Looking up in the night sky, away from city lights, we see myriads of stars. So did our ancestors. The mystery and majesty of the starry night impressed them then as it does many of us now. Most were driven to put sacred stories to the stars, some were tempted to worship them.

But the heavenly arrangement above is unique to our time in the history of the universe, and to our place in this galaxy of ours. The celestial painting above is ours and ours alone.

People for thousands of years assumed, understandably, that the stars above were fixed, unmoving. Many believed they were stuck somehow on a colossal sphere enveloping earth at some finite distance. The whole sphere moved around us giving the stars the appearance that they were moving in unison over our heads during the night.

We know now that they are not fixed points of light, but thousands of fusion reactors spread all about us at greatly varying – and inconceivably large - distances.

If we were to travel out into space we’d see that the constellations appear relatively the same – for a while. But moving out at greater distances, far beyond the edge of the solar system, the stars in the constellations would appear to shift about. Before we knew it, nothing in the heavens would be recognizable as any of the starry designs we see here from earth.

It’s pretty straightforward why. If you saw a forest at a distance, the trees would seem to trace out a certain pattern. Walking a little to the right or left essentially makes no difference to the pattern of those distant trees.

But walk toward the forest and the closer you get the more the trees seem to change position. The pattern you saw from a distance is no longer there. Get to the forest itself and walk in amongst the trees and whole new patterns show up continuously.

But the constellations don’t change only because of our location, they change with time, as well.

The stars we see in our skies are not the same stars the dinosaurs saw in theirs. What humans have seen above in the last tens of thousands of years is unique because of the time we are living.

One reason is that stars really do move. And some are moving pretty darn fast. But they are so unbelievably far away that it takes a long, long, long time to notice any movement at all through the background of other stars.

But give them enough time and the stars will move about, changing the starry designs as they do.

Another reason our view is unique has to do with this fact: The stars that we can actually see are the brightest available stars up there. They are the big burners, the monster stars. There’s not a tiny dim one in sight. Those little guys are numerous, to be sure, but not visible.

The stars that do light up our celestial sphere are short-lived. By their very nature they are doomed to die soon. They burn themselves up in just tens of millions of years, not tens of billions. That means that most stars alive now weren’t even born when dinosaurs ruled the earth, about 65 – 225 million years ago.

Moreover, stars visible to the dinosaurs back then were similar to ours in composition, so those ancient stars have since faded away or exploded.

T. Rex didn’t see our stars; we don’t see his.

And the stars we see in the heavens now will not be here tens of millions of years down the line. The majority of them are destined to die out by then.

New stars are being formed, to be sure, ensuring another generation of future constellations. But that scene will be different in a second profound way. There is less and less available material to build stars, therefore there will be fewer of them to light the sky. The future bodes poorly for those who love a sky full of lights.

Bottom line: All the familiarity of the night sky is familiar only to humans. Before we were here and after we are gone, and anywhere else in the galaxy, let alone the universe, a whole different sky fills the view.