Growing up, it was my habit to stare at the sky above. How did the sky become so complex with so many stars in the night? It was a question a small boy could not answer. It perplexed me.
I could count only to a certain number. A million was a concept I was yet to grasp. Seeing so many stars up in the sky was a mystery. Counting them was out of the question, although I thought I was good at arithmetics in school. The stars were dispersed in all sorts of patterns no kid could make sense.
Some were big stars; some were small. Some were dim; some were bright. Then there was the mothership of them all, the moon, a huge object to a small boy.
In my home village in Sri Lanka, we did not have electricity when p. There was no artificial lighting to pollute the night vision. The night sky was crystal clear, undisturbed by man-made lighting. Probably my eyesight was also ultra-clear back then. I wore glasses in my late teenage years, too much reading in dim lighting. That is another story.
I pulled a camp bed (බූරු ඇඳ, in Sri Lankan) to the front yard of our house. Another diversion, බූරු ඇඳ, means a donkey bed. It was certainly not made of donkey’s skin but recycled gunny sacks. What made the Sri Lankans name an easy-to-assemble donkey bed is beyond my understanding. Perhaps they thought that any fool could assemble a donkey bed.
Back to my story on the sky and space, I lay flat on my back on this easy camping bed, aka donkey bed. Now, I could gaze at the huge sky above without straining my neck. A great visual amid the night silence. My fascination was with the multitude of shining stars above me. It was a visual luxury to gaze over a tapestry of stars.
Then the moon changed its shape depending on the day. The moon would stare at me from different angles; sometimes it was full, sometimes half and sometimes a quarter, depending on the day of the night. When the moon was full, it illuminated the ground in night.
I tried to figure out what was before me in the sky. It was a mystery way beyond me. I spent hours staring into the atmosphere. Finally, I slowly realised how small I was with a vast sky with shining stars above me.
My father called me into the house when it became too dark. The night show was now over. Into the night, I dreamt about the sky. My mind was in the clouds and the atmosphere.
The moon was the most prominent object I could follow now. I learned the sun was the biggest planet. But nobody could look at the sun, although I tried. It was too bright. A few times, I wore my father’s sunglasses and tried to stare at them, what this bright thing was. It was blinding and too huge for me. I gave up the idea of figuring out the sun.
Wherever I went with my parents at night, the moon was still there in the same position. I doubted if the moon was following me. Am I that special for the moon to follow only me out of all the boys and girls in my home village? For a while, I truly believed that the moon was my follower. What a gullible boy I was; I felt foolish when I figured out the truth about the enormity of our closest planet a bit later.
My father had several journals and notebooks that he had maintained as a young man. So I sneaked into his books and journals in my spare time at home. I read them with amusement, many of the notes were gobbledygook to a boy, but I could get a good sense of scientific facts from them.
Extracts from my father’s journals on science and space.
I learned the moon was 240,000 miles away from the earth. The sun was very far at 93 million miles, a number I could not comprehend. Imagine the whole width of Sri Lanka was 140 miles, and the length was 270 miles. I could not visualise the huge and unimaginable distances between these two super planets. Back in the day, Sri Lanka had yet to convert to metrics; every length was measured in feet, yards and miles.
Then I engaged my father and probed him. He took me aside and explained the solar system and the distances in a way a kid could understand beyond miles. He drew our planetary system on paper. Then using a lamp and a tennis ball, my father did a mockup of the sun and the earth. I understood how day and night worked. I learnt the distance was so much from the world where I was to the vast sunny planet that it took nine and half minutes for the sunlight to reach me.
Then my father explained a light-year — an unimaginable concept for a little boy. I learnt from him that the closest star to the earth was four and a half light-years away. He explained some of the stars I saw that night possibly could not be there anymore in real-time, having vanished many years before.
The enormity of what I saw in the night descended on me slowly, thanks to my father.
Every night, I would lay outside on the camp bed and try to figure out the plants, stars, solar system, and finally, the Milky Way. Of course, Milkyway was way beyond my understanding.
The more I looked, the more I tried e religious beliefs and myths I had come to accept.
In my religion, God created light on the first day, the sky on the second day and the sun and moon on the fourth day. How did he do that in reverse? Then some Buddhists in Sri Lanka believed that a rabbit lived on the moon. Then, when Jesus was born, a star tail appeared from nowhere to light up the world. None of these concepts and beliefs made sense.
My father listened to a radio program on Radio Ceylon hosted by a professor, Adhikaram. The host was a respected leader within the enlightened community in Sri Lanka. He debunked many local myths and talked openly about science, space and recent discoveries. While his explanations were often above me, I listened to them with my father.
In 1969, another breakthrough happened. America landed men on the moon. I read all about the moon landing in the local papers. It was the highest achievement for humanity ever. However, I am unsure what the zealots with blind faith in myths in Sri Lanka thought of it.
Learning space science at an early age opened me to the universe's wonders. That’s why today, I cheer on Elon Musk.
We are going to be multi-planetary species one day. Not in my lifetime, but one day it would happen.
I applaud all those little girls and boys who stared into the sky and dreamt through the centuries.
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