The Sky Has Been Changing Here’s Why That Matters

Look up.

The atmosphere seems endless, doesn't it? A smooth orange cover by day, a glittering infinity by night. But there are instances — uncommon, quiet minutes — when it feels alive. When the stars sharpen contrary to the blackness, when the breeze breaks, and you sense that the entire air is keeping its breath.

And in those instances, you realize the reality: the sky is watching.

But it won't speak.

We envision the sky as a void, empty and silent. However it is anything but empty. Above people stretches a restless sea of air and mild, swirling with unseen Planet currents. Winds scream across the planet at rates that would grab people apart. Rivers of heat and cold rise and fall in styles over the age of any living thing. Clouds blossom and fail like ideas overweight to hold.

And through everything, the atmosphere keeps their silence.

But stop is not similar as absence.

The air remembers.

Every fire that burnt a forest to the bottom, every eruption that darkened your day with ash, every hurricane that flooded cities and carved streams into stone — the air bears every one of it. Ash from volcanoes that erupted before humans endured however drifts in their upper layers. Dirt from deserts almost around the globe travels on the breeze to seed clouds over distant oceans. Also the air you are breathing today once passed through the lungs of mammoths, dinosaurs, and creatures older still.

It keeps all it. Patiently. Quietly.

We examine the sky. We start satellites to pierce its secrets, measure winds, track storms, and estimate rain. We believe we understand it.

But we are wrong.

We just actually look the surface.

You will find nights once the silence thinks major — the kind of silence that presses in your chest, the stillness before lightning tears start the dark. Also the birds drop mute. Actually the insects pause. That quiet thinks deliberate, old, as although the entire air is waiting.

And then it produces every thing it was holding.

Thunder sheets across the land. Winds shout through valleys and across oceans. Water hammers the floor so violently so it erases sound itself. We contact it chaos. Nevertheless the sky?

The atmosphere is just allowing go.

The sky has observed points we can't imagine.

It seen meteors strike holes in to the world, seen oceans freeze in to glass and deserts bloom wherever none should exist. It's carried the smoke of burning worlds and the whispers of civilizations extended gone. It's listened to every term we have ever spoken upward, every track, every prayer, every desperate cry — and answered with silence.

Probably this is exactly why we turn to it frequently for meaning.

We study omens in the roles of stars, in the forms of clouds, in the arc of the moon. We find comfort in sunrises and closing in sunsets. However the sky does not organize it self for us.

It just is.

And now, the sky is changing.

We've filled it with items that do not belong. Smoke. Carbon. Chemicals. Light. We've made their blue haze paler, dirtier. We have hit openings in its guard, letting the sun's radiation through. We've trapped their heat, creating their storms angrier, its droughts lengthier, their winters and summers tougher to predict.

And however, the atmosphere doesn't speak.

But it's answering.

Their storms reduce deeper now. Winds reach farther and tear harder. Shoots burn up larger because the air itself has become hungrier. Droughts remain before the earth cracks. Floods increase greater than they ever did before.

We do not require words to know what is happening.

The atmosphere is showing us.

There may come each day when the air forgets us completely.

Once the lights of our cities disappear, once the smoking of our products drifts away, once the breeze sweeps across mountains which have swallowed our ruins. Clouds can gather over places where no streets remain. Rain may drop on surface that's cleared our names.

And the air will still be here, holding our dust and breath and parts in the same way it carries everything else.

We shall develop into a memory folded in to its silence.

But there is elegance in that.

As the air is not our enemy. It is the breath of the planet, the mild that warms people, the shield that holds living in. It cradles every bird in trip, every moving seed, every dawn and dusk. It is the first thing we see when we start our eyes and the last issue we see once we shut them forever.

Maybe their stop is not indifference.

Probably it's listening.

The next time you stage outside through the night, stop. Look up.

Start to see the stars burning light-years out, their mild older than history. See the clouds great faintly in the moonlight, exactly the same clouds that have drifted around countless lives before yours. Have the thin veil of air breaking up you from the cool vacuum of space.

And understand: you are part with this story too.

The atmosphere will never let you know its secrets.

It won't describe the storms, the droughts, the warmth, the cold.

But if you're however enough, if you're calm enough, you could experience it.

The great, individual existence over you.

The hush ahead of the lightning.

The infinite storage of air and light.

The air does not require words.

Because it hasn't ended watching.