Do we gaze at the stars because we are human? or are we human because we gaze at the stars?

Since ancestral times, human being have felt attracted by the sky without any apparent reason. The gradual knowledge of how the world's elements work has been a decisive factor in the development of our technology. There was a time withouth precise watches neither street lighting, and people had to know the time looking at the sun and lit their steps with the brightness of the stars at night. The number of myths, legends and stories around this midget glow-worms is countless, in the same way we have a lot of unanswered questions.

The connotations associated to the stars is a distinctive feature that humans possess. The key word is contemplate. Naturally, we can assume that the rest of species don't look at the sky in the same way. What was the sequence of events that led us to change the fact of looking up and see them unavoidably from gazing at them deliberately?
It has been a slow process to become aware of the nature of our planet, the theories have been changing constantly and the mistakes have been corrected by new discoveries. In these time we have only seen the tip of the iceberg so that we have a lot of researching work ahead. Nevertheless, there is one thing that has remained unchangeable: our fascination for the starry firmament and our wish of achieving the skies.

As we would have expected, humans haven't developed a pair of wing to fly through, but we have improved notoriously our aircrafts in the last decades, in such a way that is one of the safest means of transport at present. So we have accomplished succesfully this ambition.
Our astonishment about these spots of light has been showed since early historical periods in most artisctic branches, such as painting, photography, literature, although their influence on other disciplines is undeniable too. We can find a colossal number of metaphors in poetry, for example. We can dare to affirm that it has been the topic and the muse of inspiration of many artists.

Finally, we have to mention, the influence over religions and consequently over the course of our history, being the role of astrologists of extreme importance of society. The importance of the elements in Egyptian life is obvious and it configured their lifestyle in a decisive way. Nowadays, the religions have changed and people seem to be losing this fascination somehow. Fortunately, there are some people who still enjoy of this divine or not work.

G.S.G.