“But it is my right to see the mweeky way! Stop all electricity!”
Oh good lord...
No, no one is talking about “rights” or taking away “muh electricity”. People are talking about the needlessness of shining streetlights and your house floodlights into the sky (or straight out into other people’s yards), where they arent doing jack but blotting out the sky. What are you “protecting” by pointing a light straight up anyway?
And I find it odd that as much as we talk about how we are the protectors of western civilization, and traditionalism, one of the pillars of it were the common knowledge and use of the night sky for navigation, timekeeping, religious observance, and the regulating of crop planting/harvesting, not to mention many of the early classical works were in part either directly tied to constellation mythology or were direct descendants of mythology that came from the same.
To just casually blot that out is no different than some professor ignoring classical knowledge because we have “better” stuff to replace it.
I live in a remote rural area and can see the Milky Way just fine except when there are summer people and tourists occupying the tourist cabins scattered along this road-I don’t get why they come out here to BFE and turn on all the lights on the property-including those mercury vapor ones on 20 foot tall poles-you’d think they’re expecting a robbery or a driveby shooting as if they were in the high-crime area of a major city...
The glow from the nearest city-almost 50 miles away-is almost completely hidden by the hills between here and there-I do have to get out from under the overhanging trees to watch meteor showers...
“People are talking about the needlessness of shining streetlights and your house floodlights into the sky”
Who shines needlessly into the sky? The lights shine and a fraction of it is bounced back to the sky. When there are hundreds of thousands of lights, the sky would be naturally “polluted”. Look at the night sky from space. Civilized places have glowing nights. If you want to see the best view of the milky way, nobody is stopping you from going to Africa or Antarctica. Btw, the modern Western Civilization was built on electricity. Hands off “muh electricity”.