What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/what-did-we-lose-when-we-lost-the

by cetera • 5 years ago

198 105 5 years ago

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

sneak• 5 years ago

The Starlink satellites are clearly not responsible for the loss of the starry sky. That process has been underway for more than two centuries and has been the consequence of what are now much more mundane technologies that we hardly think of at all. But I began to think of the ambitions of the Starlink project as somehow amounting to a final twist of the knife. Perhaps this is a bit too dramatic a metaphor, but if we think that the loss of the star-filled night sky is a real and serious loss with significant if also difficult to quantify human consequences, then the final imposition of an artificial network of satellites where before the old celestial inheritance had been seems rather like being tossed cheap trinkets to compensate for the theft some precious treasure.

jimmaswell3• 5 years ago

What's more important, pretty long exposure pictures taken from Earth or internet access? I say internet access. Space telescopes are the future of real astronomy important data comes from anyway.

factotvm3• 5 years ago

You have chosen poorly.

If we lose that essence of humanity where we feel wonder and awe looking up into the night sky, then we lose one of the prime movers of discovery and science. Or do you think cat videos can do the same?

reaperducer3• 5 years ago

What's more important, pretty long exposure pictures taken from Earth or internet access?

If that's all you think is lost, then you are apparently not a scholar of history, archaeology, philosophy, literature, or anthropology.

Moreover, just because -you- don't value something doesn't mean it has no value.

filleduchaos• 5 years ago

I have internet access (I am from and live in Nigeria).

Nobody consulted me (or my country, or any of the countries it's purporting to help) about Starlink. Our input is of course never needed - why would it, when America (both the government and the companies) can simply decide what's good or not good for us instead?

In fairness, this is a deep-rooted bitterness that goes far beyond this one project. The sheer fact that an American company can just up and do things that impact the entire globe on a whim (and worse, the power the American government has to approve/"regulate" such projects as though only their citizens are impacted) is unbelievably absurd to me (see also: Facebook, etc).

lightbulbjim• 5 years ago

I can setup a telescope in my back yard, but not in space.

reaperducer3• 5 years ago

The Starlink satellites are clearly not responsible for the loss of the starry sky.

This is more correctly stated "The Starlink satellites are clearly not solely responsible for the loss of the starry sky."

But that's like saying, "It's OK to open this coal-fired power plant because there are lots of other ones already polluting the world."

spodek• 5 years ago

"Lose" sounds passive, like it just happened. We "lose" our keys.

"Smothered" or "Cast away" might be better terms. Like what we're doing to beaches with plastic. We worked hard to create what blocks out the stars and covers the sands, as well as much of our other connections to once pristine nature. We know when we launch satellites, build smokestacks, drive where we could walk, and choose to fly.

We can fool ourselves that we didn't know, but as Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.", but also "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

mellosouls2• 5 years ago

It's even worse than that as your alternatives themselves imply acquiescence.

Starlink is a commercial operation intended to make money for its investors, none of whom asked for permission to do this, they just did it.

These fundamental things are being stolen from us by people with a stronger sense for coin than decency.

CDSlice3• 5 years ago

Starlink is a commercial operation intended to make money for its investors, none of whom asked for permission to do this, they just did it.

This is completely wrong, in order to launch Starlink SpaceX had to get approval from the FAA. You can't just stick whatever you want in space.

factotvm3• 5 years ago

Please check out The International Dark-Sky Association and consider donating.

https://www.darksky.org/

Note: I am only a donor and not affiliated with them in any way.

akvadrako• 5 years ago

Light pollution is the pollution I care about most. I remember as a childhood the sense of wonder and inspiraiton I got from looking up at the milky way; I had no idea until I was older that many people didn't even know it was possible to see it with the naked eye.

If you also care about dark skies you might be interested in dark sky preserves¹ and the IDA².

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark-sky_preserve (2) https://www.darksky.org/

ashtonkem• 5 years ago

Light pollution is also frustrating because it represents wasted energy. Light that goes where you don’t need it is power you didn’t need to spend.

layer82• 5 years ago

It’s dwarfed by waste heat though, which is an estimated ~70% of all energy produced.

tnorthcutt2• 5 years ago

Light pollution is the pollution I care about most.

Light pollution: not deadly.

Air, water, soil pollution: all catastrophically deadly.

thereare5lights2• 5 years ago

Light pollution: not deadly.

The effects may not be as immediately obvious or severe as the other types of pollution, but it is deadly

Time to turn off the lights https://www.nature.com/articles/457027a

Limiting the impact of light pollution on human health, environment and stellar visibility https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147971...

Light pollution as a biodiversity threat. https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/20103347944

Light pollution disrupts sleep in free-living animals https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13557

LIGHT POLLUTION IN THE CONTEXT OF THREATS TO THE WILDLIFE CORRIDORS https://search.proquest.com/openview/f2decb732d52abd6837baa7...

Understanding, Assessing, and Resolving Light-Pollution Problems on Sea Turtle Nesting Beaches http://aquaticcommons.org/115/

andi999• 5 years ago

It is unbelievable what you can see. 20 years ago I was on a small island in the gulf of thailand, 30 km away from shore, and with the great thing that all electricity on that island was generated by engines which were switched off at 10pm. The sky was full of stars.

firebaze• 5 years ago

The only long-term solution is to convince your acquaintances to have at most one kid, or to make sure your kids join a space-faring company ;)

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

... or in other words: the most relevant component in the light pollution factor is the exponential factor of human reproduction.

deathgrips• 5 years ago

Now your acquaintances have one kid and you still can't see the stars.

CyberDildonics• 5 years ago

Please record your conversation with a neighbor when you suggest they don't have more children so that there aren't as many lights on in their house.

zakki• 5 years ago

Is there a method to calculate light needed in a room? Let’s say enough for reading.

PurpleFoxy2• 5 years ago

Why would it be the one that you care the most about? Air pollution gives you cancer and breathing difficulties, noise pollution causes stress and hearing damage, soil and water pollution poison you and the environment.

In contrast light pollution deprives you of a good view and messes up some nocturnal animals. Sure, it’s not great, but compared to other forms of pollution it’s almost a non issue.

karmakaze• 5 years ago

I am one who values darkness and researched treks to get such views. I haven't yet made one to see first hand. I had trouble distilling this post down to the level of concern I should have. It was unclear if the currently proposed satellites are still below naked-eye vision which seems okay, though not as much for the astronomical types. Science could carry on with space-based telescopes.

This summs it up for me (being logically moved by intangibles without the wordiness):

Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize and defend human goods that cannot be objectively measured. And should some effort be made to quantify them, they are likely to be reduced, impoverished, and exploited.
What do we lose when we lose the stars? What has it cost us to conquer the night? Perhaps only the poet can say.

If you care, get involved with the International Dark Sky Association https://www.darksky.org/

FrozenVoid• 5 years ago

You can recover the "lost stars" with cheap telescopes, some software and good weather. Urban astronomy is pretty popular nowadays: https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/

tokai• 5 years ago

Urban astronomy is popular and fun. But no one would pass on dark skies if they could get them. Mostly you don't have better options when you watch bright cities skies.

asperous• 5 years ago

I do worry about what happens when a dozen other companies want to do the same thing for different purposes and we end up with half a million micro satellites I instead of 42,000.

But the nice thing is these satellites only have lives of a few years and can easily be deorbited.

chris_va2• 5 years ago

Most of the Starlink constellation is at 500km and higher, so a much longer lifetime.

... it only takes 1 collision to cause a chain reaction when we have 40k satellites, much less 1m.

CDSlice3• 5 years ago

The lifetime doesn’t seem to be that much longer, according to [0] a Starlink satellite’s orbit will decay in around 5 years.

[0] www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-internet-satellites-percent-failure-rate-space-debris-risk-2020-10%

retrac• 5 years ago

a final twist of the knife

That will be when we get orbiting billboards: https://www.space.com/pepsi-drops-orbital-billboard-plans.ht...

etrautmann• 5 years ago

what a horrifying dystopia.

xwdv• 5 years ago

I wonder why there’s no billboards at sea where cruise ship lines pass by, that will probably come before orbital billboards IMO.

wffurr• 5 years ago

Why buy advertising on a billboard that gets seen very briefly when the ship goes by when you could instead buy advertising inside the ship where you have a captive audience for weeks on end?

willismichael• 5 years ago

I tried to read the article but the site prevented me from seeing it because of my ad blocker.

DocTomoe• 5 years ago

We won't if enough people vow to never buy anything ever again that was advertised on them.

I'd sign that.

dheera• 5 years ago

As a side project I do a lot of dark sky and deep space photography [ IG: https://instagram.com/dheeranet ].

Seeing the Milky Way at night is incredible, but what a lot of people don't realize is that there is a whole lot more than the Milky Way up there in "plain sight" and huge, just too dim to see with the naked eye. Many people don't realize for example that the Andromeda galaxy is visually about 6 times the size of the full moon, but just too dim to see. Some of the nebulae I photograph are actually barely visible with the naked eye if you go to a truly dark enough place (e.g. Death Valley).

A big part of what I'm trying to do through photography is to inspire more people to be interested in space, STEM, and also protect the beautiful views that have been bestowed to us by the universe. It's something that I'm quite privileged to have easy access to in California but did not when I was growing up in Asia and later on the east coast of the US.

By the way, although although a lot of people have been pointing fingers at StarLink, including a huge swath of the amateur astronomy community, it's not actually a huge problem for most photography and observations. StarLink satellites are easily filtered out using even the most basic outlier rejection techniques (e.g. sigma clipping) and their tracks are presumably predictable and known in advance. They are much less of a problem in my experience than planes and assholes with car headlights who deliberately stop by your observing site for extended periods of time. I can't comment if there are any research projects affected by them but I imagine that at most they are an annoyance to data filtering and not dealbreaker.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

Off topic, but it was amazing realize just how much other stuff is up there in the sky just outside our immediate visual perception. Great photos.

hermitcrab• 5 years ago

Cool photos.

mncharity• 5 years ago

STEM

I was thinking last week about creating a web app to teach light pollution. And a bit of brightness in astrophotography more generally.

Context is I'd like to sketch a primary-school "atoms up" learning progression, but emphasizing nuclei. Nucleosynthesis then pulls in deep time, galaxy, and stars. But many kids, and many teachers, have never seen a sky of stars. So how might stars, largely unseen, be tied to their everyday lives?

I saw this graphic[1] go by. But it's physically unrealistic - even faint stars in darkest "1" are shown brighter than the sky in polluted "9". So how might it be done better?

Perhaps as an interactive. A slider for sky illuminance. Another for exposure (pupil dilation, etc). IIRC, retina dynamic range is similar to a screen's. Conceptual buttons, like day/twilight/night, moon and phase, urban to sea, altitude, clouds, etc. These all next to a similar sky graphic, with room left over for secondary material. So one might explore the space from cloudy day, to nights with eye and instruments, to above atmosphere, Hubble, and beyond inner-system dust scattering.

With some potential for fun stories. Like once above atmosphere, being able to see a sky of stars in the middle of the day, as long as you're not looking towards the Sun, or anything sunlit. And for addressing common misconceptions. Like the moon and stars are only up at night.

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*tMWGuSj2j3zs_oLTysYa3Q.jpe... from https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/your-guide-to-the-best...

WarOnPrivacy• 5 years ago

I use Hipcamp's dark skies map to find camping areas w/ stars https://www.hipcamp.com/discover/dark-skies

I also like how the map makes lightwash look like a disease.

alyraz• 5 years ago

PaulDavisThe1st6• 5 years ago

I moved 2 years ago to a small village in New Mexico. It's not technically a dark sky site (we get some light to the north from Santa Fe), but most nights I sit outside (hot tub) and stare up at the vast expanse. Of course, it never looks like the long exposure shots, so that mythical milky way isn't part of the view at all.

Nevertheless, I've already noticed how much more I think about things related to what it is in the night sky. The slow movement of Orion. The so-far constant relationship between Aldebaran and the Pleiades. Learning (some) of the names of the most prominent stars. Being reminded month after month of how the lunar cycle changes the experience of the night sky, even on a day to day basis because of approx 1 hr shift in "when the moon is in the same spot".

I've spent plenty of time below dark skies, but have lived in cities more or less my entire (57 year) life. It's only been very recently that I've really started to have some sense of what is gained when one has the an experience of the night sky that is more like what our ancestors would have experienced: how it shapes one's sense of where we are in space and time, of how much vaster things are than our small lives (I say this even living in the American west, which encourages this experience all by itself), and of relationships in the sky that we can see but not really understand (without science and very complex and vast equipment).

worik• 5 years ago

"that mythical milky way isn't part of the view at all."

Light pollution!

I see it from here. Look me up on a map: Waitati, Otago, Aotearoa.

The milky way is spray painted across the sky. I wonder what you mean? Is the light pollution in the cities far from you bad enough to obliterate that?

In a 200 mile radius of me there are probably not half a million people, concentrated in one direction, and a city of 120,000 fifteen miles away across a thousand foot high mountain. Seems odd to me I can see it and you cannot. Is it more visible in the Southern Hemisphere?

I go out most ever night. If it is clear I look at the stars, usually one, at random.

PaulDavisThe1st6• 5 years ago

I think you misunderstood me.

I can see the milky way easily and clearly. We have very little light pollution.

But it's nothing like a long-exposure photo of the milky way, as seen here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=milky+way&hl=en&gbv=2&tbm=is...

mikedilger• 5 years ago

It's more visible in the Southern Hemisphere.

I see it clearly, and I'm only 10km from Palmerston North which puts out a lot of light.

I've seen it from remote ocean, and more remote parts of NZ, and it never looks like those colorful long exposure photographs. Instead it barely has any color, but certainly has billows of tiny black clouds obscuring uncountable infinitely close stars that look like milk.

lp2513• 5 years ago

I’m about 10 miles south of Santa Fe and the night sky blows mind. Nothing like the sky in my moderately sized hometown.

Some nights I think I can faintly see the Milky Way... but I might be fooling myself.

PaulDavisThe1st6• 5 years ago

Where are you? Eldorado? La Cienaga? Cerillos ? (I'm in Galisteo)

chordol• 5 years ago

There’s a link in the article to Ivan Illich’s “Silence is a commons” that captures a wider point about commons, and paints it with a couple of historical examples.

http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1983_silence_commons.htm...

telesilla• 5 years ago

Makes me very happy to see this author posted here, I do recommend signing up for his regular posts. They are always insightful and beautifully written on highly topical themes.

todfox5• 5 years ago

This is one issue that breaks my heart more than almost any other. I never saw a truly dark sky or the milky way until I was in my early 30s. Now I take regular road trips out west to experience it.

People are so oblivious to light pollution. They don't realize how absurdly bright our lights are and how little they're actually needed. At minimum, they shouldn't be lighting the undersides of airplanes.

I didn't know what else I could do about this, so I inserted a light pollution level in my indie game. You have to replace these hideously bright outdoor lamps with full cutoff fixtures to gradually get the stars back. I wish there was more I could do.

The problem has to be educational. If the public valued the night sky, they would be amenable to fixing it. But how do you accomplish that if you're not any good at marketing or communicating?

divbzero• 5 years ago

I might soon be forced to move closer to an urban area. One of the things I’ll miss most is being able to see the Milky Way on every clear night. Gazing across thousands of light years at the neighboring arm of our galaxy will never cease to amaze me.

koolba• 5 years ago

At minimum, they shouldn't be lighting the undersides of airplanes.

What if another airplane has to suddenly climb at night?

todfox5• 5 years ago

There's much less air traffic at night, and what traffic there is, is probably on an IFR flight plan.

But lighting would only really help VFR pilots if it was coming from above and they were looking down. Looking out and up from a small airplane cockpit to avoid traffic is really impractical. You're better off relying on ADS-B.

danaliv• 5 years ago

Google TCAS.

genewitch• 5 years ago

also "LED" fixtures may not be the answer. The astrophotography community has software to remove both high and low pressure sodium lights' color frequency. LEDs can be in several different frequency bands, and makes them harder or impossible to remove, even if there is less overall "light pollution" from them.

I live in a purple area (one step brighter than black - none or close to none) on the pollution maps and even so, when a nearby city switched to LEDs for the "main drag" it made the city lights really apparent even further out than before, about 7 miles further out, due to the high humidity and other local effects.

However i do think that something needs to be done, i lived in a suburb of Los Angeles growing up (quite far though) and i remember being able to see the milky way during the summer when i was allowed to stay up later than usual or play outside later than usual. In my teens and early 20s though, we had to drive to angeles national forest mountain roads to be able to see the milky way.

128xp• 5 years ago

This isn't really an answer to your question, but I feel like a big part of the problem is that people don't know what they're missing. Even though I've tried to find dark places to see the stars, I have never in my life seen the night sky without light pollution. I've thought about it a lot and there probably isn't the political will to start something like this, but I think there should be, on the last new moon in August (any day would work, but it has to be the dark and clear), a national night sky holiday, where everyone turns off the lights for an hour after midnight, so we can all get a chance to really see the stars. (Turning off the the power for an hour would be even better, but that might cause problems with the power grid.)

todfox5• 5 years ago

That's a great idea. It wouldn't impose a cost or a require permanent change to anyone's property. If people could only see what they're missing!

PurpleFoxy2• 5 years ago

Australia used to have this thing called “earth hour” where they encouraged you to turn off your lights for an hour. Not sure if it was officially scrapped or if no one cared anymore after lights become extremely efficient.

bamboozled• 5 years ago

I spent several weeks in NW Australia, in desert areas. At this time it was considered one of the darkest places on Earth.

I can honestly say the stars were the most incredible thing imaginable. I slept in a swag, under the stars for many weeks. I’d wake up sometimes at about 2am for an hour or so as I’d go to bed so early because we had very little artificial lighting.

One particular night I remember the whole sky looked purple and white with stars, I could see so many objects moving, satellites and who knows what else, the sky looked alive.

I remember thinning how lucky I was to see it, I also remember thinking “why would anyone watch TV if they could see this instead ?”.

It really put things in perspective for me and made me realise the earth is an incredible spaceship, maybe the best one we will ever have!

civilized• 5 years ago

If there is any benefit of making everything "smart", may it be that one day we can turn off all the lights for 20 minutes and let city dwellers see the stars

bondolo• 5 years ago

I have cared about the problem of light pollution since hearing about it as a teen almost 40 years ago. Despite being a regular advocate for dark skies in casual conversation, politics such as LED street lamp replacement, business decisions such as replacing low pressures sodium vapour floods in the company parking lot I have come to the conclusion that most people just don't care or don't get why it matters. I've heard responses like "so close your curtains" or "it is safer with more light" or "the lights aren't that bright".

You can see the distinctive cool white LED "O" of Apple Park from 20 miles away in a plane. Why? Just vanity? The huge amount of light bleed serves no functional purpose. Lights, lights everywhere lights. Lighting up nothing. You can buy an intensely bright fixture at Home Depot and just mount it up making any location bright as day, but 24 hours a day. LEDs may have actually made things worse because of their low cost per lumen and long operating lives that encourages more and brighter lighting.

I am out of step in wanting a world with less human noise and light. If I complain about how noisy I find the bay area and how I would love to punch the Harley rider who lives a block away in the throat the most common answer I get is 'Wow, India and China are way louder' like that should make me feel better or unjustified in my complaint. In truth all it does is make me want to avoid visiting those places.

warent• 5 years ago

Why? Just vanity?

Pretty much this. Humans tend to want to feel important and recognized, and what better way to feel big than to outdo the stars in the sky? When there's no more stars to outdo, all we can do is compete with each other.

todfox5• 5 years ago

When I walk around my town at midnight, I often stand and notice how the lights just reveal empty space everywhere. Nobody is around. Nobody is even using the all that light! Driving at night would be dangerous without light of course, but that's why they have headlights. Those lights are burning all night long and they're not even doing anything.

People seem to abhor silence and emptiness. They hate it, or maybe they're afraid of it. They always want to fill it with something.

I love to walk around in the middle of the night because the car traffic around here virtually stops and silence and some degree of darkness returns. The busyness goes away. I'm always amazed that I rarely see anyone else out at night. Don't others crave emptiness too?

jacobolus• 5 years ago

White LEDs (including at least anything with correlated color temperature > 2500K) should never be used outdoors at night for any purpose other than momentary artistic displays. (And indoors should be mostly reserved for daytime use.)

They are awful for street lamps, porch lamps, car headlamps, flashlights, bike lights, camp lanterns, ...

People don’t seem to understand that adding massive glare in your peripheral vision and clobbering your night vision makes it harder to see everything, and makes everything less safe. (Not to mention screws up your sleep, prevents you from seeing the stars, is terribly damaging to nearby animals, ...) Street lighting (including from car headlamps) is safest and most effective when it is dim but even (human eyes are amazing at adapting to low overall light levels, given sufficient time) and not very blue, rather than bright and extremely patchy.

If people want to use LEDs, they should be dim, orange, diffuse, as low to the ground as practical, and directed primarily downward. The purported advantage LEDs have in longer lifespan and lower power use can conceivably make them better for street lamps if the lamps are made dimmer, more numerous, spaced closer together, brought lower down, and shielded better from the top and side. But if they are going to be put higher up, made intensely blue and extremely bright, then they end up not having any energy saving and making conditions worse for everyone, including drivers, pedestrians, people whose windows look out on the street, ...

The lighting vendors selling these over-blue over-bright lamps to cities and the public are doing the world a gross disservice.

crooked-v• 5 years ago

The sheer eye-searing glare of LED headlamps on cars is becoming an active safety hazard at this point.

h0l0cube• 5 years ago

You can see the distinctive cool white LED "O" of Apple Park from 20 miles away in a plane. Why? Just vanity?

And also to disorient nocturnal migrating insects (with flow on effects down the eco system) while they signal to elites overhead how eco conscious they are by using recyclable packaging in the complimentary in-flight magazine.

tuckerpo• 5 years ago

I grew up in rural New York and have lived in medium sized cities since 18, and I think I miss being able to stargaze more than anything.

grawprog• 5 years ago

Last summer some time, I was coming down from mushrooms walking home down a road that, when I was a teenager, had been forest.

I became really aware of the streetlights trying to look at the stars going down the road.

You used to be able to see so many stars from that road before street lights or houses were put in. So many stars it was hard to see the space between them.

When I got home, I ended up lying on the grass for a bit in the dark to try and look at some stars the street lights ended a couple of blocks away, so the yard's still relatively dark at night.

Then when I looked up and tried to watch the stars...all I saw were satellites zipping around everywhere.

When I was a kid, seeing a satellite was a fairly rare phenomenon almost as exciting as seeing a meteor. I honestly found the satellites to be more depressing than the light pollution. There wasn't a section of sky that didn't have a satellite in it.

I was still somewhat in that mushroom state of mind, so I got kind of unreasonably sad about it. But it really bothered me. I ended up not wanting to look at the stars and just went to bed.

sjg007• 5 years ago

I remember the first time I saw the milkyway in real life down in tulum. It was unreal. I can imagine space itself is out of This world.

What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

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