At the very mo­ment that hu­mans dis­cov­ered the scale of the uni­verse and found that their most un­con­strained fan­cies were in fact dwarfed by the true di­men­sions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that en­sured that their de­scen­dants would be un­able to see the stars at all. For a mil­lion years hu­mans had grown up with a per­son­al dai­ly knowl­edge of the vault of heav­en. I the last few thou­sand years they be­gan build­ing and em­igrat­ing to the cities. In the last few decades, a ma­jor frac­tion of the hu­man pop­ula­tion had aban­doned a rus­tic way of life. As tech­nol­ogy de­vel­oped and the cities were pol­lut­ed, the nights be­came star­less. New gen­er­ations grew to ma­tu­ri­ty whol­ly ig­no­rant of the sky that had trans­fixed their an­ces­tors and that had stim­ulat­ed the mod­ern age of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. With­out even notic­ing, just as as­tron­omy en­tered a gold­en age most peo­ple cut them­selves off from the sky, a cos­mic iso­la­tion­ism that end­ed on­ly with the dawn of space ex­plo­ration.