Celestial events - Who bloody cares?

Okay well probably quite a few people, astronomers, star-gazers, this guy...

In old age the Monopoly man turned to world domination.

Honestly though I mean sure they can be fun to look at and we can all 'oo' and 'ah' when it goes dark during the day from a solar eclipse or enjoy the shooting stars of a meteor shower, but haven’t we evolved beyond making a big deal of these things. Don’t get me wrong I’m not ragging on space altogether, I’m all for space exploration and will be glued to Sky News’ second by second coverage when an alien mothership does finally visit our planet. Banner news flying across the bottom of the screen ‘Aliens said to favour retention of the euro zone’. And in time I might break all my personal rules and watch the episode of Jeremy Kyle with the tagline ‘It's rocket entered my atmosphere, now it won’t pay the alimony’.

I just don’t understand the hype over a few meteors or some daytime darkness. The reason these events were so engaging to ancient civilisations and why they built the likes of Newgrange, was because they were unexplained phenomenon and often linked to manifestations of divine activity. Nowadays we fully understand these events or at least an explanation is readily available should we want one. Yet, they continue to be newsworthy, with articles telling us that we won’t see this again for years or in our lifetime. So what? At best there's some good photos in it (see image 4 in previous link).

If the planets aligned in such a way as to cause a lunar eclipse that made it look like the some guy giving the finger, a giant fuck you to Earth, that might be worth tearing myself away from The Wire (I know, I know, I’m late at getting to it and yes it’s amazing)  to have a gander.

Tired of mooning the Earth Luna adopted a new tactic.

  
Otherwise, I can’t really imagine myself in forty years time regaling the younger generation with stories of how I saw a once in a lifetime meteor shower. Which, in all likelihood, if I’m being honest with them I probably didn’t see much during because it was a cloudy night and I can't be certain whether what I did see was a shooting star or just the bottle of wine I had waiting for it to start, playing tricks with my eyes

So by all means keep watching the skies, but I'll be watching the stars.