In my 20s, I went for a trip from Yosemite National Park with a group of my friends. We camped, we ate s’mores and hotdogs and we told stories around the campfire. Tomorrow we were all going to get up early to head off to our hikes and activities—things that required getting a good night’s sleep—but that didn’t stop us from the last activity of the night. We all trudged up the campsite road until we came to a clearing, then we turned off our headlamps and we simply looked up. Did I mention that this group was of astronomy graduate students, on their way to earning their PhDs?

For anyone who has never lived outside of the city wouldn’t be able to understand the breathtaking wonder that the night skies can bring us. It didn’t matter that the Yosemite crew were all people who had looked through the eyepieces of the largest telescopes available (or to be frank, the computer screen), the raw feeling of the universe still pressed down upon us at the expense of one fewer hour of sleep.

The sky doesn’t look the same to the majority of Americans as it did to the ancient Greeks who first saw an archer and a bull and seven sisters running through the cosmos. It leaves me wondering if we’ve replaced those stories with video games and big budget movies, with influencers peddling the newest skincare grift and conspiracy theories about fake moon landings and a flat Earth. Modern technology has changed the world. We have phones in our hands that connect us to friends on the other side of the (decidedly not flat) world, but have we given up our fundamental connection to the Earth in that bargain? To that feeling of smallness that comes from simply looking up and seeing the ceiling of stars that have guided and awed our ancestors for most of our existence on this planet?

And I sincerely hope that every person, from the children attending school for the first time to the teens playing Fortnite to the barista making latte art can some day be in a place dark enough that they sacrifice that extra hour of sleep to simply look up and marvel.