N every culture, the sky and the religious impulse are intertwined. I lie back in an open field and the sky surrounds me. I’m overpowered by its scale. It’s so vast and so far away that my own insignificance becomes palpable. But I don’t feel rejected by the sky. I’m a part of it - tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity. And when I concentrate in the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty out aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space