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Comment by pishpash | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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