I felt similar recently when we saw a yellow and black garden spider for the first time ever in our backyard in Raleigh this October -- she was so huge! -- while our neighborhood was filling up with plastic cobwebs for Halloween.

And not least they look pretty! As Tennyson said, "a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid."

To sum this up, what I think is the right analogy is that the Pleiades are like Nature made us a wacky, unmissable roadside attraction, one useful as a spatial mile-marker for the Moon/planets and as time-marker (if you see this, you've gone too far, so plant crops now) for the Earth's own orbit.

1) Visible from a wide range of latitudes.
2) Looks like nothing else, so recognizable for non-specialists.
3) Near plane of the ecliptic, so useful as a reference point for "wandering" celestial bodies and the Earth orbit itself.
4) Also near plane of the Milky Way, as if at a busy intersection.

Okay because I want to procrastinate, a little more Pleiades stuff. Arguably it is the most common landmark in night skies as seen across world cultures, an iconic reference point. Like Mount Fuji in Japan, except not bounded by geography. So: why? I've seen scholars suggest a few reasons.

Anyway Katrina's NYT story knows the genre; she keys in on this in her choice of kicker.

"...Mr. Boyle went stargazing in the mountains, and felt humbled....'If I could actually see everything that’s there, it’d just be this arc of stars that would stretch from horizon to horizon,' he said..."

For the cluster itself to be smeared over the whole sky only deepens this sense of microcosm/macrocosm unity, of seeming individuality that, on closer look, is tied by hidden patterns of connection into harmonious whole.

George Santayana, American philosopher, once riffed on why the night sky is beautiful. "The infinity which moves us is the sense of multiplicity in uniformity."

He's keying in on tension of manyness vs. oneness. In his terms, the Pleiades already packed the punch of the whole sky in miniature.

Also fun to get the sense of some Kardashev logic about the obvious destiny of humanity.

"The Sun emits more than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production. At some point... the best way to power AI will likely thus be to more directly tap into that enormous source of energy."

you know, thinking about an era where extremely rich individuals controlled politics and promised the infrastructure of the future, just a very idle and anachronistic interest of mine

To follow this analogy one more step, we are now at the same place an early-career Johannes Kepler was: believing many astrologers to be con men but still hopeful that the underlying practice might work with better math and data. We'll see if this case shakes out the same way or not.

In both, telling apart the artistry of the practitioner from the power (or impotence) of the claimed practice itself is pretty hard. Also this how a lot of magic tricks work, too. The claimed mechanism of a trick has to feel plausible but what is claimed is usually a misdirect.

Otherwise I really enjoyed, and admire, when he wanders away from geology (his starting superpower) into other domains, putting this book in a rare circle of nominal pieces of science writing that are equivalent to the positionless 7-foot NBA "unicorns" who can step out of the paint and drain 3s.