What We Lose When We Can ’ t Stargaze

I once met a physics graduate student at a cosmology school (I’ll call him Max) who, until his late 20s had believed that you could only see the stars with a telescope. Max had grown up in New York City, where the twilight of artificially lit nights dissolved the firmament. When he discovered the “permanent presence of the sublime,” as poet Ralph Waldo Emerson described it in his 1836 essay “Nature,” patiently awaiting on a clear, dark night, he was mesmerized. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] What do we lose when our connection with our cosmic environment is broken? The night sky is humankind’s only truly global common, shared by all of us across civilizations and millennia. Yet, today a majority of us lives in cities, where increasing light pollution compromises our view of the stars. Even worse, a new kind of threat is rapidly encroaching: thousands of low-earth orbit satellites have been launched in the last five years to deliver global internet connection, and appear as fast-moving dots across the starry sky. According to current trends, by 2030, artificial satellites will outnumber real stars, and no corner of the planet will be spared: the starry messengers shoved aside by instant messaging. To lose the stars would be to sever ourselves from our past and perhaps threaten our future. Over the millennia, the sight of the heavens subtly and silently guided humankind’s steps: It influenced religion and spiritu...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance Source Type: news