Oh, look at that pretty twinkling shooting sta- oh shit, that’s another one of elon musk’s pointless billionaire space toys. I can’t even relax by just looking at the stars anymore.
A tumblr comment may be the source. I don’t see it anywhere else. So allow me to add a quote from 29-days-of-fog that summed up why I lay down and look up for a couple hours on dark trips, why I look up when I walk outside at night
you’ve heard of existential dread and existential horror, now get ready for existential peace, which is that feeling when you stare up at the nightsky and think, “huh. i exist. that’s pretty neat.”
If you really want to change, do it on lsd
Due to light pollution, there has never been a time in human history when people could see fewer stars than now.
There has been a centuries-long decline in the rate of deaths by violence.
Ergo, regularly observing the vastness of the galaxy drives men to madness.
Thanks to light pollution and pollution pollution just seeing the stars can be hard enough for many
i remember reading an article about a blackout in some big US city (can’t remember which), and people called 911 because the sky looked scary. they could see the milky way for the first time.
I think it was LA? If I remember right people were calling and observatory and some people thought they were UFOs
This is true for the majority of living humans. We are disconnected from the beauty of the heavens.
We can see a planet ot two, sometimes.
That doesn’t change the message.
True, just makes it harder to send
“Message not sent. Please connect to WiFi.”
But the songs are in my library! I downloaded them! Why the fuck would I need an internet connection?!
Government tried to reduce the amount of light pollution. People walking their dogs at night complained and many folks just didn’t feel safe anymore without light everywhere.
I’ve got this tattooed
That’s a great idea! How did it turn out?
I would if I could see any fucking stars
there’s an app for that!
(but for real there is, it helps identify stars)
sky map from fdroid
I remember an inspirational poster from my childhood that said something about how the government would get a lot more done if everyone was required to take an afternoon nap.
Could go one of two ways, math, or human sacrifice.
The sad thing is how close we are to getting into a space civilization and so much more but how we can’t get our shit together long enough or priorities straight. One m-type astroid accessed in low Earth orbit – there are several already there – has more mineral wealth than all that humans have ever accessed in the Holocene on the surface of this gravity prison with its differentiated gravitationally sequestered artificial resource scarcity that hoards all the good stuff in the core. All we have are the scraps that have landed on the surface after it solidified and got mixed around. The m is for metal. Those are remnants of differentiated, read - concentrated, cores of planetesimals. That kind of wealth makes resource scarcity obsolete and creates both wealth and infrastructure resources to get into space colonies. Space colonies cannot have waste systems. Their primary constraint is heat radiated into space. The wealth to fund and create such a sustainable environment fixes much of what we fail at now. It moves populations into space too. We’ve known about how to build the stations since Dr. O’Neill did the studies in the 1970s about only using established materials science and engineering to create the O’Neill cylinders at up to 9 kilometers in diameter and 30 kilometers long with just steel and concrete. The wonder of such innovation would accelerate our passage into the next age of technology – biology. One day the masters of biology will look back and pity us in our primitive stone age of silicon. The foundations of that world are stones of the future orbiting around us now.
That is what I see when I look up. I see the twinkling reflections of cislunar stations much brighter than the background stars, a place where most humans live a few centuries from now. It is a remarkable place after the end of the age of scientific discovery at the beginning of the engineered expansion, but still centuries from my Parsec 7 that I call home.
Is that Arthur Dent?
Stargazing in complete darkness is mesmerising, even if you can’t see the whole galaxy.
Sounds like it’s time for one of those Men in Black flashy things. Come on, K.
I’d much prefer it over needing sleep.
Yeah. Some of them would try to colonize them, or see them as resources to be exploited/ profited from.
Agent Smith was right.
