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Saving Earth’s Starry Cathedral

The starry night sky has shaped this planet and its inhabitants. But what if light pollution and satellites completely block it out?

Milky Way with satellite trail
The Milky Way galaxy with satellite trail, as seen from the recently designated (2021) International Dark Sky Park of West Penwith, Cornwall. Credit: MJ Sharp

Stars live for millions to trillions of years. But their deaths play out within seconds. For the most massive stars, pressure in the core starts mounting. Star stuff packs tighter and tighter into a shriveling star body. When there’s nowhere left to go – boom! An explosion so bright it can outshine a star’s own galaxy blasts energy out into the cosmos. Star stuff splatters everywhere. 

And here we are.

The nitrogen in our DNA. The calcium in our bones and teeth. The iron in our blood, coursing through our veins, animating our bodies and giving voice to our souls. These elements, “even the carbon in our apple pies,” as astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” Practically everything on the planet originated from this stuff.

So if we are the stars, who are we when they disappear from view?

The night sky has long captivated the human imagination, inspiring wonder, spirituality and a profound sense of connection to the cosmos. However, as we increasingly illuminate the planet with artificial light and send satellites into orbit, our ability to gaze upon the stars is under threat. 

Citizen scientists around the world have observed that on average, Earth’s skies have gotten nearly 10% brighter each year over just the past decade or so. Fewer than 20% of Americans, two-thirds of the world, can still see the Milky Way. And the stars we still can see may not be stars at all. That’s even more likely in the near future, when around six percent of “stars” may be satellites. Already the night sky is vastly different from the one under which life evolved and civilizations took hold. So how might life reshape itself in its absence?

This October I sat down with a diverse panel of experts – including Lindsay DeMarchi, an astrophysicist-turned-policy analyst and space environmentalist, MJ Sharp, a Durham-based photographer and Fulbright Scholar who searched ancient sites of Cornwall, UK, for what we lose when we’re robbed of the night sky, and NC State University ecologist Caren Cooper, who has studied how light and sound pollution affect the health of common birds. Over Zoom, we explored the past, present and future of our relationship with the night sky. 

Through their personal experiences and professional perspectives, DeMarchi, Sharp and Cooper delve into the cultural significance of the stars, the alarming effects of light pollution on planetary health and the innovative – sometimes, quite simple – ways we might preserve this natural wonder for centuries to come. 

From the spiritual rituals of ancient civilizations to potential “night sky churches” of the future, this conversation reveals the true depth of the night sky’s role in our lives. And it proposes an alternative to losing this brilliant cultural and physical heritage. 

This interview, conducted as part of the Long View Project, was edited for clarity. 

JoAnna Klein: What does the night sky mean to you?

Caren Cooper: To me, it means we’re not alone. It means that our planet is super unique, but also, hopefully, that it’s not just us. There’s so much out there. It’s humbling.

Lindsay DeMarchi: I have a deep, working relationship with the universe, as well as a deep appreciation, which is a funny way to get to what the night sky means to me, because I never had it. I always grew up in light pollution. I grew up in New Jersey, where it was always a sunset color, all through the night. It was always pink. I always lived in a city, even when I studied abroad in New Zealand. I lived in Dunedin and could not see the stars there either. I didn’t really see the stars until I was the Astronomer in Residence at the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve. Just to put that in perspective, I had to travel to Idaho and live somewhere different for a month to really see the stars, and I was immediately humbled. What the sky actually means, to me, is a sense of empowerment. It’s a connection that every single person could have. We each could see the Milky Way from where we live. And it’s a connection to our origins. It’s a grand sense of belonging and empowerment for everything that came together to make us.

MJ Sharp: I’ve been thinking about this recently, the way that the night sky immediately pops you into awe because it’s so much bigger than you. That whole phenomenon. You experience awe when you’re little and the other thing is not little. That is very rare for us. A big city with skyscrapers – it’s not the same. It’s not a big, empty space. 

The very first time I really paid attention to the way the night sky looked, I was in high school. I woke up in the middle of the night because my room was so bright. It took me a long time to realize what was going on. It was the moon in the windows, and I went outside because I was like, what? What’s going on? 

Then I was wilderness camping not long after college with a group of people in Pisgah in the western mountains of North Carolina. I remember lying in my sleeping bag and looking up, and the stars felt so overwhelming and close. I remember being super, super disturbed by it and anxious about it, like it was closing in on me. I literally looked away so I could sleep.

It’s a connection that every single person could have. We each could see the Milky Way from where we live. And it’s a connection to our origins. It’s a grand sense of belonging.

Humans evolved in the dark, with no cameras to capture the night and keep it safe in our pockets for anytime viewing. Instead, to experience the night, people had to be there. The ancient people of Cornwall, for example, likely built some of their monument sites with the night sky in mind. Perhaps they were inspired by that awe, empowerment and wonder you all just described. 

MJ, as a photographer who has made these images of Cornwall and experienced these skies while doing so, how might the availability of cameras change our experience of the night sky?

MS: When I was in Cornwall in the UK, sometimes when I was waiting on a long exposure, I would play around with my phone. Things looked gorgeous on my phone. They looked like beautiful watercolors, so much better than what I was really looking at, which was monochromatic and very dim. Even the Milky Way. I have these pictures I love of the Milky Way, but I didn’t see that. It just looked like airplane exhaust or high clouds. 

The whole Northern Lights thing. Everybody here in North Carolina was talking about maybe being able to see them. People were sending in pictures that they’d taken, and for the most part, people weren’t seeing anything. They were taking a picture, and then seeing it on their phone. So what does it mean when peoples’ experience of the night sky is this kind of once-removed, now-it’s-beautiful-because-of-my-iPhone?

I think a lot of what makes experiencing the night sky or a dark scene a profound experience is that lingering and waiting, being receptive – kind of going dormant and just being there. When it really is dark, you can’t proactively do anything. You’ll just trip and fall into a ravine. You can’t do anything but sit and wait to be receptive in that way, sensing things, is a huge part of how we evolved. I worry that the night is becoming just another Instagram opportunity – not at all the experience you have when you’re out in it for any length of time.

Over the past 70 years, scientists have documented hundreds of stars just vanishing from the night sky. They didn’t slowly die. They didn’t explode. They “vanished” because light pollution washed out their light. This loss is happening quickly. Can you help me understand the magnitude of this degradation? How much is the night sky disappearing?

LD: Part of the issue is this new advancement of LEDs. 

So for those of us who don’t remember, before LEDs were as popular as they are, we used to have light bulbs that looked a little bit more amber, maybe even more dirty by comparison. LEDs are really bright and really white. 

The great thing about LEDs is that they are more energy efficient than the light bulbs we had been using, and they’re very easy to control. The problem is that now that LEDs are so affordable and have been so well advertised as energy efficient, they’re being overused. We are over lighting. 

Also, using good lights without a knowledge of how to minimize light pollution is a huge contributor to the problem. There will be LED lights that are on these fixtures that are rather flat. So you would think that if you held it completely horizontal, it would illuminate the ground and not have any spillage upwards, which is what’s causing light pollution. Unfortunately, because they’re so adjustable and so easy to use and purchase, people are buying them and just tilting them, maybe diagonally, which is creating light pollution. Light is kind of blasted all over the place. 

So, LEDs are great for saving energy, but how can we fix their light pollution?

LD: LEDs’ strengths are also the solution. You can very easily adjust the intensity and color of LED lights so they’re not so blindingly white. They can be warmer colors. You can also just as easily correct that direction. 

MJ: The mantra used to be all about, turn off the lights. You don’t need lights to be safe. We tend to think so, but some studies suggest lights don’t always prevent accidents or reduce crime. It actually can have the reverse effect. But people too much associate light with safety, so now the push is for good lighting – not “turn off the lights,” but “change the lights” so that they are directional and just what you need. Maybe they only come on with motion sensors. Essentially, fancy light, which is way more pleasant to be around. 

I mean, one of the ways you know you’re in a place with money is often where the lighting is kind of beautiful and thoughtful. It’s considered kind of a luxury item, good lighting. But good lighting is actually great for getting rid of light pollution and preserving night skies. 

That is something I could envision in the future: really beautiful, 2400 Kelvin lights at night that are only illuminated just where you need them and are really, really, really pleasant to be around. And as a side effect, people will sleep a ton better and be healthier without bright or colored lighting affecting them. That is a killer for human health. Bright light exposure late at night or in the wee hours triggers your cortisol, and blue light from LEDs suppresses your melatonin. I mean, it wrecks you.

CC: In addition to what people are saying about the color of the light being so important, and also the design, we’ve made it so cheap to light that people waste it. I don’t know the estimates, but a huge percentage is just waste

The other solution that I would love to see as part of the future is curfew lighting, meaning that there are times when there’s just darkness. It could be 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. or whatever. It is happening in some places. I think the night sky could be an impetus for advocates to say, we want a chance to see the night sky, even though we live in the city. Let’s say it started at midnight. I would stay up to see the Milky Way. I would get up in the wee hours to see it if I knew there was curfew lighting. 

LD: One of the greatest things about solving light pollution is that it’s kind of a permanent solution that you only need to do once. It’s not quite the same as, say, cleaning up the oceans or other ecosystems where the pollutants need to bleed out over time. You fix light pollution once. It’s instant. It’s done. It’s fixed. And you never have to do it again. 

MJ was talking about different lighting choices. I went down a rabbit hole of kind of a similar vibe of well-thought-out lighting feels luxurious. Is it? And these lighting options are just a design choice that costs the same. You know, it’s not even like you have to go get a consultant or anything. A lot of places like Home Depot and Lowe’s have been open to Dark Sky advocates putting in displays. I just spent some time in Illinois. Our Dark Sky chapter got a local Home Depot to adopt that. It really is just a choice of the same tier of options.

One of the greatest things about solving light pollution is that it’s kind of a permanent solution that you only need to do once … It’s instant. It’s done. It’s fixed. And you never have to do it again.

Just stepping back to health, Caren’s lab has done work on how sound and noise pollution affect the health of adult birds in urban areas. Caren, can you talk a little bit about that?

CC: Loss of the night sky is such an important issue, but in many ways, I see it as the collateral damage because light pollution has so many effects. It disrupts our circadian rhythms – and not just humans, but all animals. Plants, too. And you can go down to single cellular organisms; they also have biological clocks. And those biological clocks just control everything, like metabolisms and hormones. Just everything works in sync with the rising and setting of the sun. And so it’s integral to human health and animal health and everything, to have periods of darkness, even though they scare us or make us feel unsafe. 

I don’t know the full chain of how it all works, but yes, light pollution is associated with disrupting circadian rhythms, which affects sleep. When you don’t have good sleep, good circadian rhythms, there’s mood and depression issues. It is even linked to obesity, metabolic disorders, diabetes and heart disease, even cancers. It’s a whole host of things. 

We looked at how that disruption [light pollution] changed bird physiology. There are classic studies with sea turtles. With wildlife, light pollution creates a lot of orientation issues. With birds there are fatal collisions with buildings and towers. There’s such a whole range of things. What happens to wildlife and birds is just a precursor. It’s a warning signal for all the same things that are going to affect human health and wellbeing.

LD: I really wanted to just highlight and echo some of the points you were making about the ecosystem damage. The way that it’s intuitive to me, and I think many other science-minded people, is to think of how long life has developed – just, billions of years. 

That’s so hard to imagine, so sometimes with students, I’ll map all of existence to a single calendar year. (Carl Sagan was the one to come up with this [cosmic calendar] I think. I can take no credit.) So if you do that, Big Bang is January 1st, and where we are right now is December 31st at midnight. If you mapped the whole universe to a calendar, cellular life begins somewhere around September. And human life, modern humans, our species, exists in about the last eight minutes. In almost the last one second – so, 11:59:58 – is when Columbus arrived in America. 

To really put it in a deeper perspective, Edison didn’t invent the light bulb ‘till, what, the 1880s? So you’ve got a change that is drastically altering the earth in the last 200 years, put against the way life has evolved since cosmic September. I mean, that’s massive.

It’s integral to human health and animal health and everything, to have periods of darkness, even though they scare us or make us feel unsafe.

That’s amazing. And even if we step into that last eight minutes where humans are – that has also changed, drastically. The sky has shaped whole cultures. 

Around 4500 years ago, people around Cornwall built stone structures that evidence suggests the night sky influenced. It must have been a big part of their culture. MJ, you worked with researchers looking at that evidence. What did they make of it? 

One big thing they discovered was a path between two of the stone circles that was most likely ceremonial. The path surface was made of big, river rock stones, and they were embedded in yellow-gray silt clay from the area that would be kind of glowy in the low light. What the researchers realized was that there was a certain time of year when the Milky Way rose on the far, distant hill to mimic where this path was on the ground between these two stone circles. They conjecture, really convincingly, that this was probably a yearly ceremonial site for these people, where the living communed with the dead. You know, the Milky Way is, in lots of cultures, thought to be the pathway of the ancestors. There were other clues that prehistoric sites were a place to connect with the afterlife. The ancient people would curate bones in some of these stone structures. 

I do feel like the night sky, by these kinds of indicators, was crucial for memorializing the dead and for the full emotional health of the living community. When you think about it, you don’t have pictures. You don’t have writing. You have stories, maybe, but how do you remember people?

And it still factors very prominently in some cultures today. If we were to continue down the path we’re heading, and the night sky as we know it were to completely disappear, how might culture change? What if it were always pink? What if there weren’t stars? What if “I wish upon a star,” or “have you ever seen a shooting star,” were just things that people said in the past? What is culture without a night sky?

MS: There’s an anthropologist who did a lot of work with a group in Africa and came to understand that there were certain things they talked about that they would only talk about at night. Because we evolved as a species to have half of our emotional time at night, I worry about what we, ourselves, are losing about our own capacity and our own range of topics we feel we can discuss when we don’t have a night sky, and we don’t have darkness. 

LD: Building off of that, I think that our future society would have a very different relationship to religion and to death, honestly. Part of the reason I feel that way is very personal. I pursued astrophysics because I have big questions, and I wanted big answers. I wanted to know not just where we came from; I wanted to know, is God real? I was 18 years old and like, can I find God in the universe? Can I find enlightenment? Can I find something that clicks and says, this is what your life is about? That’s where we go to have those big thoughts: We look at the night sky. When people die, we have imagined them, for thousands of years, having something to do with the great beyond. 

The Transcendentalists and Romantics back in the late 1700s and early 1800s taught me that when we go into nature, we see mirrors everywhere. We reflect. There’s a deep self reflection. That resonates with me very strongly. The unique thing about looking at a night sky, or looking at space, is, number one, that it’s uninterrupted, and number two, that it’s the closest thing we have to eternity. I don’t know where else you can really comprehend such large distances and scales of time and space. That’s kind of why I think religion might change without a night sky.

Right now, our generation has a memory of what it feels like to be small, that sense of awe. I think that without that being so intuitive and accessible, religion may feel a lot more mythological – maybe not completely removed, but I think that these myths of things larger than us won’t be as intuitive. Or really, they won’t be relatable, especially considering satellites. 

The thing about satellites is that they’re human-made, and they’re quite obvious. They’re very bright. When I’m out looking at the night sky and I see a satellite, it immediately breaks my immersion. It’s interesting because I’ve had people tweeting at me on some of my images of space that have satellites through them, and they say, I love satellites because I live in an urban area, and they’re the only stars I can see. I think that it’s a terrifying idea that we need to manufacture a night sky because we’re just constantly shouting over ourselves. We shouted light that lit up the night, and now we need to shout louder light to create moving stars. I don’t mean to be depressing or dystopian, but I think that it might really have deep effects on our own cosmology as humans.

CC: It reminds me of the disconnect that people have that a lot of our advancements create. Like, we get water from the tap, and we’re really disconnected from where water comes from and what it takes to have clean water. We get our food in the grocery store, and we’re disconnected from our agricultural systems. We just get so disconnected. I feel like not seeing the night sky is another, super deep disconnect. 

With just all the new SpaceX and people wanting to go into space, my first thought has been, we are in space. We’re on a planet in space, but we’ve prevented ourselves from seeing that. We should put all of that money and energy to curfew lighting, so we can actually all be in space at once and experience it. That’s what it feels like when you can really see all that’s around us. We can’t see the stars, but they’re there. It’s not like extinction of a species, and we can never get it back. We can totally get it back. There are solutions. 

The unique thing about looking at a night sky, or looking at space, is, number one, that it’s uninterrupted, and number two, that it’s the closest thing we have to eternity. I don’t know where else you can really comprehend such large distances and scales of time and space. That’s why I think religion might change without a night sky.

What else threatens our view of the night sky? What should we be on the lookout for in the future?

LD: I think that as things stand right now in October 2024, the greatest threat to seeing the night sky is still ground-based light pollution, adding light where it doesn’t belong, over-lighting. But that could change very quickly, because satellites are a whole other thing that’s taking off quite literally.

Let’s talk about satellites. Today, there are more than 10,000 functioning satellites in space. In just a few years with no mitigation, one study estimated that one of every 16 bright things in the sky will be a moving satellite. According to an article in Science News, that’s like comparing seeing a single car drive by a century ago to living next to a busy interstate in the near future. Say we don’t want that. What do we do to manage this? 

It’s a wild west out there. And no one owns space. So how can anyone put rules or policy in place when it’s space, and we’re just little humans?

LD: That’s such a good question. There are fewer laws about space than there are in the middle of the ocean. If two satellites are approaching each other, it’s not like the highway. There’s no determined pathway, like this is the orbit and you go in a clockwise rotation. No. You get it up in space, and it goes zigzag wherever the orbit is aligned to go. We try to keep things in a calculated trajectory that hopefully won’t have interruptions. But I have heard anecdotally that satellite operators will play chicken if they are both approaching one another. There are no rules of the road for who has to get out of the way. And they’re not just joyriding. Fuel is limited. So if you move out of the way, you’re spending fuel. You’re spending money. 

What I do know from images and observations is that some satellites right now are so large and reflect so much sunlight that they are brighter than the Little Dipper. The Bluewalker 3 satellite is one of them, at its brightest, it is one of the top 20 brightest objects in the sky. 

When satellites are bright like that, do they block out the real stars around them? How does that change what we can see, other than just seeing extra dots up there?

LD: You really can’t tell by the naked eye if it’s a star or a satellite, other than the fact that it looks like a shooting star that doesn’t go away. It looks like a tiny, bright dot that is moving across the night sky. However, if you’re an astronomer trying to look very deep in space [it’s a problem]. Remember that the deeper you look, the farther back in time you’re looking, so if you’re trying to find really, really old galaxies, very distant stars, distant worlds, you need to look at very faint objects. We’re only beginning to understand the universe that way. 

The thing is if you’re trying to take a long exposure photo to see something very faint, very deep in space, if a satellite crosses your field of view, it’s going to saturate your camera because it’s very bright, and you immediately lose that sensitivity. There’s also the fact that the width of the satellite trail through your image can block out stars. Sometimes, depending how close they are to your field of view, they could wipe out an entire galaxy. The most devastating thing, for me, is that they can block time, information about what’s happening at a moment in time. 

Why is the thought of satellites obscuring time so devastating to you?  

My dissertation was in the study of dead stars. Believe it or not, stars live billions of years, but they die within seconds. Our field has what’s called The Astronomer’s Telegram, which is quite literally emails. Little telegrams come out and say, oh, I just saw something flash in the night sky; something just got bright that wasn’t bright before. And everyone jumps on it, doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday, a weekend, middle of the night, middle of the day – everyone jumps on it to look at it. Because there’s information about a star you can only capture in the very, very, very brief moments before it dies. 

We don’t know how a star dies. It’s an open mystery. And if there is a satellite in your way as you’re trying to take that data, that data is gone. It’s not quite the same as photography, where you can edit things out or use AI to change the image or fix it. That information can never be gotten again. It is permanently erased.

CC: Is that why a lot of astronomy now is launching telescopes into space as opposed to relying only on ground based ones? To avoid all the light pollution that we have down here and to hopefully avoid the satellites? How does that work?

LD: Shockingly, Hubble has satellite streaks in it. Hubble is our crowning achievement of the 90s. Some of the most beautiful images of space are either going to be from Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Hubble is a satellite in our Earth’s orbit. About 5% of archival data was found to have satellite streaks in them. That is projected to increase to be up to about 50% at the current rate. 

Wow, 50% when?

LD: The percentage of streaked images goes up depending on the number of satellites in the sky. So if it’s 60,000 satellites by 2030, then there’s a 20% chance of streaked images by 2030. And if there’s 100,000 satellites by 2030, then there’s about a 50% chance. It’s sad, because it’s also our scientific heritage. 

Other people like to point out that JWST is not in our orbit. It’s at what’s called a Lagrange Point. It follows the Earth at a different area in space. So, they reason, its images wouldn’t have as many satellite streaks. Number one, JWST took decades to build, and in our political climate, getting something funded for decades consistently is a very difficult task, and it was extremely expensive. Also, its mirrors are very, very, very delicate, and one of the mirrors got damaged on the way out. So another question I like to bring up in this holistic view is, if we have so many satellites, and we’re creating satellite debris when they break apart or crash into each other, can we even get things out of the Earth’s orbit undamaged, to get to a Lagrange point to take that data that we’re looking for? It’s a lot of ifs. 

Yeah. Are we trapping ourselves in and blocking our own ability to see out? 

LD: Industry as a whole is very well aware that satellites are bright and that it’s causing a problem. At their own cost, they have tried to develop tech that makes satellites darker so that it’s not so bright and disruptive, but it’s a non-trivial task. For example, SpaceX said let’s paint it really, really dark and see if that makes a difference. It worked for some satellites, but not all. 

When I worked on the Hill, I wrote a bill called the Dark and Quiet Skies Act. The purpose of this bill was to put industry, academia, the public and the government together in a room with $20 million and say, can you come up with a solution that makes satellites darker? It’s a hard design challenge.

With all the people wanting to go into space, my first thought has been, we are in space. We’re on a planet in space, but we’ve prevented ourselves from seeing that. We should put all of that money and energy to curfew lighting, so we can actually all be in space at once and experience it.

Bringing us back to Earth: In the future, as more people pack tighter in brighter cities as the world warms, how might light pollution affect migrating birds?  

CC: The way birds migrate, there are a lot of different cues that they use. A lot of birds migrate at night – lots of songbirds – and some of those cues are stars. 

So what if they get lost following a map where one in 16 “stars” are satellites?

CC: It’s kind of amazing how much we have to speculate. These are such unprecedented things. I don’t know. Does it mean that birds would get really lost, and I don’t know what? We already do see a lot of mortality. I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the images from the Chicago Museum or ones of those who are monitoring where collisions are happening at some of these migration pathways. It’s a tremendous number of birds

LD: I’ve noticed, especially where I live in San Diego, it’s very popular to have these large buildings that are basically giant mirrors. I lived in Chicago when the McCormick building had been responsible for something to the tune of like, 1,000 deaths in a single night during peak migration season. I was part of the Dark Sky chapter and was so upset that I went straight to their website to write them a letter to say, we had a lights out program for the migration season, what the heck? And they had a banner on their website as soon as I got there that said something like, “we are aware of what just happened. We’re sorry.” And they promised to participate. But I know that part of bird collisions is also the fact that these mirrored facades reflect the sky, and birds have no idea that there’s something in the way. Is it just a light pollution thing, or is it also a design thing?

CC: Daytime collisions are different, and there’s a lot of research on new products that have been designed related to the type of glass people can put in. There is glass that looks fully transparent to us, but has all kinds of patterns that just the birds can see. It’s a matter of changing out all the glass, but it seems like they can be really effective. Nighttime collisions come from birds getting really disoriented by lights. Even the 911 memorial was a big deal with birds circling like moths around a flame.

I’m about to have you all travel to the future and come back and tell me what you saw. 

So, a quick recap: We’ve talked about dystopian things. We’ve talked about things that we could do now. We’ve talked about lots of satellites going into the sky, people moving into cities. We’ve talked about how more light in the sky affects our bodies and other animals’ bodies and behaviors. And we’ve recalled humankind’s rich cultural history, shaped by our ability to see the night sky. Those stars have helped us to place ourselves in the universe and encouraged us to wonder more about the universe – of which, we still have a lot to learn. 

So say time machines exist, and you went to the future and have just come back. You have, let’s say, three minutes to tell a friend, colleague, family member, the government – somebody – what you saw. What do you want to say in that three minutes?

MJ: You know, as a photographer, I would love to go 10 years ahead and just everyone gets beautiful lighting – and, just, everything’s better off for it. Every species is better off for it. Everybody’s happier and well adjusted and has more spiritual experiences. It just solves so many things. I would just love that, if the garish lighting went away. 

There’s a documentary about the lighting that they put in a housing project in New York City for safety. But it’s essentially like a stadium light that just blares sideways, and it’s really oppressive and assaultive to the community that lives there. So just none of that would be in existence anywhere in the world. I just feel like, wow, beautiful light would solve an enormous amount of problems. 

Thanks. Does anyone else want to jump into the deep end?

LD: The reason I pursued policy was because I wanted to be a part of making those decisions, especially every day. I don’t care if I’m not the loudest voice in the room; I just care that I’m sitting at the table. I think that everybody has that capability, not just in policy, but in loving what you love loudly enough, just so that becomes information that people know. If you love the sky, say it, you know. I love the sky. I love looking at the night sky. It’s important information, and it reaches people more than you think, especially having worked on the Hill. In my policy role, I cared so much about what is popular among constituents because laws pass more easily when they’re popular with people. 

I saw this shower-thoughts tweet years ago, that was like, we always talk about time travel movies where there’s a butterfly effect, like you make one little change and it completely alters everything. But, what if you did that today? And it really just rocked my mind. Oh my God, every little choice I make today is a butterfly effect for the future. I don’t have to go back in time. It’s right now. I think about that too as I’m trying to make a policy suggestion as an analyst. 

I’ll share with you my vision of the future that gets me up in the morning, that made me choose this, rather than the dystopian one that I’m afraid of. I dearly want us to do more with less. I’m used to this in science, where our funding is usually not great. We have to make round pegs fit in square holes. That’s the whole point of innovation, doing more with less. It’s not throwing resources and money at the problem. It’s real innovation and ingenuity. So my vision of a future – maybe it’s 100 years from now – is that we learn how to recycle batteries better. We learn how to take care of garbage and reuse it so that we have a much more enclosed system. Maybe we take best practices from space, where, on the space station you can’t throw anything away. Everything has to re-enter the cycle. To me that’s doing more with less, and that’s something I really hope we adapt more widely as a society.

CC: From the conversation today, what has struck me the most was the talk about the spiritual connections and whatnot, and how important the night sky is, at a kind of spiritual level. When I went to the future and came back, there was some kind of (I don’t know if this is silly, but anyway) connection with churches and planetariums. Those cathedral buildings were planetariums. It was more like the places people seek for spiritual connection are transformed in ways that relate to the night sky and nature-based things, but including our place in the universe.

That’s a wild answer. I love it. 

LD: Love that. Love it. 

When I went to the future and came back, there was some kind of connection with churches and planetariums. Those cathedral buildings were planetariums.

Caren, you do so much with citizen science. Can getting involved in a project help connect people more with the night sky? 

CC: The short answer is yes. I do think that participatory science has a good role to play in helping people, through science, have that emotional, and cognitive, experience. I think that’s what it takes. I mean, I don’t think any of us make decisions logically. We justify it later, but we make decisions emotionally. That’s one of the powerful things with citizen science; it’s experiential. It helps people feel things. 

There are projects, like Globe at Night and the Loss of the Night App, where people contribute information about what they’re seeing with the night sky, their estimated measures of light pollution. With Globe at Night, there’s up to three focal constellations each month, depending on where you live, and you look at one and on a scale of one to seven report how much of it’s visible. 

Yes, people self-select to do a citizen science project. For a lot of folks, by the time they come to that citizen science project, they’re already concerned and aware, and doing that project is a way to express that concern. And yet, they still report it being transformative. People might have an interest in the night sky, but it might not be until they do a project and start to measure what they are experiencing that they really recognize what they’re missing. It’s also really helpful for raising awareness with kids. 

We’ve imagined a little about a future where a preserved night sky is appreciated. But right now, if we care about the night sky, what can we do – as individuals, a society, governments – to promote these futures?

LD: I think that local dark sky ordinances are huge. It would be great to have a federal dark sky law, but when it comes down to it, it’s not the role of the government. The government doesn’t control individual houses, so it has to be local ordinances. Before I got involved, I thought that local law meant nothing. But now I would say that if you are involved in local politics, or you want to be, that is very impactful. 

Also, never underestimate the humanities. It is critical. It is so crucial. Art is deeply intuitive, and it catches us in a way in which we are unaware. I would love to hear how people’s responses have been to MJ’s work, because I think that’s when it becomes deeply personal. I can’t overstate enough how important that is, even from a policy perspective. Like I said, policy moves the masses, but you’re not going to pass policy if it’s not already popular. 

MJ, what has the response been to your work? 

MS: A director at a museum in Ohio where my work has been showing just emailed me about classes she’s taken through my show. They go into my show, go down a dark corridor that’s only lit by red lights on the floor, and make a hairpin turn at the end. She said what these students do is they go, and they immediately collapse in these chairs and kind of power down. Their anxiety level goes way down, self reported. Then they start having really interesting insights that are untethered to facts and figures. It sounded as though this happens reliably. She noticed too that they weren’t leaving. She was having to say, okay, class is over. They just didn’t want to leave.

I was workshopping it here in town at The Fruit, in Durham. It’s a 22,000-square-foot black warehouse space. It was really dark inside, with just red lights around to see by. I had these 9 by 13 feet projections of these Cornwall images. People would sit in front of these things and not talk to each other –  not even to who they came with. They didn’t feel any need to be social and introduce themselves and catch up or anything like that. They just came into a dim space and immediately went into this other headspace and stayed there. Then they would go and bring back their wife or husband or their friend, because it was only going to be up for a day. And they kept coming back with other people.

People are starved for a no- or unbelievably-minimal-stimulus that gives you permission to not be multitasking, to not be actively thinking and just letting yourself be in this holding state, this kind of indeterminate state. That’s really, really rare. These things, for whatever reason, in whatever way, absolutely give people permission to do that. It’s like this image tethers them to that space for as long as they want to stay. 

That kind of ties in all your futures together, right? Say we had these night ordinances; that changes the culture, maybe suddenly. And every night, that’s become the thing that families do. They go outside when the lights turn out and power down themselves.

CC: I study soundscapes, and we had a project this year, and we had students do a five-minute listening session and tell us all the types of sounds they heard and rate them. So many of the students responded also saying it was so great to have this permission to go outside for five minutes and just listen to the sounds. It was permission to do nothing but just experience whatever is there. Sometimes these spaces just need to be there – whether it’s art or, in this case, science – and these experiences are being taken away.

About the interviewees

Caren Cooper is a professor of Forestry and Environmental Resources at NC State University. Besides research on participatory science, her lab has published a number of papers on the ecology of lightscapes and soundscapes. 

Insider recommendation: What would some of the worlds’ most iconic cityscapes look like without light pollution? Check out Under Lucky Stars’ Clear Night Sky for an interactive web experience “that sparks imagination,” Cooper says.

MJ Sharp is a photographer, artist and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. She was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Exeter, UK, for the 2021/2022 academic year pursuing the art/science collaboration Our Disappearing Darkness and Recreating True Night with nocturnal ecologist Dr. Kevin Gaston. 

Insider recommendation: Check out these links from MJ’s Disappearing Darkness lecture or the images projected in her show at The College of Wooster Art Museum. Visualize the light pollution in your area with this map or the light pollution atlas from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Dig really deep and calculate the dark sky based on your own observations using the Bortle Dark Sky Scale.

Lindsay DeMarchi is an astrophysicist, space environmentalist and policy analyst at the Aerospace Corporation. She  writes about the gaps in space policy and what they might mean for the future. 

Insider recommendation: Check out the natural soundscapes and photography by Louise Beer. Play a few albums by musical artist Lord Huron. “Strange Trails evokes stars peeping through mountain pines; Vide Noir is a mind untethered in the blackness of space; Long Lost is finding oneself in forgotten liminal spaces,” DeMarchi says.

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