Our gadgets are misleading us
Human beings are wanderers who roam the world in search of adventure. And this love of adventure creates a need for home: homecoming makes wandering worthwhile. Hence human beings have devised instruments that help them to navigate, so as to guide them to their destination and — most importantly — to guide them back again, to the place where they are at home. The sextant was one of the most beautiful examples of this: an instrument for steering by the stars, which you held to your eye, and which reminded you of the vastness of the space across which you peered and the littleness of your own ambitions. Our ancestors who steered by the sextant never doubted the fixed background to human life, the unchanging heavens by which they navigated.
