{"id":10569,"date":"2016-04-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/missing-the-night-sky"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:04:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:04:25","slug":"missing-the-night-sky","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/missing-the-night-sky","title":{"rendered":"Missing the Night Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,\u201d Matthew McConaughey\u2019s character says near the beginning of the 2014 movie Interstellar<\/i>. \u201cNow we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.\u201d The filmmakers surely must have intended that remark to serve as a comment on real-life America\u2019s diminished appetite for manned space exploration. But there is another reason we no longer marvel at the sky above us as we once did, and it has little to do with withered ambition: the stars themselves are harder to see. Things our grandparents would have been able to spot easily with the naked eye \u2014 the Andromeda galaxy, comets, the zodiacal light \u2014 are in many parts of today\u2019s world outshone by the light emanating from buildings, streets, and parking lots. Even some of the brightest arrangements of stars, such as the constellation Orion or the Pleiades cluster, are no longer fully visible to residents in and around the biggest cities \u2014 cities whose glow can illuminate the horizon from over 200 miles away. The lights of Las Vegas, for example, can be seen from eight different national parks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the phenomenon has been documented and decried by professional astronomers and amateur stargazers for decades, most of us barely notice that the nighttime skyscape is fading from view. Living in a world awash in artificial light has become the norm. According to data from the late 1990s<\/a>, some 40 percent of Americans live in places where it never gets dark enough for human eyes to become dark-adapted, and over two-thirds live in places where it is impossible to see the Milky Way. Virtually none will ever experience a night dark enough for the Milky Way to cast shadows on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Readers might be tempted to write off the disappearance of the night sky as a \u201cFirst World problem,\u201d the sort of thing we can bother worrying about only because our most pressing needs have been addressed. But of course it is a First World problem in the most literal sense: the phenomenon is more pronounced in industrialized countries like the United States. The expansion of artificial light \u2014 and the resulting dimming of the nocturnal lights that humans, as well as other species, have looked to since time immemorial \u2014 is a consequence of the modern effort to expand human agency to the largest possible swath of surrounding space. This effort has afforded us more time in the day we can devote to work or play and more places where we feel safe. Yet the costs of our sky\u2019s increasing artificial illumination range far beyond diminished enjoyment of the stars or opportunity for telescopic research. We also lose a powerful reminder of our finitude.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n\t\tLighting the American Night\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

T<\/span>he story of how we are losing the night sky is first of all a story of improvements in lighting technology. The United States \u2014 being the first home to some of the most important innovations \u2014 serves as a good example of how the darkness became light. Various parts of this story have been told in several fine histories, including Wolfgang Schivelbusch\u2019s Disenchanted Night<\/a><\/i> (1988), John A. Jakle\u2019s City Lights<\/a><\/i> (2001), and Peter C. Baldwin\u2019s In the Watches of the Night<\/a><\/i> (2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until the mid-eighteenth century, American street lamps were privately operated. This was true even in New York City, where a law enacted in 1697 required<\/a> \u201cevery seventh house\u201d to \u201ccause a lantern and candle to be hung out on a pole\u201d during \u201cthe dark time of the moon.\u201d Candles were soon supplanted by oil lamps; Ben Franklin describes in his Autobiography<\/a><\/i> how a certain John Clifton placed an oil lamp at his door, leaving the people of Philadelphia \u201cimpress\u2019d with the idea of enlighting all the city.\u201d (Franklin himself contributed to the improvement of oil lamps, suggesting a design that was vented to reduce the nightly buildup of soot on the inside of the lamps and that used glass panes instead of globes to make the lamps easier to clean and repair.) Around this time the transition from private to public lighting began: Philadelphia started assuming responsibility for some street lamps in the 1750s, as did New York in 1761 and Boston roughly a decade later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oil lamps eventually gave way to gas lamps (with Baltimore leading the way in 1817<\/a>), but both of these early forms of street lighting were dim and sparsely distributed \u2014 sometimes intended, Baldwin writes, \u201cnot to illuminate the street but to serve as navigation beacons.\u201d So dark was it still in those nights that unless pedestrians were directly under a lamp they would have had difficulty identifying one another. Baldwin recounts how a New York watchman was killed in the line of duty in 1830: he ran down a poorly lit street and collided with a post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Arc light tower in
San Jose, California, 1880s
Wikimedia Commons<\/cite><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Darkness began to recede significantly in the early days of electric lighting. Arc lighting, which creates illumination by sending a current across two carbon rods, became prominent in the 1870s. It was cheaper and much brighter than gas. Schivelbusch writes that \u201cUnlike all earlier innovations in lighting which had been metaphorically compared to the sun, arc lighting really did resemble sunlight.\u201d It was the first type of lighting to exhibit, in the words of Jakle, \u201cnight-destroying brilliance.\u201d Arc lamps generated so much excess heat and glare that they were only suitable for hanging outdoors or in the largest indoor facilities. They could still be found in some American cities as late as the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Edison was the foremost pioneer of the next great advance in lighting \u2014 not just the safer and longer-lasting incandescent light bulb, but an entire system of generating and transmitting power. As electric utility companies began to proliferate toward the end of the nineteenth century, electric lighting spread with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the car came. To ensure the safety of both pedestrians and automobile drivers, lights had to be installed at more regular intervals along streets and had to be lit for longer stretches of the night. \u201cWhite ways,\u201d as heavily lighted streets such as Broadway came to be called, crisscrossed the cities, allowing cars, themselves affixed with beams, to safely convey the masses to evening dining, commerce, and entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Owing in part to improvements in power distribution (including the victory of alternating current over the Edison-backed direct current*<\/a><\/sup>), by the 1920s electric lighting reached 85 percent of urban dwelling units in the Northeast and Midwest, according to Baldwin. The countryside came along later: when the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration were established in the mid-1930s, only a tenth of farmers had electricity; by the early 1940s, about half did; by the early 1950s, nearly all did. Electric lighting had gone from something of an urban novelty at the start of the century to a nearly universal necessity by the time of the nation\u2019s postwar economic boom.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n\t\tChasing the Dark\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

T<\/span>he prevalence of artificial illumination soon became an obstacle for astronomers, whose work requires dark skies. Man-made light that shines or reflects upward scatters in the earth\u2019s atmosphere, which makes it much more difficult to pick out the light of stars and other cosmic objects against their now-glowing surroundings. Additionally, light produced from elements such as mercury that exist in some artificial light sources can interfere with spectroscopy, the splitting of light (and other types of electromagnetic radiation) into its component wavelengths, which is used to help ascertain the chemical composition of distant stars and galaxies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As early as 1887, Harvard astronomer Arthur Searle noted<\/a> that artificial lighting in Boston (which first installed electric streetlights in 1882) prevented adequate observations of the zodiacal light \u2014 a faint glow just before sunrise or after sunset caused by sunlight reflecting off of space dust, a phenomenon that can now generally be seen only from rural locations. By 1909 the astronomy handbook Curiosities of the Sky<\/a><\/i> urged readers to flee to the countryside if they wanted to see the zodiacal light, because \u201ccity lights ruin the spectacles of the sky.\u201d Astronomer George Ellery Hale, in his 1922 book The New Heavens<\/a><\/i>, <\/i>wrote that readers would lose track counting every visible star in the night sky unless they happened to be near \u201cthe glare of cities, which is often strong enough to conceal all but the brighter objects.\u201d Warnings such as these only intensified in the decades that followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the first major astronomical facilities to suffer from artificial light was the Mount Wilson Observatory, which Hale had helped establish beginning in 1904 on a mountainside some seven miles from Pasadena, California. The 100-inch telescope (meaning that the telescope\u2019s mirror has a diameter of 100 inches) that was completed at Mount Wilson in 1917 was for many years the largest in the world, and it enabled Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s to settle the \u201cGreat Debate\u201d over whether or not the Milky Way galaxy comprised the entirety of the universe. But light projected from rapidly growing nearby cities \u2014 downtown Los Angeles was less than twenty miles away \u2014 became so strong that the telescope soon became useful only for observations of relatively bright objects and those that emitted in the infrared portion of the light spectrum. Mount Wilson was deemed an unsuitable home for the new 200-inch galaxy-hunting Hale Telescope, which was instead installed, in the late 1940s, on Palomar Mountain, about ninety miles from Los Angeles and fifty from San Diego. However, by the 1960s, its observations too were being hampered by city lights. In the late 1980s it was reported<\/a> that the night sky around Palomar Observatory was about twice as bright as it would be without interference from surrounding artificial sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Los Angeles from Mount Wilson
Alex Noriega via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Astronomers at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, one of the many federally funded facilities established to help kick-start the United States in the space race, believed their operations would be safe from urban interference. When Kitt Peak, about forty miles from Tucson, was selected in 1958, the observatory\u2019s early director Aden Meinel expected<\/a> the Tucson Mountains to hide the lights of the city, and he predicted that the limited availability of water in the area would limit Tucson\u2019s growth: \u201cFor the foreseeable future there appears to be no serious threat to the astronomical conditions on Kitt Peak.\u201d But by 1972, according to an article in Science<\/i><\/a> the following year, the growing amount of light extending out from Tucson was \u201capproaching the 1965 level at Palomar; this is far in excess of the most pessimistic predictions made before the construction of the major telescopes at Kitt Peak.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among astronomers this problem had come to be known as \u201clight pollution<\/a>,\u201d a term that had previously referred to possible harmful effects of artificial light on human and other organisms (or that distinguished from any sort of \u201cheavy\u201d pollution). Among the first to study light pollution of the skies was astronomer Merle F. Walker, who had been tasked in the early 1970s with finding California sites for future telescopes. Walker was an astronomer at Lick Observatory, which was experiencing so much interference from the growing city of San Jose that Robert P. Kraft, then the observatory\u2019s acting director, declared in the early 1970s<\/a>, \u201cLick will be out of the business of observing galaxies, quasars, and other faint objects within a decade.\u201d In a 1973 article<\/a>, Walker used census data and Air Force satellite images to create a map of light pollution in California and Arizona, which showed that \u201call of the major California observatories and four of the six major observing stations in Arizona are already affected to some extent by light pollution and the remaining two are so close to light sources that future light pollution is a real danger.\u201d The sites in California and Arizona had been some of the most ideal in the contiguous United States for astronomical activity because of their high percentage of clear weather and atmospheric transparency. (In addition, the west coasts of continents generally experience less optical turbulence because of their colder ocean currents.) However, the growing threat of light pollution led Walker to recommend that planners consider locations away from the North American continent, such as Hawaii and Chile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walker\u2019s studies helped individual observatories join their efforts to gain wider recognition of the scourge of light pollution. In 1988, the International Dark-Sky Association was founded to educate the public about the value of the night sky and to lobby for lighting-policy changes. Then, in 2001, a trio of researchers produced \u201cThe first World Atlas of the artificial night sky brightness<\/a>,\u201d providing \u201ca nearly global picture of how mankind is proceeding to envelop itself in a luminous fog.\u201d They also created similar historical maps for the 1950s and the 1970s, as well as an estimate for 2025. Their images have become for dark-sky advocates what Apollo 17\u2019s iconic \u201cBlue Marble<\/a>\u201d photo was for the environmental movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discussion of light pollution is no longer confined to professional journals and local newspapers; over the last two decades, leading news outlets have slowly brought it into the national consciousness. Extended popular treatments of light pollution include Ian Cheney\u2019s documentary The City Dark<\/a> <\/i>that aired on PBS in 2012<\/a> and Paul Bogard\u2019s 2013 book The End of Night<\/a><\/i>. And Dark Skies Awareness<\/a> was one of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy\u2019s cornerstone projects, helping to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo\u2019s first recorded use of an astronomical telescope. As astronomer Tyler Nordgren told Bogard, \u201cFour hundred years ago, everyone in Florence could see the stars, but only Galileo had a telescope. Now everyone has a telescope but no one can see the stars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n\t\tBrightness and Biology\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

S<\/span>targazing human beings are not alone in having their activities threatened by unnatural brightness. A growing body of research assembled by naturalists, biologists, and epidemiologists indicates that artificial light has dire consequences for many different species of animals. As early as 1918, the Audubon Association of the Pacific documented<\/a> the numbers of birds killed by government lighthouses along the California coast. The destruction of birds is \u201cslight,\u201d it reported then. But a 1965 report published by the American Ornithologists\u2019 Union estimated<\/a> that lights on TV towers caused at least a million bird deaths each year. Light emanating from buildings, including from lighthouses and skyscrapers, interferes with the natural light of the stars and moon that some nocturnally migrating birds use as an aid in navigation, causing confusion and disorientation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The danger artificial light poses to sea turtles has also been well documented<\/a>. Female sea turtles emerge from the ocean to lay their eggs on the beach before returning to the water. To make the journey from sand to sea, both adults and hatchlings use light reflected off the water as a guide. But beachside development has created a competing light source. Many turtles have been found to wander in the opposite direction, towards parking lots and roadways where they are struck dead by vehicles, while others die of exhaustion, dehydration, or predation. In addition to affecting orientation, studies have shown artificial light to disrupt foraging, mating, and communication habits of many different animals, including moths, bats, frogs, and fish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ubiquity of artificial light has also been shown to interfere with some aspects of human biology. Some researchers suspect that increased time spent with indoor artificial light rather than in outdoor natural light has contributed to nearsightedness<\/a> \u2014 a controversial idea that deserves further research. Multiple studies have demonstrated the connection between a disrupted circadian clock and changes in metabolism: excessive amounts of light at night can decrease sleep efficiency and alter the timing of food intake and insulin response, causing weight gain<\/a>. Exposure right before bed to blue light \u2014 the kind produced by the screens of most cell phones, tablets, TVs, and laptops \u2014 is believed to disrupt<\/a> sleep<\/a> because it suppresses production of melatonin, a hormone that regulates the day-night cycle. Melatonin deficiencies have also been hypothesized as a cause of breast cancer; researchers have repeatedly observed the increased prevalence of breast cancer in night-shift workers, and a 2010 study<\/a> showed that there are higher breast cancer rates in countries that have higher levels of light at night, although it did not demonstrate a causal association. None of which is to say that the health and safety benefits of artificial lighting for human beings do not far outweigh the costs, but just that the harmful effects are taken for granted, rarely acknowledged, and poorly understood.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n\t\tLight Pollution and the Law\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

T<\/span>he good news is that a few simple lighting-policy decisions can do quite a lot to mitigate many of the ecological, health, and astronomy-related concerns created by excessive ambient light. The International Dark-Sky Association recommends<\/a> that, whenever possible, lamps should be designed or shielded in such a way that their light shines only down and not up (almost all light that shines upward into the atmosphere is wasted anyway). The intensity of light should be limited only to what is necessary for achieving its purpose, usually human safety. Light fixtures high in blue light content should be prohibited or dimmed with filters. Steps should also be taken to prevent light from spilling into areas it is not intended to illuminate, such as adjacent houses (what is called \u201clight trespass\u201d) or animal habitats. All-night lighting should be used only when absolutely necessary. And in the home, doctors advise improving the quality of one\u2019s sleep by covering up lights shining from televisions, electric clocks, and other appliances and by avoiding looking at one\u2019s smartphone right before bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1958, Flagstaff, Arizona (home to the Lowell Observatory) adopted what are believed to be the first light-pollution-prevention measures in the United States. Tucson, which in addition to Kitt Peak is also near the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory and is the home of the University of Arizona\u2019s Steward Observatory, enacted similar measures in 1972, as have many other communities with nearby observatories in the years since. Light pollution regulations \u2014 along with some advances in astronomical technology, such as the invention of charge-coupled device imaging, which allows astronomers to digitally edit out some unwanted light sources \u2014 have already helped to extend the life of observatories. They have also helped to preserve the night sky for the general public. For example, San Jose, cooperating with Lick Observatory, agreed in 1980 to switch its mercury vapor streetlights to low-pressure sodium lamps, which emit light on a much smaller range of wavelengths. Kitt Peak, according to a 2010 analysis<\/a>, has seen its sky brightness stay \u201cremarkably constant\u201d for the past twenty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Light pollution mitigation efforts have yielded positive results for wildlife as well. The \u201cLights Out Chicago\u201d program, an effort that began in 1995 to get building owners to agree to turn off unnecessary lights during migration seasons, is thought to prevent the deaths of 10,000 birds each year. Some other large cities, such as New York and Toronto, have implemented similar programs for bird safety. According to a 2003 article<\/a> on the National Geographic<\/i> website, <\/i>photographic surveys of Florida beaches indicated that they had been \u201cgetting darker and safer for the sea turtles\u201d thanks to lighting regulations. As of April 2015, over twenty counties and over sixty municipalities along the Florida coast had enacted lighting ordinances, and a recent study<\/a> of sea turtle nesting patterns offers reason to hope that the laws are having a positive effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An added benefit of efforts to mitigate light pollution is that they can save quite a bit of money. According to a 2010 paper<\/a> in Ecological Economics<\/i>, the cost of wasted outdoor lighting adds up to an estimated $7 billion a year in the United States. The Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting reports<\/a> that the replacement of conventional street lighting in the city with LEDs over a four-year period has reduced energy costs for lighting by over 60 percent, while making streets brighter and skies darker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently, most restrictions on outdoor lighting come from municipal and county legislation. However, these codes are generally written with an eye toward preventing light from spilling onto adjoining neighbors\u2019 properties, not into the sky. Statewide legislation can be more effective for addressing overall light pollution, and having a uniform statewide regulation, instead of a mess of sometimes-contradictory local regulations, helps manufacturers to produce standardized dark-sky-friendly lighting devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far, seventeen states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have laws<\/a> to help cut down on light pollution. Many of the laws, however, are very limited, regulating for instance only the outdoor lighting for buildings on state property, or prohibiting state funding for certain kinds of lights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No substantial federal action on light pollution appears to be imminent. The International Dark-Sky Association organized congressional briefings in 2008, after which eleven members of Congress signed a bipartisan letter<\/a> to the Environmental Protection Agency requesting that it pay more attention to light pollution in its research and education programs and its publications. The organization also sent the EPA a petition<\/a> arguing that the agency already has authority to regulate light pollution under certain provisions of the Clean Air Act. (The agency\u2019s only apparent response<\/a> was that it was \u201cconsidering the issues\u201d and \u201creviewing what, if any, legal authorities EPA may have to take steps to define and address light pollution.\u201d) A different regulatory approach, suggested by attorney Kristen M. Ploetz in a 2002 New England Law Review<\/i> article<\/a>, would have Congress do for light pollution what it did for tackling noise pollution by passing the Noise Control Act of 1972, which established standards for reducing various kinds of noise. But that precedent does not seem especially promising, since within a decade Congress defunded the EPA office governing noise control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A major hurdle faced by dark-sky advocates who wish to persuade policymakers and the public is that, while the environmental and health problems light pollution creates are significant, they are nowhere near the scale of other kinds of damage, such as air or water pollution. Attempts have been made to piggyback light pollution onto the climate change issue by highlighting the energy we misuse on unnecessary lighting. The International Dark-Sky Association notes<\/a>, for example, that the United States would have to plant 875 million additional trees annually to make up for all the carbon dioxide released to produce the energy that is currently wasted in outdoor lighting shining upward into the atmosphere. However, the amount of emissions we could prevent by eliminating this wasted energy is a tiny fraction of total U.S. emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor does protecting the quality of our nation\u2019s astronomical research seem an argument likely to persuade lawmakers or regulators \u2014 not least because planners of many new observatories have chosen locations outside of the continental United States, as Walker recommended in the 1970s. The dormant Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Kea is now home to over a dozen different telescopes, and Chile\u2019s Atacama Desert has become a mecca for astronomers over the past twenty years because of its high altitude, bone-dry climate, and distance from light-polluting cities. Astronomers have also been able to avoid light pollution and other kinds of atmospheric interference altogether by launching instruments into space. The most famous of these is the Hubble Space Telescope; its so-called successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is due to launch in 2018. Although many big telescopes are still in operation at astronomical facilities in the continental United States, the existence of these other options elsewhere on and above the planet make it less likely that the demands of science will change many minds about cutting back on light pollution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescopes in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile
Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n
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\r\n\t\tAwe and Contemplation\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

W<\/span>hat defenders of the night sky need most of all now is not a case against light pollution grounded on astronomy or ecology but one rooted in our cultural heritage. It is precisely by considering the effects of light pollution as a cultural matter that we can most clearly understand what is at stake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adam Smith, in his posthumously published essay \u201cThe History of Astronomy<\/a>,\u201d calls what we see in the night sky \u201cthe most universal objects of the curiosity of mankind.\u201d So numerous are the passages of prose and verse and the works of art inspired by the night sky that there would be little point in rattling off a few here. But likely because its cultural value is seemingly so self-evident, dark-sky advocates have too often given it mere lip service. \u201cWe can\u2019t lose our culture and heritage!\u201d it said at the bottom of a page<\/a> on the old International Dark-Sky Association website, but the section tellingly explained that \u201cChildren who grow up without the experience of a starry night miss invaluable opportunities to speculate about larger questions,\u201d and highlights the IDA\u2019s programming material \u201cdesigned specifically for children\u201d \u2014 as if cultivating wonder and reflection on larger questions are things one is supposed to grow out of upon reaching adulthood. Of course, the fact that eminent individuals and whole peoples have in the past found the night sky worthy of awe and contemplation is irrelevant if we cannot understand why their reasons for doing so remain compelling to us today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attempts to defend the night sky on cultural grounds must show how the qualities it embodies are unique to it. It is not enough simply to suggest, as many dark-sky advocates have, that the sky\u2019s cultural value lies in its natural beauty that produces wonder and inspires us. Natural beauty can be found in many other places too \u2014 and for that matter, thanks to our space telescopes, we can now in a sense see the sky more clearly than ever before. Nor is it helpful to point to the many beautiful aesthetic creations the night sky has prompted. Perhaps van Gogh, had he lived under today\u2019s light-polluted skies, would not have painted The Starry Night<\/a><\/i>, <\/i>but the vast majority of works of art about nature do not focus on the night sky, and so its disappearance would not end artistic creativity and appreciation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we do not understand more fully how the night sky as seen from the ground through the naked eye embodies beauty uniquely, the cause of preserving it remains vulnerable to economist John Kenneth Galbraith\u2019s quip<\/a> that \u201cThe conservationist is a man who concerns himself with the beauties of nature in roughly inverse proportion to the number of people who can enjoy them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same goes for the concept of infinity that one might point to as an invaluable property of a starry night. (According to astronomer and writer Bob Berman<\/a>, \u201can observer needs to see four hundred fifty stars at a time to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away.\u201d) While the night sky\u2019s immensity is undeniably impressive, unless we can explain the distinctive nature of the stars\u2019 infinitude \u2014 that is, unless we can explain how it differs from, say, the countless grains of sand on the beach, or, for that matter, the vast array of shimmering pixels on the dome of a planetarium \u2014 we have not made a convincing case for why the stars should remain visible to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a case must show that the night sky is not culturally valuable merely as a relic of the past; rather, if it were more visible to us, it would teach us an important lesson even for our present and future, a lesson that perhaps nothing else in nature can teach us quite as well. We will see this more clearly if we recognize that the loss of the night sky was not an incidental consequence of the invention of particular lighting technologies but rather a direct implication of the modern scientific project. The unique importance of the night sky is that it reminds us of the limits of that project.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n\t\tThe Dawn of Modernity\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

I<\/span>t helps to remember that people\u2019s experience of the night prior to modern lighting was vastly more terrifying than the rhapsodies of today\u2019s dark-sky advocates might suggest. When the sun went down, navigation of terrain became more treacherous, nocturnal predators began their prowl, the threat of succumbing to illness seemed to intensify, and the risk of fires from candles and oil lamps rose. Pillaging, murder, theft, drunkenness, and prostitution were often deeds of the dark, after the government and church powers that ruled the day had ceased their activities. On top of all this, dark spiritual powers could instill dread in people\u2019s hearts, whether it was the stars and planets cursing men\u2019s fates, or the legions of evil forces \u2014 ghosts and spirits, witches and demons, and other mystical and diabolical entities \u2014 looking for prey. As A. Roger Ekirch \u2014 whose 2005 book At Day\u2019s Close<\/a><\/i> richly catalogues these many dangers of the night from the time before artificial lighting \u2014 puts it, \u201cDarkness in the early modern world summoned the worst elements in man, nature, and the cosmos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, when against this backdrop some of the modern scientific pioneers first began calling for more light \u2014 figuratively speaking \u2014 to overcome what they thought of as the darkness of preceding eras, their arguments drew rhetorical power from the fact that real darkness was so perilous. Francis Bacon, for example, described<\/a> \u201cthe kindling of this new light in the darkness of philosophy.\u201d Bacon, of course, was not the first to describe wisdom as a light; the metaphor exists in almost every previous religious and philosophic tradition. But what was special about the desire for light in the early modern era was that its advocates conceived of the Kingdom of Darkness as vulnerable not only to spiritual and intellectual forces but chiefly to technological arts, and as ultimately conquerable by them. Bacon remarked<\/a> that \u201cthe greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge.\u201d This end, he argued, was to produce useful means for easing nature\u2019s burden on mankind, and natural darkness was one of the obvious ways of symbolically representing that burden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of The Great Instauration<\/a><\/i>, where Bacon lays out his plans for the kind of science that would make this end possible, he says he is convinced that \u201cthe human intellect makes its own difficulties, not using the true helps which are at man\u2019s disposal soberly and judiciously; whence follows manifold ignorance of things, and by reason of that ignorance mischiefs innumerable.\u201d Bacon casts the problem of ignorance as one that is largely self-inflicted rather than a permanent fixture of the world. This means that there is hope for restoring the connection between the human mind and the nature of the world \u201cto its perfect and original condition.\u201d To do this, though, we will need to create \u201chelps for the sense\u201d to make up for our failings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous eras, Bacon thought, had ignored such \u201ctrue helps\u201d; by placing their faith in received opinions, abstract ideas, traditions, and texts, they had doomed themselves to false understanding, putting too much of a burden on the human mind to mediate and interpret sources that were far removed from man\u2019s physical surroundings. Because the original sources of wisdom were no longer directly accessible, the process of retrieval would always be subject to controversy, misunderstanding, and abuse, yielding little in the way of practical results and instead animating conflicts when consensus could not be reached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bacon hoped to avoid all these problems by placing human knowledge on a more solid foundation: the facts of nature. Systematic experimentation would reveal nature\u2019s hidden truths, which could then be used to help produce tools of all kinds to alleviate human burdens and to push back the limits nature imposes on us. One of the more apparent such transformations is that the night is no longer very dark and that many of our activities are no longer dependent on daylight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth reminding ourselves that the connection between technology and our scientific knowledge is rarely as neat as Bacon imagined, and even he was well aware that the mechanical arts advanced at times without much theoretical insight. Nevertheless, the way popular understanding conceives of modern science and even the Enlightenment at large follows a vaguely Baconian line of thinking: the figurative light of reason and experiment that dispels the fancies of older and darker ages is one and the same as the literal light that helps us to see \u2014 through technologies such as microscopes and telescopes \u2014 into all corners of the natural world. Modern technology, according to this conception, is the fruit we reap from leaving behind the darkness of the past, and the modern scientific project, we like to conclude, offers the only sure means to receiving the bright light of facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when we treat the light that science provides as the only true light there is, we lose the older lights of philosophic insight. Dismissing the old philosophers, Bacon remarked<\/a> that \u201ctheir discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.\u201d This is analogous to how modern lighting technology has resulted in the loss of the stars, which throughout human history had been a source of philosophic wonder and a constant reminder of the limitations of what we know. The cultural value of the starry night is that it confronts us with the reality that our powers over nature and our insights into its inner workings are really quite limited, not only in themselves but also against the backdrop of other kinds of knowledge. Sure, our telescopes see farther than our eyes ever could, but our natural vision is now restricted mostly to the small sphere over which we have control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This interpretation of how modern lighting technologies affect our understanding of ourselves appears already in some older texts. For example, when Robert Louis Stevenson looked back at the introduction of gas lighting, he wrote<\/a>: \u201cThe work of Prometheus had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man\u2019s fancy. The city-folk had stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last part of Stevenson\u2019s remark is a reminder that Prometheus\u2019 gift of artificial light, fire, to mankind came at the expense of a higher source of light. One of the consequences of regarding nature largely with a view toward how we can use it for our material benefit is that we have less use for nature as it is, including the starry heavens. Once we have our own biddable stars for lighting \u2014 and other technologies to replace other celestial functions, such as keeping track of time or helping with navigation \u2014 the real stars overhead concern us little in our everyday affairs. In one of Nietzsche\u2019s most famous passages<\/a>, a madman carries a lantern on a bright morning because man has \u201cunchained this earth from its sun.\u201d It is a description of what it means that man has killed God, but we might extend the notion a bit and say that our artificial lights conceal what a starry night \u2014 even better than a sunny day \u2014 can teach us: that we are small creatures dependent on vast forces we cannot possibly control. Our forgetfulness of this lesson is in part responsible for our forgetfulness of the intellectual, spiritual, and artistic traditions that were once inspired by it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But though we imagine that we have no practical use for the stars, they still exist, and perhaps because of their persistence some thinkers have gone so far as to express outright disdain for them, and even for the moon. The Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, who were among the more radical voices of modernism, broadcast the slogan<\/a> \u201cLet\u2019s kill the moonlight!\u201d and one of the movement\u2019s leading poets published a manifesto<\/a> that begins with a declaration of war against the night sky:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts….<\/p>

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The tract concludes: \u201cStanding on the world\u2019s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!\u201d One cannot help but think that the stars only become the object of such rage, even if just symbolically, because they point to something fundamentally flawed in the modern project: that our mastery of nature will never be total but will, as great as it may grow, meet with ultimate frustration.<\/p>\n\n\n

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O<\/span>bservers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Frederick Jackson Turner have remarked that America is a land and people deeply shaped by the experience of the conquest of nature, the challenge of developing \u201cout of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life,\u201d as Turner wrote<\/a>. After the U.S. Census pronounced in 1890 that the American frontier had closed, Turner declared, \u201cHe would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, we continue to apply the language as well as the spirit of conquest to various frontiers: the scientific, the technical, the biomedical, and of course what science fiction has taught us to call the \u201cfinal\u201d frontier \u2014 outer space. There has been talk, including in these pages<\/a>, of establishing a \u201ctransorbital railroad\u201d to open up travel to the Moon and to Mars and beyond. Many movies set in space consciously borrow tropes from old Westerns. \u201cWe\u2019re still pioneers,\u201d one of the main characters reminds us in Interstellar<\/i>, after saying, \u201cWe\u2019ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments … when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known … as our proudest achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike the American continent, outer space is practically infinite; there is no endpoint. But we can go only a very short distance before coming up against a barrier not \u201cout there\u201d but in ourselves: death. The fact of our finitude means we will explore only a small sphere of the total sum of space, and not an arbitrary sphere but only the one around our planet Earth. Sending people to Mars and other unvisited points in our own solar system will likely be possible in the next few decades, but traveling even to \u201cnearby\u201d stars would require complicated new technologies and trips lasting decades or centuries. A journey to Andromeda, the nearest neighboring galaxy, would take 2.5 million years at the speed of light. Besides, many of the starry objects themselves have already died long before their light reaches our eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, the inaccessibility of the stars reminds us that we are not and cannot be at home everywhere in the physical universe, that we are bound in time and place to a relatively tiny sphere of influence. Astronomy, arguably the most ancient of the sciences, has always understood what my professor on the first day of an introductory astronomy class called the \u201cTantalus Principle\u201d: we can look but we cannot touch. The full meaning of light pollution for our understanding of ourselves is that the finitude that defines our own inhabitable sphere comes to light (so to speak) only in our encounter with the contrasting infinite background beyond. Our attempt to extend the light of our bedside lamps throughout our lived world has whited out this background, blinding our eyes to realms of the universe in which mankind has no agency. With the flood of artificial light blotting out the stars, we are, to borrow from Hamlet<\/a>, \u201cbounded in a nutshell\u201d and counting ourselves \u201cking of infinite space.\u201d Seen in this way, our reliance on artificial light is not a Promethean defiance of our fate but a cowardly refusal to face it. Such is the picture W. H. Auden presents in his poem \u201cSeptember 1, 1939<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

… Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Auden\u2019s poem was written at the outset of World War II. It is worth noting that blackouts in major population centers during the war introduced many city dwellers to night skies they had never experienced before. Printers began churning out astronomy volumes to explain to the curious the things they were now seeing, and astronomer Walter Baade at Mount Wilson was able to take advantage of a wartime blackout in Los Angeles to peer deeper into the Andromeda galaxy than had previously been possible, leading to observations that showed the universe was double the size of what Edwin Hubble had calculated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, some of the few other times the stars have shone brightly above our large cities in the past century have been occasions when natural disasters challenged our technical prowess of mastering the night. The only occasion the Milky Way has been visible in real detail from Manhattan in the past fifty years was when a severe thunderstorm in 1977 knocked out power across New York. (The view during both the 1965 and the large 2003 blackouts was reportedly<\/a> not quite as good, in part because of a fuller moon.) After an earthquake triggered a massive power outage in Los Angeles in 1994, residents called in to emergency crews, radio stations, and observatories to express alarm at the strange cloud that had appeared overhead. They were seeing the Milky Way for the first time. And the 2012 power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy gave some urbanites on the East Coast a look at a sky more starry than they were used to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Milky Way from La Silla Observatory, Chile
Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Without such disasters \u2014 a word that comes to us from the Latin for \u201cill-starred event\u201d \u2014 and if the public attitude toward light pollution does not change, future generations of Americans will have little left of the night sky. This is already the case along most of the East Coast. West of the Mississippi, star-filled skies can still be found, but darkness is receding there as well. Of course, we can imagine an astral tourism industry emerging to bring well-to-do urban families to visit the few \u201cdark-sky reserves\u201d that activists establish, likely in national parks; and perhaps more small night-sky-friendly communities will pop up, modeled after Arizona Sky Village in the town of Portal. But these will be the exceptions, a few ironic specks of dark in an otherwise light-filled sky. For the majority of Americans, the infinite stars and their intimations of our finitude will be out of sight and so out of mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Preserving our experience of the non-human realm above does not mean returning to the dark ages; nor need it mean having to choose between city and sky. It is up to the planners and fabricators of our lights, buildings, and cities to make conscious decisions to prevent our self-envelopment from becoming complete. And it is up to us to encourage the thoughtful and creative arrangement of lights in our lived places \u2014 so that we might, as Dante put it in the last line of his Inferno<\/i>, \u201cemerge again to see the stars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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[*]<\/a> Through an error introduced during editing, a previous version of this essay erroneously described alternating current as having been backed by Thomas Edison over direct current, when in fact in the great battle between AC and DC, Edison was on the (losing) DC side.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jacob Hoerger on light pollution, enlightenment, and our sense of finitude<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14964,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5018,5039,5046],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10569"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10569"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10569"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}