Hopeful Night.

I could not agree with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson more and his opinion of what we are losing from the absence of night, and what we are artificially gaining from it. In the film The City Dark he makes this powerful statement: “You could live your life at home ever looking up … [but] I … submit to you that you’ll be missing a point of view, … a cosmic perspective, because you’ll start thinking of your own environment as all there is. And if that’s how you think about where you are, then it rises to an artificial level of importance to you, whereas, when you look at the night sky and you realize how small we are within the cosmos, it’s kind of a resetting of your ego, to deny yourself of that state of mind, either willingly or unwillingly, in my judgment, is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human” (qtd. in City dark). What is most important and true about this passage is how humans are rising to an artificial level of importance. We live in boxes, leave for work in our four wheeled machines so early its not yet light out, work all day in bigger boxes until we come home when the sun is already setting. Tired from working all week we don’t even go outside anymore, we watch people star gaze in movies, and pay to look at the stars in planetariums, but rarely do we go out on our own and see them for ourselves. 

The light pollution has gotten so bad in some cities that many have no idea about the wonders of the sky, they are content with the 20 stars the see above because they know nothing different. There are many groups of individuals who study the worlds above us, chasing the universe as if it is escaping. In a way it is, our impact on the purity of night has become so great that it is bleeding into the sky. Scientists and star gazers are searching all over the world to find and hold on to the last few remaining dark places, areas we have yet to contaminate with our constant need for light and power.

Image source: http://www.sdaa.org/images/cityLightsLg.jpg

What is motivating about light pollution is it has a direct and effective solution, not many man made environmental issues have this ability. This is not realistic but for the sake of this example let’s say it is, if suddenly one night we turned off all the lights, every office building, all the street lights, all the homes, and signs, light pollution would disappear. People would see the cosmos, and more importantly animals would see the cosmos. Turning off the lights would not reverse the damage humans have done to nature, but as we know nature is resilient and if we turned off the lights entire species would thrive. If this actually happened, even for just one night it could inspire people. If people never see the stars for themselves they will never have anything to compare them to, but if they do see the stars, look up and feel breathless and full of awe maybe they will become advocated for the stars.