Nameless Range
Well-known member
Not to pile on to the negativity of modern times, but I had a discussion with a coworker on Friday that bothered the hunter in me.
A while ago, a line of lights streaked across the night sky above Helena, MT. It was the result of a launch by SpaceX, who is in the process of building a constellation of 12,000 satellites, and are currently seeking approval to expand that to 30,000 more.
Of course you can look up to the sky now and see satellites most nights, but the sky is still mostly stars to me.
Now not all new satellites will be visible by the naked eye , and not all those that will be visible to the naked eye will be visible at all times or in all places, but we are approaching the possibility of having 50,000 satellites circling the earth. For perspective we can see about 9,000 stars in the sky, and earth has around 4,000 satellites currently circling it.
When there are 50,000 satellites in the sky, “you’ll see the sky crawling,” says Tony Tyson, a University of California Davis astronomer and physicist. “Every square degree will have something crawling in it.”
Sure there are reasons for doing this, but I cringe at the affect such a night sky may have on a humanity already so distant from those hunters of yesteryear, who navigated both time and earth by starlight, and who put hunters of their own into the sky.
A night sky functionally forever changed to you and I and our children - it feels like the death of a thing tied to the soul to me. It’s a washing out of a window to the universe. For this to be done with impunity seems unjust. Maybe it doesn’t even matter to the urbanized world, where most can’t see the night sky anyway due to the light pollution of our cities.
I guess I was kind of ignorant to this issue, but it led me down a rabbit hole to dozens of articles on the topic. This is a pretty comprehensive one.
www.google.com
A while ago, a line of lights streaked across the night sky above Helena, MT. It was the result of a launch by SpaceX, who is in the process of building a constellation of 12,000 satellites, and are currently seeking approval to expand that to 30,000 more.
Of course you can look up to the sky now and see satellites most nights, but the sky is still mostly stars to me.
Now not all new satellites will be visible by the naked eye , and not all those that will be visible to the naked eye will be visible at all times or in all places, but we are approaching the possibility of having 50,000 satellites circling the earth. For perspective we can see about 9,000 stars in the sky, and earth has around 4,000 satellites currently circling it.
When there are 50,000 satellites in the sky, “you’ll see the sky crawling,” says Tony Tyson, a University of California Davis astronomer and physicist. “Every square degree will have something crawling in it.”
Sure there are reasons for doing this, but I cringe at the affect such a night sky may have on a humanity already so distant from those hunters of yesteryear, who navigated both time and earth by starlight, and who put hunters of their own into the sky.
A night sky functionally forever changed to you and I and our children - it feels like the death of a thing tied to the soul to me. It’s a washing out of a window to the universe. For this to be done with impunity seems unjust. Maybe it doesn’t even matter to the urbanized world, where most can’t see the night sky anyway due to the light pollution of our cities.
I guess I was kind of ignorant to this issue, but it led me down a rabbit hole to dozens of articles on the topic. This is a pretty comprehensive one.
The night sky is increasingly dystopian
SpaceX’s satellites are messing up astronomers’ observations. It’s just the beginning.
www.google.com
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