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.

> 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.

Do they think that strongly enough to change though?

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?

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?

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

It's more likely that orbital junk will make any space based activity impossible.

Well if you live in city night sky was ruined already 100 years ago.

I agree, but as air pollution improves around the world, that ruination is being reversed

They were talking about light pollution

So am I. Particulates in the atmosphere make light pollution much worse.

The fun part of that was that astronomers were whining about light pollution all along, and being ignored. And here we are.

They will continue to whine until all observation is done from outer space.

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.

Except most organizations can barely afford their ground-based observatories as it is, so to think you can chuck enough capacity into orbit to compensate even a fraction of it for anywhere close in budget is wishful thinking.

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..

That's such an unreasonable and hostile take.

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.

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.

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.

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-rus...

Give it a few years.

A lot is said how there is no night sky for anyone anywhere near a city anyway, so if you prefer to live in one (or believe that is the ultimately sustainable choice to reduce humanity’s environmental footprint) you couldn’t care less about all those satellites polluting the sky.

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.

Have you ever been to a truly dark sky area though? I used to think I could see a lot of stars and then I went to a truly remote area 100's of miles from a large city and dozens of miles from even small settlements and my mind was blown away by the clarity of the milky way.

I’ve been to pretty wild places with stark skies, though didn’t especially care to observe it at the time to be honest.

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.

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.

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.

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?

You are looking at it wrong. It's not being ruined, it's being developed.

Much like the forests and plains were developed into vast concrete suburbs

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 :).)

One could argue that you're looking at development as a purely positive thing.