i remember when i was a kid, i was hiking with my parents and we spent a night on about 2500m and looking up i obviously had a great view of the cosmos BUT i also could see some satelites moving and even the then MIR space station. i was impressed that "we" are actually up there for everyone down here to see. i guess the current generation want's a pristine night sky AND 24/7 internet, gps and tv.
A. Why is this a generational thing? I guess you’re a boomer or xer?
B. 1 or two satellites or space stations are neat. Your story was from a time when not every company in the world could get something up there with little regulation.
C. Yeah, nature is always more beautiful than our creations. Imagine many years from now when there may be so many visible satellites in the sky it’s not a novelty like it was to you as a child.
D. This kind of apathy is how we got into the climate crisis today.
early millennial. it's just funny how many ppl start to become critical about "space junk" since they realized that "twitter man bad" has some of them, ignoring, how dependent they are on all that stuff flying around there. love your sidestep to the current day topic, tho.
engineers and the military talked about space junk for obvious reason, but no one lamented working satellites because the antagonist celeb of the month launched them into space.
Exactly. No one is even mentioning how Amazon launched its first of 3,200 Kuiper satellites today. This is just another Musk complaining topic usually.
The current generation, AND the previous generation (that being millennials, many of whom are now in their 40s) both would rather the natural beauty of our entire planet not be destroyed just so the likes of Elon Musk can sell a product.
move out of the city, away from any night light and then just ignore the occasional ring of dots that takes up like 0.00003% of the night sky for the average stargazer; why does everyone now pretend to be copernicus?
That seems more than a tad hyperbolic. My wife and I enjoy sitting in our backyard next to the fire and stargazing every now and again. We'll catch maybe a dozen satellites on a good night, during the couple hours post-sunset when you can actually catch the sunlight glinting off them. By about 2 hours after sunset, the number of objects that are both high enough to still reflect sunlight and large enough to see is pretty tiny.
I see vastly more planes with blinking lights and bright landing lights than I do satellites, and this has been the case for decades, but somehow that's not a threat to our enjoyment of the night sky?
Every light adds to light pollution though and makes it more difficult for earth-based astronomy. And that's excluding events where satilites pass through observations.
Yeah I once read a book describing the soon coming end of the world from every century going beck to PraiseGod Barebones the English politician who prophesised the coming end of the world in 1675, they all said the same thing 'mankinds huberis and sudden turn to immorality has doomed us all'
The good news is that it gives us a useful heuristic to ignore the uninformed and unsupported moaning of "we're dooooomed" without needing to spend any additional effort. Leaves more time for dealing with meaningful discussion.