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Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

The star link complaint seems kind of like how people must have been when telegram/power lines went up.

Astronomers, amateur or otherwise, have been complaining about "light pollution" forever. Traditionally, it's about night-time lighting on Earth that isn't shielded from transmitting light upwards.

It startled me to find (in a long ago HN thread) that people, presumably nerdy types, are not generally sympathetic to the complaints. I somehow assumed that universal lukewarm quasi-environmental feelings would mean people would go "yeah, lighting the night sky is inefficient and dumb, and astronomy makes pretty pictures" but apparently "fuck astronomers" is a popular opinion.

The kinds of people who like building things will be less sympathetic to environmental concerns when those concerns are 'don't build that, leave the world untainted by human hand'- there's a difference between polluting by building/placing something of value somewhere and polluting as a pure stupid ugly externality. Engineer-y people might be inclined to hate the latter but not the former.

The aspect of amateur astronomy culture that discouraged me was the awful code published in Sky & Telescope back in the late 80s or early 90s.

They used to have a policy that in order to be compatible with the least common denominator of their readers, they required published programs to be in BASIC. And not just BASIC, but basic BASIC, with line numbers.

As far as I was concerned, it was unreadable and obsolete since about 1985. It also probably influenced me away from ever learning Forth by association.

Not to mention, that when I got a book on astronomical computer algorithms, it turned out that the available implementations were in Fortran, which to my taste was as bad or worse.

Fortran is still popular in scientific computing, and modern compilers are pretty good.

Not only that, but modern compilers are insanely good at compiling numerical Fortran code. The very first optimizing compiler was for Fortran and it's consistently been on the forefront of compiler techniques ever since.

I know that's the cliche, but I don't think that something like VSOP87 would be noticeably faster compiled with Fortran vs. C, in the early 90s. If there even was a Fortran compiler available for Mac or Amiga, it was probably priced obscenely, too.

Well, that, and with modern machinery, a global investment economy, and so many construction jobs depending on infinite growth, "build that junk" is the no-brainer solution to everything. Problem is, just a couple "build that junk" people can do so much damage, unless checked by an unusual, overwhelming backlash, we're not slowing down in any measurable way any time soon.

> ...but apparently "fuck astronomers" is a popular opinion.

They know what they did.

(Leap seconds.)

fun fact - mars has great time zones. No silly country borders and also had them even before we had time zones on earth https://marscalendar.com/time-zones

We now know that light pollution also kills insects, which will in the long term also kill us.

Reducing it should therefore be a priority. Instead, it's increased worldwide, mainly thanks to cheap power LEDs.

Power lines still look like garbage, IMHO. After having lived some years in Germany where they are almost universally buried (except high voltage long-haul lines), I can't stop seeing them everywhere in the US. So ugly. Every sky and scene just spoiled with rickety old third-world "oh let's just put this here for now" trash. Like a scratch right across my eyeballs.

Not sure where in the USA you are looking. If it's in a seismically active region there could be factors other than cost and aesthetics. Here in Japan power lines are seldom buried for this reason.

I've been everywhere, man.

Although there are some areas where power (and comms) cables are buried, it is overwhelmingly common in the US for them to be pole-mounted.

Yeah, early above-ground telephone wiring was a horrible mess. This is one of those intermediate steps where the satellites are are awful. Even as they're implemented there should be a plan to get rid of them. If you search from pictures of overhead wires you can see what it was like for a while. https://uh.edu/engines/nycandwires.jpg

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