And now it will also be ruined if you live in nature. That's an awful attempt at an excuse that doesn't solve anything. We should be fighting to improve this situation, not be complacent and allow it to get worse.
That reminds me of the story of an Old Believer Russian family that moved to Siberia around the 1920s and was only found again by Soviet miners in 1970s. The patriach of the family was not educated, but he and his children managed to infer that the fast moving stars newly risen in the 1950s to be man-made stars (satellites).
Sorry. 1936-1978.
Still
Here you go:
"though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
It’s often claimed how there is no night sky for anyone anywhere near a city these days, so if you prefer to live in one (or believe that is the ultimately sustainable choice to reduce humanity’s environmental footprint) you couldn’t care less about all those satellites flying overhead.
Speaking from experience, that is not true. On a clear moonless night a few months before COVID I saw uncountable stars when I looked up from a rooftop in a moderately busy part of Kowloon of all places. (Sure, I might’ve mistaken a few satellites for celestial bodies, but I made an effort to ignore at least the non-geostationary ones.)
If you cannot see night sky in your city, consider that your AQI may be too high at the moment. (Going up to the roof wouldn’t hurt either.) It doesn’t mean you couldn’t enjoy stars where you live ever again.
Have you ever been to a truly dark sky area though? I used to think I could see a lot of stars and then I went to a truly remote area 100's of miles from a large city and dozens of miles from even small settlements and my mind was blown away by the clarity of the milky way.
I’ve been to pretty wild places with stark skies, though didn’t especially care to observe it at the time to be honest.
Goes without arguing that outside of a city is generally easier to observe night sky because pollution is weaker. However, if the place far from a city has polluted air for whatever reason it’ll still be a problem—and conversely even in a city air and light pollution are not a given, subject to regulations and climate patterns.
I’ve seen our Milky Way, not in HK but in another city (smaller but stronger air pollution). It was very weak (first, air pollution amplifying light pollution; second, it was not too high above the horizon when I was awake), but not seeing it in all of its glory doesn’t mean city dwellers have to concede that they lost the sky completely even now, much less 100 years ago—because they obviously haven’t.
They will continue to whine until all observation is done from outer space.
On the one hand, it's good to have a reminder as it's important that interference with terrestrial astronomy is taken into account when designing new space missions. On the other hand, the degree to which the whining is being amplified by doing it in news articles gives it a bit of "shitting where you sleep" quality - my feeling is they're already quite successfully souring the nascent space industry to the general population, which is extremely counterproductive long-term, especially for people whose fields' existence depends pretty much entirely on goodwill and surplus funding.
In other words: excessive whining about space utilization will not stop launches of telecom satellites and subsequent light and radio pollution, but it may very well make it so no one will have the will and the spare cash to fund the next space-based telescope.
As a sibling comment pointed out, most people impacted by this will be amateur astronomers, and, you know, casual star gazers.
Secondly, this isn't "souring the space industry". LEO satellites mostly serve terrestrial companies and governments, where they're used for military, communication, and, increasingly, other commercial purposes. The complaints aren't about space tourism projects or launching a few space telescopes; they're about launching thousands of satellites, and fueling the commercialization of LEO, where the sky will eventually be littered by these things. We're at the very early stages of this, and individuals are already voicing concerns about it. I hope this "whining" continues, as I sure as hell don't want to also see ads when I look up into the sky.
Except most organizations can barely afford their ground-based observatories as it is, so to think you can chuck enough capacity into orbit to compensate even a fraction of it for anywhere close in budget is wishful thinking.
It will be a nuisance for amateur astronomers too (for astro-photography people anyway), since they are more likely to take wide-angle shots (increasing likelihood of bright transient in shot) and have less technical means to compensate for it.
And they certainly don't have the budget to launch their own satellites..
