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Comment by odammit | Hacker News Reader

It drives me wild how much sky is missing. Street lights are one thing but stores like Marshall’s and other places that aren’t open at night keeping signage on all night and their interior lights just boils my blood.

I wish more local municipalities would enforce restrictions against unnecessarily keeping lights on.

The closest (to me) and only city I know of that does proactively enforce light restrictions is Cave Creek[1]

[1] Pages 14-21: http://www.cavecreek.org/DocumentCenter/View/995

Some good related light pollution links:

- http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/darkskies

- http://www.darksky.org/

- http://www.darksky.org/5-appalling-facts-about-light-polluti...

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I lived in a city for about a decade, and recently moved out to a far suburb of that city. I was shocked at how far light pollution has come in just that time... you can hardly see the stars at all. It's not hard to imagine, should humanity be lucky enough to continue thriving, that in a few generations things like visible stars, green spaces, wild animals... will be something left for stories. I wonder if those generations which grow up without them will even know enough to miss them?

I grew up in a rural area, where a few minutes drive out of down would kill most of the light pollution (read: most, not nearly all). I live in the city now and have for roughly a decade, and I still constantly miss the stars.

Even in town back there I could at least get a decent show at night. Here I'm lucky to see a few small specks.

In my experience here so far, people already don't miss the stars. Many haven't really seen them. Even if they visit someplace where they could, they're so unaccustomed to the appreciation that it's not really a consideration.

I live in London during the week; obviously there's massive light & noise pollution, as well as pollution pollution. But at the weekends I'm in Worcestershire, in a village that is not on the gas main, and has no street lights. The difference is like night and day!

When ancient civilizations looked up they saw gods.

What will happen to the minds and psyche of future generalizations when they look up and see nothing?

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