Think back to the last time you slept under a, dark, star-filled sky. Your shoulders dropped. Your mind went quiet. Sleep came easily. That wasn’t a coincidence.
For 200,000 years, humans fell asleep under the same thing: a vast, slow-turning canopy of stars. Our nervous systems evolved to read that visual signal — soft, moving light in a dark environment — as a specific message: the day is over. It’s safe to rest.
Then, in the space of a single century, we replaced it with streetlights, glowing screens, and flat white ceilings. Today, over 80% of people in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia have never once seen the Milky Way from their own home.