[HN Gopher] What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
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What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
Author : cetera
Score : 106 points
Date : 2021-01-30 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconvivialsociety.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconvivialsociety.substack.com)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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).
| lp251 wrote:
| 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.
| worik wrote:
| "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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| 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.
| chordol wrote:
| 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...
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Cool photos.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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.
| asperous wrote:
| 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_va wrote:
| 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.
| factotvm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| jkinudsjknds wrote:
| Romantic, but you might feel differently if your view of the
| stars was obscured first by smog before light.
| [deleted]
| andi999 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| _Light pollution is the pollution I care about most._
|
| Light pollution: not deadly.
|
| Air, water, soil pollution: all catastrophically deadly.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| > 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/f2decb732d52ab
| d6837baa7...
|
| Understanding, Assessing, and Resolving Light-Pollution
| Problems on Sea Turtle Nesting Beaches
| http://aquaticcommons.org/115/
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Fair, thank you for including sources.
|
| I still think it's rather absurd to care more about light
| pollution than any other kind of pollution.
| zajd wrote:
| > Light pollution is the pollution I care about most.
|
| Translation: I live in a place where the government has
| regulated air quality to the point I don't understand it's
| importance.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's dwarfed by waste heat though, which is an estimated ~70%
| of all energy produced.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| It's a different problem altogether IMO. Wasted light is a
| design, political or education problem. Heat waste is often
| an engineering problem that we still haven't been able to
| solve.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, it mostly is a different problem. My point is that
| with regard to energy wastage we have hugely more
| important issues than unnecessary light output. And the
| switch from incandescent light bulbs to LED has already
| reduced the energy wastage from lighting. I'm all in
| favor of reducing light pollution, but not because of
| energy concerns.
| canoebuilder wrote:
| Unfortunately leds have made light pollution worse.
|
| Instead of pocketing the difference in greater photon
| production efficiency the trend has been to just make
| things brighter.(where they really don't need to be)
|
| Not to mention, not just lighting use, but lighting
| design needs a complete rethink in the age of leds. Much
| nighttime lighting, public and private used to cast a
| nice, pleasant glow, now very often led nighttime
| lighting is far too bright, and produced in wavelengths
| that can be quite unpleasant on the eyes, and registers
| as cold, sterile, and unnatural.
|
| The problem of light pollution is not solely about energy
| wastefulness. Light pollution disrupts natural rhythms
| and ecosystems. The blotting out of the night sky is a
| great loss for the human soul and human experience.
| [deleted]
| canoebuilder wrote:
| Heat production is a necessary component of all energy
| transformations. Nothing is 100% efficient in this regard
| as you know.
|
| But light pollution, while producing waste heat, is also
| just unnecessary in general.
|
| We don't need to keep office buildings lit all night, we
| don't need to have cities lit up all night like sports
| fields. Night time lighting should be on a targeted and as
| needed basis.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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/
| spodek wrote:
| "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."
| [deleted]
| mellosouls wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| what a horrifying dystopia.
| willismichael wrote:
| I tried to read the article but the site prevented me from
| seeing it because of my ad blocker.
| xwdv wrote:
| I wonder why there's no billboards at sea where cruise ship
| lines pass by, that will probably come before orbital
| billboards IMO.
| wffurr wrote:
| 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?
| sneak wrote:
| > _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._
| jimmaswell wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| The Starlink issue is only relevant to streaks on long
| exposure pictures. You can't see it with the naked eye. The
| ship has long sailed on general light pollution near urban
| centers. Nice if it can be reversed but going to
| unreasonable lengths to preserve everything how it was in
| the past is reminiscent of people who cover their furniture
| in plastic.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _going to unreasonable lengths to preserve everything how
| it was in the past is reminiscent of people who cover
| their furniture in plastic._
|
| Your comment is reminiscent of ageism.
|
| It's also disingenuous to frame this as a "Starlink"
| problem. It's a Starlink problem plus the 13 other
| companies also trying to put 50,000 microsats in orbit,
| plus the 200 companies that will do it after them when
| prices come down.
|
| In a couple of decades, we end up with millions of
| microsats in orbit, and by then there's nothing that can
| be done.
|
| But as long as we can beam social media misinformation
| into the most remote corners of the planet, heaven and
| nature be damned.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "The ship has long sailed on general CO2 emissions from
| industrial societies. Nice if it can be reversed but
| going to unreasonable lengths to preserve everything how
| it was in the past is reminiscent of people who cover
| their furniture with plastic."
|
| I wonder if you have this opinion also?
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| > You can't see it with the naked eye
|
| Maybe not where you live. But in dark places it's really
| ease to spot them.
| factotvm wrote:
| 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?
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Do we? Anecdotally, I grew up in the country and mostly
| didn't give the night sky a second thought, and yet have
| always been pretty obsessed with space-related fact and
| fiction.
| factotvm wrote:
| Yes, I believe we do. I only need think of the math
| discovered solely to predict the stars to know that
| without the night sky, we are different. To say nothing
| of the poets.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Some cultural artifacts continue to exist because the
| experiences of past generations are passed down through
| teaching and stories. But if not restrengthened, they die
| out. Right now, we are zero or one generation away from
| large swaths of human population having interacted with
| the full night sky. What happens in two more generations
| when 99% of humans are able to see only a handful of
| starts at any given time? That is when you start losing,
| but at that point it is already too late.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| You can't see Starlink satellites with the naked eye, so I
| don't see how that's relevant.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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."
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| BuT eXpAnDiNg InTeRnEt AcCeSs To RuRaL cOmMuNiTiEs Is WoRtH iT.
| FrozenVoid wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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