Who Owns the Stars?

Published on September 17, 2025 By Mrityu Darpan

There was a time when the universe felt like an open book. A kid with a simple telescope could gaze at the night sky and discover new worlds. A lone thinker could watch an apple fall and uncover the laws of gravity. The truth, in all its bare, naked majesty, was right there — waiting for anyone with the curiosity to simply look.

That world is gone. The book has been slammed shut, locked, and placed on a shelf in a building we are not allowed to enter. The nature of which we are all children has become so distant that we have lost our connection to the mother.

And this is the first truth bomb I need to share with you: the truth has become private property.

Think about it. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground we walk on — these are for everyone. They are our birthright. The universe, in all its grandeur, should be the same. Yet today, the great truths of existence are owned by organizations, locked behind the paywalls of academic journals, and guarded by the high priests of institutions.

In order for a person to have a direct experience of this truth, they are told they must first walk a long, narrow, and expensive path. Study for decades. Get the top scores, the top degrees, from the top colleges. Dedicate your life to a single, hyper-specialized field. And then, maybe, if you are one of the lucky few, you will be granted access to the multi-million-dollar particle colliders and space telescopes — the grand cathedrals of modern science where the "real" truth is supposedly found.

And for everyone else? For the vast majority of humanity? The system has a clear and brutal message.

• You have a family to feed and responsibilities to carry? You must choose them over this journey. The truth is not for you.
• The raw curiosity you once had has been beaten down by the need to pay bills, by a society that feeds you junk for your body and your mind? The truth is not for you.
• You are worried about your job, your future, the rise of AI, the cost of education for your children? Your concerns are too worldly, too immediate. The truth is not for you.

We are no longer participants in the great search for meaning. We are merely an audience, meant to applaud the discoveries announced from on high. We are hands that beg for a few scraps of knowledge about our own bodies, our own minds, our own existence.

And what is the truth we are being fed? A strange soup of quarks, strings, and curved spacetime. A world of mathematical abstractions invented in labs and imagined on paper. We are told this is the nature of reality, but it feels alien. It has nothing to do with the creation we are a part of, the lives we live, the losses we suffer.

This is the great disconnect. This is the source of the ache in my heart. Is this progress? If so, why does it feel like a profound loss? Is this the truth? If so, why does it bring no peace?

I remember being a kid, looking at the sky, and imagining stars floating in soft, ethereal clouds. Now they tell me space is an empty vacuum that also bends and curves like a rubber sheet. Which is it? The universe they describe feels like a series of contradictions, a puzzle where the pieces are designed not to fit.

I am not against science. I am not against any theory or any person. I am a seeker of truth. The same truth that every human heart on this planet yearns for: What is my origin, and why am I here?

Two thousand years of science, and this question, the most fundamental of all, remains unanswered. It is the one question that is never the focus of the great experiments. So what is science even doing?

Will I ever find peace? Will I ever feel like I am home, and know for sure where I came from and why? These stars, this space, the birds, the Big Bang — will I ever know the reason for it all?

If I could ever meet God, I would not ask for riches or a long life. I would ask this one question, and then be gone.

I would be at peace.