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While I agree. I also feel sad that we have ruined nearly every place on earth and now we must ruin the night sky, one of the last untouched mostly natural pla

• pishpash 4y ago
  You already can't see the Milky Way in the way that cave ancestors could see. The future will be advertisements in the sky and brightness 24/7. There will be no "night". But people born in the future will think it's just normal and "cool" or whatever slang they use then. If they want to imagine night they turn on that VR implant in their head to Sim 2022.
  • h0l0cube 4y ago
    > But people born in the future will think it's just normal and nice. We are ‘people born in the future’ compared to our cave ancestors, and I wager if you asked just about anyone if they thought an unobstructed milky way was ‘nicer’ than the diffuse haze of a city skyline, they’d almost unanimously pick the former.
    • bmitc 4y ago
      Do they think that strongly enough to change though?
      • hawski 4y ago
        When a river gets polluted people do not think strongly enough to change. Now, why is that and why we still should strive to do better?
      • geden 4y ago
        Do you think we’ve been ground down sufficiently by corrupt wholly self interested politicians, so just feel resigned to something like this? When we’ve fucked our biosphere with CO2, a much more dangerous issue we’ve failed to solve?
      • h0l0cube 4y ago
        Collective action can help, but at an industrial scale, a functioning democracy is necessary to mitigate the tragedy of the commons. A functioning democracy requires an empowered and informed voting population. Corruption from industry seeks to minimise both. People need to fight for stronger democratic institutions if they believe the priorities of the majority should come first. And I’m betting the majority want to look up and see real stars
        • TeMPOraL 4y ago
          Keep in mind that in this case, even a perfectly functioning democracy may not give you the result you expect: there are many of us here who would vote strongly for continued development of space industry and expansion into the solar system, even if would completely block Earth-based observations, because we believe developing Earth orbit is much more important than astronomy in general, and it also happens to be a necessary stepping stone to enabling affordable space-based observations, so we believe it'll ultimately benefit astronomy mid-to-long term.
          • h0l0cube 4y ago
            > Keep in mind that in this case, even a perfectly functioning democracy may not give you the result you expect I don't expect to fully know the will of the majority. If the majority think that clearer skies are great, and let's say that took a significant amount of finances to happen (not sure that it would), people might think that lower taxes are even better. Democratic government is just a vehicle for enforcing the interests of the majority, and I present it here as the potential avenue for reducing artificial Night Sky Brightness (in answer to GGP), with the premise that this is actually in the majority interest.
    • FeepingCreature 4y ago
      I'd rather have the unobstructed Milky Way without the city skyline haze, but I'd much rather have the city than not. And with satellites, it's even the other way around. Give me a sky full of moving points of light any night.
      • h0l0cube 4y ago
        > I'd much rather have the city than not. I think cities are great, but it's nice to leave the city. And with more intelligent lights, we can have lighting when and where we need it. And with lower air pollution, enjoy breathing better and see more stars in the sky. > Give me a sky full of moving points of light any night. But at what point does that just become noise? A shooting star is magic. Seeing the ISS float by is a novelty. But a crisscrossing streams of satellites... I'm sure that would get old quick.
        • FeepingCreature 4y ago
          Not any faster than stars themselves. And arguably slower. I see a bright star, I look it up, it's so-and-so in the constellation of something-or-other. I see a bright satellite, I look it up, it has a story.
          • h0l0cube 4y ago
            > Not any faster than stars themselves. I don't think I made any claim about their actual speed, but I would have thought if they're not geostationary (like the ISS) they are crossing our sky much faster, which is all that matters to this discussion. > I see a bright satellite, I look it up, it has a story. It's very subjective I guess, but in stars and nebula I see the history of the universe as a mysterious story in itself. A story that compelled us to explore space in the first place.
            • FeepingCreature 4y ago
              I meant it wouldn't become noise any faster than the stars themselves. Personally, I want us to colonize space more than explore it. I view the stars mostly as, to quote, "enormous heaps of valuable raw materials that had unfortunately caught fire and needed to be scattered and put out", in a Kardashevian, "wake up the universe" sense.
  • dathos 4y ago
    I can see the milky way beautifully from where I live, if that is ruined by corporations I’m not sure what I will do
    • kvdveer 4y ago
      > I’m not sure what I will do Based on the past, people will just buy these corporations products. Some will post disgruntled messages online. A very small minority will isolate and marginalise themselves by boycotting the products. No-one will care.
      • imiric 4y ago
        There's really not much an individual can do about this. Fighting a powerful corporation is hopeless, and governments won't make them change if it benefits them, and there is no collective push back from citizens. Besides, this is a global problem, and people from different countries have even less leverage to trigger a change.
  • hutzlibu 4y ago
    Or, they will just book a space trip, to get the slightly more intense experience. Also there is hopefully a good chance, that since most people have then their advertisement integrated in their VR implant, there is no more need to pollute the skies. Unless of course we overcome advertisement one bright day. Till then, I probably make vacation again, or even move to La Palma, a island with lots of telescopes and a ban on all bright lights and advertisements.
  • leftbit 4y ago
    It's more likely that orbital junk will make any space based activity impossible.
• antupis 4y ago
  Well if you live in city night sky was ruined already 100 years ago.
  • imiric 4y ago
    And now it will also be ruined if you live in nature. That's an awful attempt at an excuse that doesn't solve anything. We should be fighting to improve this situation, not be complacent and allow it to get worse.
    • Grimburger 4y ago
      The night sky is not ruined if you live rural, it's just like it is before, albeit with more higher magnitude fast moving objects.
      • inawarminister 4y ago
        That reminds me of the story of an Old Believer Russian family that moved to Siberia around the 1920s and was only found again by Soviet miners in 1970s. The patriach of the family was not educated, but he and his children managed to infer that the fast moving stars newly risen in the 1950s to be man-made stars (satellites). Sorry. 1936-1978. Still Here you go: "though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...
      • imiric 4y ago
        Give it a few years.
  • h0l0cube 4y ago
    I agree, but as air pollution improves around the world, that ruination is being reversed
• saberdancer 4y ago
  This satellite is in a 500km orbit. It is in the shade most of the night. Same applies to Starlink satellites. I have a feeling many people forget about this.
• googlryas 4y ago
  These satellites aren't affecting anyone except those with access to a radio observatory or a telescope which is probably far less than 1% of the population. It's hard to say this is ruining the night sky. No one can see these satellites with the naked eye. Even if you could, they are neat rather than ruining, unlike light pollution. The ISS looks like a really slow, dim shooting star if you can even spot it, which takes a fair deal of effort and concentration to not lose it.
• hoseja 4y ago
  You do know how satellite flares work, right? You do know you can only see them when sun reflects off them, therefore they have to be near the horizon or soon after sunset, right? You have seen the ISS streak across the sky at -3 magnitude, correct?
• clarionbell 4y ago
  You are looking at it wrong. It's not being ruined, it's being developed.
  • SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    Much like the forests and plains were developed into vast concrete suburbs
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Which ones? Most were developed into farms, cities and industrial zones. All directly responsible for pretty much every thing you're enjoying about your life. Sure, it would be even better to have both all the forests and plains, and all the food variety, telecommunication, transportation, lifespan and individual freedoms. But it was never a possibility. There was no path from there to here for humanity that didn't mean developing much of the land, cutting down much of the forests and poisoning much of the world - it's because we were (and still are) figuring things out as we went along, acting in an uncoordinated, distributed fashion. We could eventually restore much of what was; we can see the possibility now, but the path to it starts with developing Earth orbit. The way to get the forests and clear sky back without making life universally worse off leads through weathering the whining of astronomers as infrastructure, industry and habitation is being moved up the gravity well. (It's either that or making some huge leaps in biotech, but that's pretty much post-singularity regime, in the sense it's too hard - or too scary - to predict how the world would look like after working with DNA becomes as easy as working with code. Expanding to space sounds like a much safer option to pursue first :).)
  • richrichardsson 4y ago
    One could argue that you're looking at development as a purely positive thing.