For tens of thousands of years, the stars were our constant companions. One of our species' most enduring and universal relationships has been with the night sky itself, yet in the glow of today's artificial lighting, we have forgotten this intimacy with the cosmos. Stargazing has shaped the course of human civilization. The rhythm of our ancestors' lives revolved around the stars, from cycles of agriculture to patterns of birth. Origin myths made the Sun into a life-giving creator and the Milky Way a gateway for departed souls. Leading cosmologist Roberto Trotta imagines a world without stars, a dramatic alternate history in which we wouldn't understand gravity, couldn't navigate or have much sense of time, and where our sense of the profound was altered beyond recognition.