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Comment by noosphr | Hacker News Reader

Outside of a few places like the Himalayas or Australia isn't not possible to see the darkness everyone lived in until street lighting.

This is the most accurate map and it still under reports light pollution under 21.5sqm https://www.darkskysites.com/

Worse satellite constilations may make it impossible to have a dark sky anywhere: https://arxiv.org/html/2604.09427v1

Led lights have caused such a massive increase in light pollution, let alone the effects on humans due to the blue spike, that they should be banned outright.

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Yeah I really don't like the proliferation of blue-pumped LEDs, they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.

In my view we should simply have improved on what already existed, instead of blue-pumped LEDs we should have used monochromatic amber ones like the SOX streetlights which were once ubiquitous in the UK. Night actually looked like night back then, rather than a cheap and nasty approximation of daytime.

>they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.

They are friendly in the same way the feeding a baby petrol is. Sure it's more energy efficient, but humans aren't machines where input = output. It's going to take decades to get rid of all of them, and then even longer for all the cancers that blue light causes to work themselves out. It's amazing that we invented a new asbestos and put a green wash on it.

From what I've seen, most of this energy-per-lumen efficiency has just been funneled into outputting more and more lumens, not actually saving energy. It's only going to get worse with the new 2027 regulations coming in.

> all the cancers that blue light

Blue light gives people cancer?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452187/

In mice the link is clear and simple to test.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11311462/

In people for what cancers have been investigates there is also evidence of a link, but not enough studies have been done to say that it's the case for all cancers. This is absense of evidence rather than evidence of absence.

It's so interesting that people assume the color of sodium lamps is the color of night just because that's the color technology made it at one brief moment in time. Just goes to show that illumination is culture, just like everything else

It's less sodium specifically, and more the general case of 'not using ultra-harsh high-K white light to badly mimic daylight'.

it might also have something to do with the orange glow of the sodium lamps resembling the orange glow of fire and torches, which were the primary medium of lighting in the dark for humanity for thousands of years

LEO satellites only cause problems around dusk and dawn, when they're exposed to light but the surface is not.

Because they're so close to the earth's surface it doesn't happen all night because they'll be in darkness too.

I've driven across Australia a couple of times. Night on the Nullarbor is an amazing experience. So. Many. Stars.

I was lucky enough to witness a thunderstorm over the desert, too. Too far for any noise to reach me, I just saw the clouds lighting up on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful, and not a little spooky. I totally understand why there are so many UFO sightings there.

there are tons of places in the US where it's dark enough you can see the milky way shining brilliantly, just not in the heavily populated areas. Washington, Oregon, Idaho Montana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont. even more places in Canada, Alaska, Norway...

You can see the milky way at any location with a sqm of 19 or higher. True darkness is sqm 22.

Being able to see it and being blown away by it are different.

I can see the milky way but I wouldn't describe it as "a new moon just smeared all across the sky" like one of the other commenters. It's more like just a vaguely higher-density strip of stars.

My location is 21 SQM according to the DarkSkySites map.

I see the milky way every clear night (other than full moons) and after a decade or more of this I'm still blown away by it. I'm never going to get tired of seeing our beautiful galaxy stretched across the sky.

I once wanted our then still young daughter to see a real night sky (as I experienced more often as a kid). We were on a darker part of an island (the map says 21.7 sqm). It was a bit tricky walking through the dunes in such pitch dark (no full moon), but also stunningly beautiful. It’s worth doing every now and then to experience our smallness in the vastness of the universe.

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