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 places most people can view each day.
Also, what gives the right of peoples in one country to ruin the night sky of others on the other side of the planet.
It's not just about observatories and atronomers that we should consider.
I hope we can solve and compromise and not just push forward without consulting and considering.
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.
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.
And with satellites, it's even the other way around. Give me a sky full of moving points of light any night.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Besides, this is a global problem, and people from different countries have even less leverage to trigger a change.
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.
On the one hand, it's good to have a reminder as it's important that interference with terrestrial astronomy is taken into account when designing new space missions. On the other hand, the degree to which the whining is being amplified by doing it in news articles gives it a bit of "shitting where you sleep" quality - my feeling is they're already quite successfully souring the nascent space industry to the general population, which is extremely counterproductive long-term, especially for people whose fields' existence depends pretty much entirely on goodwill and surplus funding.
In other words: excessive whining about space utilization will not stop launches of telecom satellites and subsequent light and radio pollution, but it may very well make it so no one will have the will and the spare cash to fund the next space-based telescope.
It will be a nuisance for amateur astronomers too (for astro-photography people anyway), since they are more likely to take wide-angle shots (increasing likelihood of bright transient in shot) and have less technical means to compensate for it. And they certainly don't have the budget to launch their own satellites..
As a sibling comment pointed out, most people impacted by this will be amateur astronomers, and, you know, casual star gazers.
Secondly, this isn't "souring the space industry". LEO satellites mostly serve terrestrial companies and governments, where they're used for military, communication, and, increasingly, other commercial purposes. The complaints aren't about space tourism projects or launching a few space telescopes; they're about launching thousands of satellites, and fueling the commercialization of LEO, where the sky will eventually be littered by these things. We're at the very early stages of this, and individuals are already voicing concerns about it. I hope this "whining" continues, as I sure as hell don't want to also see ads when I look up into the sky.
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-rus...
Speaking from experience, that is not true. On a clear day a few months before COVID I saw plenty of stars (too many to count) when I looked up from a rooftop in a moderately busy part of Kowloon of all places.
If you cannot see night sky in your city, consider that your AQI may be too high at the moment. (Going up to the roof wouldn’t hurt either.) It doesn’t mean you couldn’t enjoy stars where you live.
Goes without arguing that outside of a city is generally easier to observe night sky because pollution is weaker. However, if the place far from a city has polluted air for whatever reason it’ll still be a problem—and conversely even in a city air and light pollution are not a given, subject to regulations and climate patterns.
I’ve seen our Milky Way, not in HK but in another city (smaller but stronger air pollution). It was very weak (first, air pollution amplifying light pollution; second, it was not too high above the horizon when I was awake), but not seeing it in all of its glory doesn’t mean city dwellers have to concede that they lost the sky completely even now, much less 100 years ago—because they obviously haven’t.
I have a feeling many people forget about this.
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 :).)
The cost effective solution is to move manufacturing to micro-G environments. The Moon might do as a good baby step, followed by robots in the belt.
I don't think thats enough and I also don't think the market for Helium-3 is that lucrative, since comercial fusion is for some reasons still not in sight.
[0] https://www.space.com/nasa-capstone-cubesat-arrives-moon
[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/06/28/capstone-cubesat-launc....
SpaceX and trailing competitors are trying to make it cheap enough to get stuff out of the gravity well (including people and our more advanced products) that more permanent installations other places can get started. Elon says Mars a lot, probably because it's popular with the public. It's still expensive to send things up a gravity well, even if it's less expensive. The moon is shallow by comparison, and the asteroid belt far away but barely a dip. It would be safest to send robots first, bootstrap an installation that can manufacture local propulsion of any sort, O2, water, maybe even refine useful building materials, metal, or other resources. Anything so less is sent up.
Hopefully among all those things would also be materials to make large mirrors (optical and other portions of the EM spectrum), in less gravity, where it's cheaper to move them to useful areas of space, or even just truck them to spots around the surface of the moon.
I'm no astro something, but I can imagine it's cheaper to build a large telescope on the ground than it is to build a small telescope in space. I'm sure people have crunched the numbers.
It is important that everyone retains the option to have that perspective.
What's the cost of a space-based detection platform compared to a ground based one, and does it impact whether such platforms get built in the future?
Overall I think its the impact on and complete disregard for radio astronomy that gets be about this. I'm sure you're not allowed to do high-decibel audio experiments next to the founder's house, but regulations prohibiting radio emissions affecting particular pockets of land are up for grabs?
That origin doesn't mean Hubble doesn't do science.
I love all the condescending comments like this one.
It’s not about siding with industry or some economic philosophy. It’s that humanity, on a long enough timeframe, is either leaving or dying.
But imagine how hard it would be to build something like the Square Kilometer Array in space (keep in mind it'll already cost billions to build it on Earth). You'd need hundreds of launches to get each of the 50 ft dishes to space. Not to mention the difficulties of on orbit assembly.
And of course before you do that you have to figure out how to do interferometry in space. AFAIK it's only been done reliably at very long wavelengths, except for a few demonstrators that required non-scalable physical connections. I don't think it'd impossible, but it requires some huge advances in both science and engineering (submillimeter positioning, cryocoolers with orders of magnitude improvement at passing vibe checks, etc)
Really ? Says who, tech bros ?
Why would anyone impose their view of their world in the entire planet ?
We have consistently been destroying the magic of existence.
Astronomy is going to lose another generation of observatories and see degraded capabilities in some survivors because, just as it was the right thing to do with electrification, bringing broadband to hundreds of millions of people who live in under-served rural communities delivers more progress to society than the small fraction of time sensitive science that may be lost, interrupted, or delayed as we pivot planning and resources to even more exciting and capable telescopes safe distances (for now) from ever-increasing challenge of local light and radio pollution.
And just as it did a century ago, astronomy is going to move further away from civilization, this time to Earth orbit and the Moon. Today we're capable of putting 5 times the Hubble mass into orbit with a single launch for less than $100 million. Within a decade, that'll likely drop to maybe $10 million to lift something like 10 times Hubble's mass in a single go. We can have large-scale orbital telescopes if we want them. And they can be affordable, well considerably more affordable than was historically possible for orbital observatories. Because launch will be dirt cheap and super-sized, these telescopes won't have to be optimized for size and weight or even long term survivability. Sure, the precision optics aren't getting cheaper quickly, but every other component and set of manufacturing tolerances can be had or done much cheaper. Don't spend 5-10X on that radiation hardened chip. Instead, send up 2 regular priced chips with some extra shielding and software that makes sure they both agree that neither one of them have been hit by a disruptive particle. Aerospace aluminum precision milling and robotic friction stir welding? Screw that, let's stick weld some steel.
Satellites are going to be a significant part of delivering modern broadband to the world's rural populations. LEO Constellations have modest capabilities, limited heavily by the physics of radios. But they can be deployed more swiftly to more people than fiber or cable. In 10 years, we will high speed broadband available for literally all locations on the globe, from at least one but likely several different providers.
Capacity will be the constellation operators' biggest challenge. Governments will increasingly turn to the LEO operators for connecting their hard to reach rural populations, delivering large subsidies and other incentives. The demand will far outstrip what the available spectrum will support. Billions of people will want access to networks that will only be able to support hundreds of millions at best. Whether or not spectrum efficiency will allow satellite constellations to compete in the long run or not, I can't say. But for the next two or three decades for sure they're going to be an increasing presence in the sky. I don't think there's any going back.
So, what about astronomy. Easy, as noted above, we do what we did a century ago and have been doing for ages, we pony up and pay to keep on doing the science, even if it has to be more remote, more expensive, and more difficult. We should commit ourselves, just like we did a century ago, to helping the most affected segments of astronomy move as quickly as possible. We can start by re-designing our in-progress next generation observatories to be either cheap and disposable or permanent and future proof orbital science platforms that we can start launching this decade and the next. And let us also invest in establishing the regular movement of humans to and from the Moon so that we can build scientific outposts and observatories of all kinds, but in particular a few great radio telescopes protected by the Moon itself from Earth's near deafening radio pollution.
This is all within our reach, we have the technology to make it happen and for a modest public and private investment we can do right by the scientific community that brings not only so much understanding, but also such richness and meaning to so many of our lives. All over the world, we must vote in representatives that will support public funding to go hand in hand with charitable and philanthropic spending, and perhaps even inviting commercial investment, to help this noble and enlightening branch of science move forward so that it can continue to help carry our civilization forward.
It's the destiny of the night sky to be filled with our spacecraft. This will surely impact terrestrial astronomy, but a falcon heavy costs $97 million, and would enable detection of threats we'd be otherwise blind to if we stuck to terrestrial observations.