- [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by Tom Locke, Amado deHoyos, Rick Duffield.

Additional funding was provided by Johnson City Bank, Meredith Fischer, and by... (fading soft orchestral music) (birds and insects chirping) (birds and insects continue chirping) (grass rustling) (calm ethereal music) - [Narrator] What is it about a story night sky, one so clear that it creates awe and inspires storytelling around a campfire, much as it has since humans began to gather?

And what if, in today's light-distracted world, we could no longer look up and wonder, would our stories be as rich and as meaningful as those of our ancestors?

- I can't see it.

- [Nader] You see it?

- Kinda.

I'm trying to find the Milky Way, but I can't really see it based off this app.

- There's Orion, but I am not seeing the Milky Way.

Want to take a look?

- Yeah.

I mean, it says it's supposed to be here, but no, I got nothing.

Here.

- Lemme see.

Oh, yeah.

It's supposed to be right there.

Can't see it at all.

- Yeah, it's not as good as the Big Bend.

- Oh God, no.

- [Will] So, what do y'all wanna do now?

- You can tell stories.

I got one for you.

There's this story about one of my favorite experience.

(slow orchestral music) (slow orchestral music continues) (slow orchestral music continues) (slow orchestral music continues) - [Narrator] On the cusp of the World War II occupation of France, three friends and a dog stumbled across a major discovery, news that would be somewhat buried in the emerging realities of the horrors of the war, a cave with some of the oldest rock art paintings known to exist or revealed.

Most scholars agree that those who painted the animals were not doing so just to show off their artistic ability.

On some level, the animals and imagery shown on the cave walls symbolize a magical and hazardous world in which humans and animals weave around each other, playing a dangerous game of survival.

The pictures are telling a story.

(slow orchestral music continues) This painting estimated to date back almost 17,000 years is thought to be a prehistoric map of the night sky.

It shows three bright stars, the Summer Triangle.

(gentle piano music) A more recent discovery in the caves reveals a map of the Pleiades star cluster among the Lascaux frescoes.

The caves could be a prehistoric planetarium in which humanity first charted the stars.

The map shows that our ancestors were more sophisticated than many believe.

- It is absolutely part of our human nature to want to reach out into the great beyond, to reach out into the mystery, and try to discover if there's something beyond what I can see and know.

(slow bright music) - [Narrator] Early life was in existence of survival.

The planets and the stars clearly made an impact on life.

The sunrise brought the day and warmth.

The moon affected the tides.

The position of the sun and the moon and the alignment of the stars in the sky were observed as they changed with the seasons.

They foretold when and where to forage for food.

Knowing the seasons marked times of famine and of plenty, the cosmos and its patterns held answers to questions of survival.

- From the moment that a child was born, as hunter-gatherers back thousands of years ago at the beginning of humanity, when they opened their eyes, they saw the sky at night, they saw the sunrise and they saw the sunset, and they saw the stars move across the heavens.

And their parents spoke to them about what was happening in the sky.

They knew it like it was their backyard.

They knew it intimately.

They were a part of it.

It wasn't separated from them.

- [Narrator] There are fragments of this early knowledge of the cosmos.

Remains of early humans have been found buried with animal bones carved with 28 notches presumed to mark the days of the lunar month, monuments to the cycles and rhythms of the heavens, including equinoxes, solstices, and eclipses are seen in majestic monuments such as Stonehenge, the Callanish, as well as the great houses of the Pueblos.

And in spite of the life of early human beings being dominated with the essentials of food and shelter, we also begin to see glimmers of an extension of their minds and their stories.

- Stories, they give us comfort.

They explain the unexplainable.

They bring order to chaos.

They teach us how to be better people, how to behave to our fellow human beings.

And so, in difficult times, we look for stories to bring comfort and ease.

- All great stories get to the heart of solving a problem.

The oldest most ancient stories are about death and resurrection.

We notice as we look up at the night sky, that sometimes we see a star burning so bright.

And it burns out, it goes away, it disappears in the night sky.

Stars experience the same death and resurrection that human beings have been experiencing since the beginning.

There's so much that we find as storytellers in common with these ancient experiences that people had when they look up at the night sky.

(slow music) - [Narrator] In our modern world, we rarely take the time to look up at the night sky, but for night sky educator Amy Jackson, the stars still hold the power to transform.

- [Amy Jackson] Inspired by the long tradition of sidewalk astronomy, my daughter, Jean, and I decided to take my telescope out one night.

The skies were clear and we were sure to see Jupiter and Saturn and definitely the moon.

(gentle music) So, we set up the telescope and invited people who were walking by to come take a look.

Hey!

- What is this?

- It's a telescope.

Do you wanna through it?

- Can I do it?

- Yeah, take a look.

(passerby speaks faintly) - Oh my God!

(laughs) - [Passersby 1] Oh my gosh!

- Oh my God.

- [Amy Jackson] Doesn't that look crazy?

- That's insane actually.

- Whoa!

I know!

- Oh my goodness!

- Oh my goodness!

- Oh wow.

- [Passersby 2] Is that Saturn?

- Oh my god!

I've never seen Saturn before.

Wow, you can actually see the rings.

That's incredible.

- Oh wait, shut up.

No, that is actually really cool.

I feel like I'm up there with it.

- [Passersby 3] Whoa, oh my God, that's so cool.

- Oh, it literally looks like the pictures.

- [Amy Jackson] You can see a star (indistinct).

- That's so cool.

- Wait, lemme see, lemme see.

I wanna see.

Oh, that's so cool.

(passerby speaking in foreign language) - Wow (speaks in foreign language) (passerby chuckles) - [Narrator] Across the world, seeing the moon through a telescope has the power to create wonder.

(telescope clanking) - That is incredible.

- Oh, wow!

Okay, I can see why people are taking photos.

(laughs) That is so cool!

- Oh my God!

- It's so beautiful.

- Wow, it's humongous.

- You see it, honey?

(people chattering) - [Person] Over there, that's 750.

(people chattering) - Oh, whoa.

- Yeah, I have been to- - Oh, that's so cool.

(person speaking in foreign language) - Whoa!

(people chattering) - Oh my God!

(person laughs) (person speaks in foreign language) - It's really cool.

- I see moon all the time, but this is very close.

(group laughing) This is amazing.

- Just taking the time to stop and really look at the night sky together, that makes me realize how similar we all really are.

And how nice it is to take the time to look up and wonder.

The stars represent this timelessness when they're around for so long that it's true that the same star that we look at was there when people were here tens of thousands of years ago when they looked at the same star.

What's one thing that actually connects us all in that way?

And that, to me, it's really the only thing.

(soft enigmatic music) - [Narrator] In a time when human progress and the light we have created threatens our ability to see the stars, it is important to ask, what is the connection between humans and the stars?

Did the stars play a part in inspiring original storytelling?

And where did stories begin?

(gentle tinkling music) - We have no way of knowing really what the very first story might have been, but we can think about, what are the influences on our lives?

What are the things that we would've seen that might have driven our curiosity for us to seek out an explanation in the form of story?

And for me, it's the night sky.

(choir vocalizing) - Nightscapes capture far more than the beauty of the night sky for each image also reveals a story.

(choir continues vocalizing) - [Amy Jackson] There's a lot to learn from stories.

They serve as a way to connect each other to one another and toward understanding in greater meaning.

- We actually use stories as metaphors for much greater truths than we can express through literalism.

The great Joseph Campbell once said that some stories are so true they can only be told through metaphor.

(soft traditional music) (Amy Bruton speaking in foreign language) - My name is Amy, and I'm a member of the Chickasaw Nation.

And my people, like many tribes throughout the United States, come from a group of people called the Mound Builders.

And the Mound Builders are an ancient group of people that were here before we had our names, our modern tribes.

And they had beliefs about the stars, and their beliefs were passed us through story.

And what we know is they believed we came from the stars and the world was broken into three pieces.

You had the upper for the deity, you had hattak, the middle for man and animal, and you had the underworld.

And the universe rotates around this plateau.

And occasionally, it bumps the bottom and a star person will get trapped.

Now, eventually, they'll make their way to the middle world and they'll live their life.

But the stars, where we came from, is where you had to return to.

So, once you die, your soul would jump through Orion.

And we viewed it as a hand, and the center is the eye.

And if you could jump through that eye, you would make it to the White Dog Way, the Milky Way.

You would travel down that path to Scorpio and Pleiades and all the different constellations, meeting different characters, grandfathers, dogs, eagles, winged-horn serpents, the Woman Who Never Dies.

And they would each give you a task or help you along your way.

And once you completed these tasks, you went on into the ancestors and you went to their fires.

And you stayed with them until it was time to come back.

And you would be reborn into the family that you left, and they'd recognize your soul returning.

You came from the stars.

You had to return to the stars.

- [Narrator] Ancient stories of death and resurrection span global cultures over centuries on our planet.

They're woven into the fabric of world religions, and in this way, bear similarities.

In Norse mythology, there's a story of Baldr, with the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, the Japanese, in Izanami, and with the Greeks, Persephone.

As the goddess of Hades, she was an eternal symbol of death, and yet, with her yearly return to Earth, she is forever the symbol of spring and rebirth.

Among the Finns, Estonians, and related peoples, the Milky Way was and is called the Pathway of the Birds.

An Estonian folklore that Goddess Lindu was the queen of birds, and after a broken romance with the Light of the North, her father brought her to heaven so she could reign by his side and guide the migrating birds.

Only later did scientists confirm that the birds of this region use the Milky Way as a guide to fly to southern lands during the winter.

Artist Carolyn Boyd was a single mom in her 30s when she visited the White Shaman mural for the first time.

She discovered it as a muralist and a fine art painter.

After that encounter with what she calls North America's oldest book, she changed her life to embark on a career-long study to share an ancient Indigenous people story about the birth of the sun and the creation of time.

(choir vocalizing) - When I visited the White Shaman site for the first time, it's very different than visiting the White Shaman site today.

Back in 1988, there were no steps or handrails or anything that took you to the site, so I had to literally climb with my fingers, just gripping into the limestone as I climbed up the canyon wall to enter into the rock shelter.

And I can remember getting up to the top and then standing right before that panel and thinking, "This has to be the most beautiful mural that I've ever seen."

And the reason that I say that is that the colors were still so vibrant.

You know, the reds, the yellows, the blacks, even white.

Just really, really stunning.

Yet, I knew from the research I'd done before I got there that they were at least 4,000 years old.

But again, I felt a connection to the people.

I felt a connection to the artists.

I think that what inspired them to produce this mural was life itself.

The paintings, again, are alive.

And the story that's communicated through these paintings is the birth of the sun and the creation of time.

By painting these images in this place, they ensured the continuation of the cosmos.

They painted the event.

It's not just a mythic event that happened once and it was done, but they painted the event that is an ongoing process, this process of creation, to make sure that the sun rises, to make sure that the sun sets.

They painted this into the mural.

I think one of the most important lessons that we can learn through the White Shaman mural is to look up.

We need to start paying attention to what's happening in the skies above us.

(calm orchestral music) (calm orchestral music continues) (calm orchestral music continues) (calm orchestral music continues) - [Narrator] The fact is, too few of us do take the time to look up, and it's having a profound consequence.

- I remember once I took a group of students to a dark sky location, young kids.

And one of them was looking outside of the bus window on the way, and told me, "Oh, the night sky is gone.

It's becoming cloudy, I think.

Big cloud is coming."

And I looked, there was no cloud other than the Milky Way, so he felt that he's looking at the cloud because he'd never seen the Milky Way like that.

And this is an experience that every child should have in order to understand our universe.

(gentle enigmatic music) - [Narrator] As these ancient stories became myths and were replayed in poems, plays, and films, they seem to resonate with us now more than ever.

Yet with the screens that hold so much of our attention morning to night, we sometimes forget about one of our greatest inspirations, our universe.

(soft classical music) Babak Tafreshi is a National Geographic photographer whose view of the moon started him on a life journey.

- I was a teenager growing up in Tehran, and on top of our apartment in this large city, I borrowed a telescope from a neighbor.

And as the first look to the moon really changed my life.

I can still remember that moment, second by second.

The craters of the moon, mountains, and all those details through just a tiny telescope really surprised me and put me on a road to explore the night skies.

You're not on Earth anymore and you are connected to something very deep within you, which were hidden for a long time, and that may roots back to our ancestors.

They looked at the stars, not only to find their calendars to keep time, but also for their very first legends and myths.

They look at the stars to find a way to live eternally and to make symbols that last eternal.

- [Narrator] And it's these experiences that inspire some children to create a life of following the stars.

- I have this visceral memory of going out to the lake at night after the stars had come out, and it was like a million stars, not only overhead, but reflected in this perfectly calm water beneath.

And at that moment, I felt like I was actually floating in space, stars all around me.

And I was lost in the sense of depth, depth of interstellar space.

- People like to look at the stars and create stories.

They wanna be connected to something greater.

And I think we all are here wondering what our purpose is, and we wanna know why.

- [Narrator] And when looking at the night sky, we feel connected to that.

We reawaken that part of ourselves that has been with us since we were born.

- [Amy Jackson] When we lose our view of the night sky, we lose our greater perspective of everything.

And to me, when I look up at the night sky, I understand my place in the universe more and we feel more connected to other humans.

- [Narrator] What does this mean for the children of the future?

Will they miss something they don't even know they're losing?

We engaged four young filmmakers from Texas State University's Film Program to join us in one of the darkest regions in North America and to make a film asking, what would it be like to see the sky as the ancients did?

- Okay.

So, this is my testimonial about the trip I just took to Big Bend.

(upbeat EDM music) (upbeat EDM music continues) (upbeat EDM music continues) (upbeat EDM music continues) (upbeat EDM music continues) (soft orchestral music) So, at the beginning of the trip, we were each paired up with another filmmaker to help us document our journey, and I got paired up with this fellow student named Nader.

Okay, there's Nader.

So, we're both excited, but we're also kinda nervous because neither one of us actually knows each other super well.

- All right.

- Okay, so, this is Nader.

He just got into the car.

Nader and I have only met four times, but we're about to get to know each other a lot more.

- Wow, yeah.

- So, I'm Mykal Bayne.

I drove down with Olivia.

A character to say nonetheless.

(laughs) She's super quirky, kooky, all the fun adjectives one can think of.

I was really grateful to have her there.

- It turns out whenever you spend eight hours in a car with somebody, you get to know them pretty quickly.

- [Nader] All right.

So, Will has just started driving.

- Yeah, and I thought it was gonna be eight hours.

- It's actually seven hours- - Seven hours and 25 minutes.

- [Nader] 25 minutes, so it's not as bad as eight hours.

- Actually, I might have put in the wrong destination too, so.

- [Nader] Goodbye, world.

- I'm very excited for this journey.

Turns out we have a lot in common.

We like the same types of movies.

- Where are we at, Will?

- Rolling, action.

Okay.

(quirky classical music) (calm music) - [Narrator] The Big Bend is a surprising sight to encounter as it reveals itself on the horizon.

The first images seem to loom as almost ethereal ghost mountains.

As beautiful as it is brutal, it is quite literally the stuff of legends.

Spanning over 800,000 acres, it is more than four times the size of Austin, Texas.

Cabeza de Vaca was likely the first European to journey through the harsh, unforgiving countryside.

And while his book, "La Relacion," reveals the desperate hardships they endured, he did note one Indian tribe and their survival ties to the stars.

(Frank speaking in foreign language) (Frank continues speaking in foreign language) (calm music continues) - [Narrator] This part of the vast Chihuahuan Desert is a world of two distinct climates revealing its stark differences in the juxtaposition of desert and springs, mountains, and the beautiful canyons that were carved by the once mighty Rio Grande.

A little known fact is the park was originally imagined as a peace park, a place where two countries would have sister national parks on a shared border.

All these years later, that original wish was fulfilled when the DarkSky Association, in collaboration with the University of Texas and multiple partners, created the over nine-million acre Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve, currently the world's largest.

The heart of the park is the Chisos Basin, named for the Chisos Indians about whom little is known.

The mountains are surprising, even for longtime Texans.

It's the Texas of stories alive with peregrine Falcons, bear, mountain lion, and bobcat, and a different type of bobcat, Texas State University Bobcats.

(soft bright music) - My name is Olivia Kathryn Baker.

I traveled to the Big Bend with Mykal Bayne, and she's really fun and funny, and getting to know her was also getting to know her art.

And she's a video maker, she has a YouTube channel.

- Two of our other Texas state alums were Mykal and Olivia.

I barely knew either of them.

And then once I got there, I got to know them a lot more and see how much in common they had with both Will and I as well, especially in terms of where we are in our lives.

- So, we're also on the trip with Will and Nader, which they're like Ed and Eddy minus, like, the third Edd.

Those two are like a weird sort of package deal because they feed off of each other's madness.

- I'm alive, ready to go, I'm awake.

Check out Nader.

- I'm alive.

(laughs) We're ready to- - You were asleep in the parking lot.

We talked for eight hours, that was the problem, in the car.

(laughs) - [Olivia] So, the energy was always really great, and they were really awesome to be with.

- Well, you know, we're all going into this trip together.

We're going into this sort of dark, deep forest blind, but we're all in it together.

(soft music) - [Will] About an hour out from Big Bend, the whole country started changing.

We finally started seeing mountains.

It was amazing, these towering mountains, and we're just driving through them in our tiny little car.

(soft music continues) - [Nader] So, Will, what you think of this scenery over here?

- Dude, this stuff, it's crazy, man.

- Whoo!

- Big Bend!

(group cheering) - [Nader] Yeah!

- Part of my journey as a journalist and photographer was to follow the solar eclipses in different continents and make a documentary.

One of them was in Zambia in 2001, and I joined two truly explore adventure from Germany and France, Gernot Meiser and Pascale Demy.

I joined them in Zambia in a very remote location of Kafue National Park where we started this camp.

And we were a group of about eight, nine people sitting together around fire.

And I looked around, one was from Poland, the other from Germany, France.

At least five, six different nations and culture.

And we were completely breaking our geographical culture and political barriers by staring at the night sky, by this borderless sky above us.

And the idea came to my mind, maybe the night sky has this unique power of uniting people.

A simple message of one people, one sky could emerge from the photography that I'm doing.

But later on, I also came to other messages that we can deliver through the images, including reclaiming the starry sky, which is affected by light pollution, fight against the artificial light, and how we can control it.

There is an old Persian saying that, "Night hides the world, but reveals a universe."

(pensive orchestral music) - [Narrator] This sky glow map reveals that most of us cannot see the stars and why.

Most people on Earth live in places where it's impossible to see the Milky Way.

Loss of darkness has a profound effect on our world, something many are simply unaware of.

It negatively affects animal migration and birds and other wildlife.

It is important to human health to experience darkness, and the never-ending daylight causes a myriad of maladies.

While homes and buildings lit up at night are thought to provide more security, data actually shows this isn't always the case.

A disconnection from nature has proven to be a legitimate issue for overall health and wellness, and the night sky's fully half of that experience.

Tyler Nordgren has forged his passion for astronomy with his talent as an artist, and combined the two into his work with the national parks in the US.

(soft piano music) - When I first started traveling to national parks, I took along my digital camera in order to show people what you could see in these dark starry skies.

I realized that it's more than just photographs.

I wanted to have more than photography.

I wanted to draw a modern version of these WPA posters.

But instead of, "See America," it was gonna be, "See the Milky Way."

And from this, we came up with what has actually become a national poster campaign.

I now have posters for parks all over the country.

In fact, some of them from all over the world.

When I wrote my book, I created this national park service poster of, "See the Milky Way in America's national parks."

These posters became a real hit with park rangers and visitors.

Parks began to ask me, "Can we sell these?

Can our park rangers use them?"

And so I was delighted, I was happy to share this message that half the park is after dark in America's national parks.

- [Narrator] As national parks, universities, and groups like the DarkSky Association and The World at Night program work to preserve the night sky, it inspires reflection on why the stars seem to have such a magnetic connection to us as human beings.

(gentle orchestral music) - [Tyler] Carl Sagan said that we are star stuff.

- Some part of our being knows this is where we came.

We long to return, and we can because the cosmos is also within us.

We're made of star stuff.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

(gentle orchestral music continues) - And it is true.

The atoms that make up our bodies, the iron in our red blood cells, the oxygen that is in our lungs, the carbon that makes up our bones, those atoms are only here on this planet in our bodies because when the earth formed, it formed out of these atoms that were floating in interstellar space, in these great clouds of gas and dust that spread out between the stars within our galaxy.

And every single element that we interact with in our daily lives began its life in the heart of a star.

So, at a fundamental level, we are stars made sentient.

- There's so much more truth in the night skies when we look up at the stars and we recognize there's something that is not for us to fully understand.

There's something out there, something up there that we can spend our entire lives attempting to connect to, attempting to understand.

And we may not ever get there, but that's not the point.

The point is the journey.

The point is the pursuit.

The point is every night trying to get a little further into our understanding of what we're seeing.

- So, a few minutes afterwards, we go and get our gear and we go out to this place, this outlook.

(lively orchestral music) (lively orchestral music continues) So, we finish up the whole sunset thing, and Amy, who is, like, our star girl, she knows all about the stars and the constellations, she pulls out these star wheels for us.

And on the star wheels are all the different constellations in the sky.

She tells us how to work 'em, how we can turn 'em to the month that we're in, and then the time that we're in and then compare it to the sky.

And we can look up and see the sky according to the star wheel.

In my normal life, I don't pay any attention to that.

I mean, I can barely even see the stars in my apartment.

- [Mykal] Getting to Big Bend, where there's no light pollution, and when it finally became fully nighttime, fully dark, that was just crazy.

I'd never seen it before.

I'd never seen the stars.

- [Will] It was really great 'cause there was no lights anywhere.

Off in the distance, there was this glow, and it looked like a city or like light pollution.

And that's when Amy, like, points to it and she's like, "Okay, can y'all see it?

That's the beginning of the Milky Way."

(soft whimsical music) (soft whimsical music fades) - I think the word clear rings most true just because all the details, all the colors.

It was really exciting to see for sure.

- Odds are that 50% of the children born this year will probably never see the Milky Way.

And yet, when people do see the stars, when they are able to travel somewhere, a distant desert or a mountaintop or out to sea, and are able to see the sky ablaze with thousands of stars and the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon, they are overcome with a sense of awe.

- One of the most frequent questions I receive on social media, in fact, is, if these images that I'm posting are real, or these night sky photos of the Milky Way the same thing that we can see.

Because most people, especially the young generation, have never seen the Milky Way.

With so many people living under artificial sky glow, it's obvious that majority of humanity had lost connection to the Milky Way.

One of the first times I saw the Milky Way truly stunning was in a desert national park in Central Iran.

I was on sand dune.

Millions of these sand grains underneath me.

And looking at the horizon, the arch of the Milky Way was rising above the planet Earth.

And I was looking at these thousands of stars in one band of the Milky Way galaxy while each one of those grains of sands underneath me could represent a star in the universe.

I could feel that I'm located on a planet moving across the galaxy.

- A few years ago, I was in Jordan, where I have a lot of family, and I go to visit them every summer, every few summers.

But that one summer, one of my cousins, he works with the Jordan Astronomical Society, and he was like, "Hey, we're taking a trip to the desert.

Do you wanna tag along?"

And that was my first time seeing the Milky Way and the stars without light pollution, and it was an incredible sight.

It was something that I didn't expect to see because I didn't know that it existed, if that makes sense.

And it was nice just being with a bunch of people who are just as curious about, you know, what's up there as everybody else in the world.

(soft music) - Our generation currently may be one of the last generations that might be able to enjoy the night sky, except if we do something about it.

(Nadeem speaking in foreign language) (Nadeem continues speaking in foreign language) (soft music continues) - Since I had seen the Milky Way once before on a different side of the world, I had thought, "All right, this time when I see it, you know, I won't be, you know, used to it, but maybe it won't be as amazing this time, like I get it."

Right?

But then I saw it again at Big Bend, and I was like, "Oh no, this is gonna be just as amazing every time."

When you see it, you know, the immediate thought is, "What am I looking at?"

Yeah, it's enormous, and there's so many questions.

Every time I see that sight, it makes those questions more profound.

- [Narrator] From any given place on our beautiful planet, the similarities in stories are surprising and delightful.

- To see all those different cultures, what they would've seen, you know, a hundred, thousand years ago, and getting into their mind and thinking like, "What do those lights in the sky mean?"

And coming up with reasons.

And some of them would say that they're ancestors or some would say that, you know, they're breast milk that spilled over the night sky.

And it felt like I was a part of history then.

Learning about, say, the Pleiades and how these seven stars, their story all over the world has similar aspects like how the Greco Romans saw them as seven sisters escaping the hunter of Orion and Zeus saving them by turning them into birds and then into stars.

While a Native American tribe here in the US saw them as seven sisters running away from a bear, and their gods took pity on them and raised the ground beneath them and put them in the sky to keep them safe.

- Every one of these myths and every one of these stories, there's a hundred different versions of them.

There's no one true version of any myth, so you can talk about any version of the myth and pull out what is true and what is meaningful from that, but it's sort of the great thing about myth where history and philosophy were trying to get down to the one thing that really happened, the one truth.

Mythology's not about that.

Mythology's actually about getting the many truths that are out there.

It's not about specificity, it's about opening up truth.

So, take the Milky Way, for example.

In these legends and myths around the Milky Way, we have many different types of narratives and stories.

However, many of the stories bear a lot of similarity to each other.

Take, for example, it's always in Greek mythology about the milk of the breasts spewing across the sky and covering the sky with milk, and that is where the Milky Way comes from.

However, when you look at Egyptian mythology, they believed that the milk in the night sky that we call the Milky Way was actually cow's milk.

That was the product of a fertility goddess.

The Hindus and a number of different cultures in Latin America, however, saw the Milky Way and believed it was a river running through the night sky to the other world.

So, this idea of somehow this constellation of stars being liquid seems to be universal.

And of course, when we think about water or different liquids, we think of the human subconscious.

And often, water is a symbol of the subconscious.

Milk is a symbol of our nourishment through the subconscious.

- It's just so interesting to see and to hear because, you know, those are different cultures on opposite sides of the Earth, and why?

Why are they so similar?

And I just think it's human nature to come up with stories.

It's just so happens that we are closer than we think when it comes to not just how we tell stories, but as we are as humanity.

- And what a grand mystery that somehow we feel connected to this image in the sky that we can envision it and imagine it.

That is real magic.

- So, we get back to the hotel, and they're like, "Oh, we're actually going to another hotel tonight."

So Nader and I load up all our stuff, we get in the car, and we go on this drive.

(uplifting orchestral music) - We got to Terlingua and that night, we decided to look at the stars again, and we look at it longer and this time with a telescope.

- So, the second night, we worked with Amy on looking through the telescope, we looked at the stars.

And she pointed out some really out some things to us about the constellations, the stories, the mythology behind it all, and how throughout history, things work and what they mean to certain peoples throughout time.

Cool.

- This star is Vega, so Vega, Deneb, and Altair make the Summer Triangle.

- Wow.

- Wow.

- Oh.

- Oh.

- A lot of times, you look up and, you know, you see stars, you see dots in the sky.

Sometimes you see one or two, sometimes you see thousands and millions.

But when you look up and you look at these millions of dots and you actually think to yourself, you're looking at things that your grandfather looked at, that your great-grandfather looked at, your ancestors looked at, the dinosaurs looked at.

The more you think about it, the more overwhelming it is, how big the world is when you're looking at those stars.

(soft orchestral music) - [Narrator] At the end of their journey into Big Bend's dark sky country, the students had time to reflect on how their time with the stars might impact their own stories.

- When I saw the Milky Way at the Big Bend, it made me feel closer to the ancient people, and we're just experiencing the sky as it is and how it has always been.

- I got so much, I really did.

I got so much from this trip, and it gave me time to really think about myself.

And I had some great conversations with Nader and Olivia and Mykal.

All these people that were kind of, they're in the same spot I am in life.

- So, while at the Big Bend, I was awestruck at the sight of the stars, but there was also this feeling of dread as well.

Because I knew because of all the research that I've done that, you know, due to cityscapes and suburban life, the view of the stars will never be the same as it was because of light pollution.

- One question I always ask is, why is any of it there?

Why are any of us here?

You know, none of us have an exact answer.

We all have, you know, our own beliefs and whatnot.

Being able to witness what I witnessed in Big Bend did two things that shouldn't have happened at the same time.

One, it amazed me and made me wonder, but at the same time, it also scared me a little bit because these questions can take you into some really deep and dark places.

But I think the way I reconcile that is with the art that I do, the music that I have, the films that I work on.

It sort of connects the frightening nature of the world to the amazing nature of the world.

- This project, it got me to really think about my place in the stars.

And now, I think when I look up in the sky and I see all these stars and these constellations, "This is what I'm gonna remember."

(lively orchestral music) (lively orchestral music continues) (lively orchestral music continues) - [Narrator] As our planet turns toward a future we cannot know, it is important to remember our ancestors and the stories they left for us and our children, but also to reflect on our story, the story of us, those that inhabit the Earth in this place at this time in our world.

- So, one of the formative experiences in my life was not only Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" coming out on the TV in 1980, but 1980 was also when the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were out there flying past the planet of the outer Solar System.

Voyager 1 and 2 were sister spacecraft launched in the late 1970s, and their goal was to fly by the planets of the outer Solar System.

Carl Sagan had the idea that perhaps we should turn the cameras backwards and to photograph the planets of our Solar System not close up where you could see them as if you were flying overhead, but rather from a distance, as if you were just approaching our Solar System from interstellar space.

So, in 1990, from the distance of the most distant planet in our Solar System, the Voyager 1 spacecraft photographed our planet, the planet Earth.

And it's a photograph in which no detail is seen.

You can't see Africa or America or Europe or clouds.

What you see in that photograph of our planet from the edge of the Solar System is a pale blue dot suspended within that sunbeam of sunlight.

- [Narrator] In collaborating with NASA to create this image, Carl Sagan seems to ask us to rethink ourselves as one people on one planet trying to take our place among the stars.

- When some people look at the Pale Blue Dot photograph, it makes them feel tiny or insignificant, but when I look at the Pale Blue Dot photograph, I feel a sense of wonder and excitement for discovery.

- It makes me feel relieved because all of my problems seem so small.

- I feel incredibly humbled.

- What I feel is free.

All the pressures that are put on me, all the problems I think that I have, all the expectations it all feels so small looking at that tiny speck.

- Yeah, every time I see that sight, I just wonder like, "Why?

And what else is there?"

- It just makes me think everybody is together.

We are all sharing this ball that is floating through space.

- My ancestors were right.

We really do come from the stars.

- It makes me feel excited about what our planet looks like and how tiny it is looking insignificant, yet very significant.

- It's striking how a single photograph can be so powerful.

The idea of universality of Earth and our own kind, one family of human being under one sky.

- I can't help but think about how small yet how interconnected we all are.

- I think of us as one cosmic tribe.

- I imagine the billions and billions of people that have called that place home.

I think about the stories that they've told throughout history and throughout the ages.

I think about all the people who have yet to be born that will one day call that Pale Blue Dot home and all the stories that they will tell.

- It's a reminder, constant reminder that we have this really fragile home and that we need to take care of it together as humanity.

- [Narrator] Between the myths and the histories of the past and the science of the future, we find ourselves on a tiny planet in an immense universe, and yet connected by the stars and the stories they inspire.

What story will we leave?

(calm orchestral music) (calm orchestral music continues) (calm orchestral music continues) (calm orchestral music continues) (calm orchestral music continues) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by Tom Locke, Amado deHoyos, Rick Duffield.

Additional funding was provided by Johnson City Bank, Meredith Fischer, and by... (fading soft orchestral music) (playful flute tune)