark, clear night—to lose ourselves in the immeasurable vastness above.
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A sweeping tour of humanity’s relationship with the night sky, Starborn soars from the historical to the personal. Trotta reveals how our lives are intertwined with the stars, from the exploration of our own planet and the birth of the sciences to how the human gaze turned inward. He also offers fantastical vignettes of what might have been—imagining a world without the heavens—and a clear-eyed view of humankind’s current and future connection with Earth and the cosmos.
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Professor Emily Levesque, author of The Last Stargazers