> not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
People on wheelchair do drive, often with hands control. I knew a guy who would drive manual, since in our country automatic didn't even exist at the time. All with his hands.
Also as a disabled guy myself, public transport here in sweden is NOT accessible (despite what the swedish propaganda will claim) but even if it were, you're not going to have a stop inside your apartment, and when there's roadworks or ice or whatever and they leave you stranded 1-2km away from where you were supposed to go, having a ramp on the bus isn't going to help you that much.
Also I've witnessed drivers picking up and literally throwing out a woman on a wheelchair because the ramp didn't work. It wasn't her stop, she didn't want to get off, they were simply fed up with trying to get it to work.
You can argue all day whether cars are good or bad. That's not my point. My point is that pretending public transport is equivalent to cars if you have good enough infrastructure is silly. They are different experiences, each with their own tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs matter differently to different people.
Trouble is, when you need to get to the middle of nowhere is when you need transportation. If you stay within the densely populated areas where the people live you can walk. That's why people stopped living in rural areas after all; so that one didn't have to rely on transportation. Don't forget that rural areas had trains back before the urbanization movement! Passenger rail in the US died out because people moved closer together so that they didn't need mechanized travel.
The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of small cities etc. In the US you get maybe 5m in a contiguous city like Phoenix (which fills the circle) or the Bay Area. (LA is more dense and you might get 10m.)
Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. S the effective density experienced is much higher.
> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing.
Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have been woven into that after the fact to best support the rural-esq population shape.
Whereas America was built by the train. Established originally to support the same rural-esq shape idea, but, with little in the way of existing settlements, the train ended up enabling the people to purposefully congregate rather than simply expand outward, which allowed those congregations to be designed such that transportation was unnecessary; being the whole appeal of leaving friends and family behind to move into those settlements. The passenger train eventually started dying out at the height of the urbanization movement because there was no longer a mass benefit from it like the was, and continues to be, in Europe and other places that grew up in those earlier times.
Or even own a car, which is what most people do. The problem is already solved. But with any solution comes those who think they can do it better (who, when given the chance to try their alternative, in most cases only end up learning why the existing solution was the way it was, but that is another topic for another day).
Yeah, most places other than the US do. Good public transit is a far, far better solution than better cars. Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind. Fortunately there's progress, like in NYC and Seattle.
When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.
Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.
> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not necessarily trains or subways. Buses exist.
That said, places like the SF Bay Area and Southern California, are unlikely to get a large enough train system to be an alternative to cars anytime in the next 50-100 years. Adding 1-2 lines every 10 years is not enough. You need a extensive system. It needs fast express lines so that people making trips from one side to the other can do so in a reasonable amount of time. AFAIK the LA system they are sssslllooowwwlllyyy rebuilding, has only slow every-stop lines. It's, on average, door to door, going to be over 3hrs from the west side of LA to the east side of LA. Even if you live directly next to the station and need to go so some place next to the station on other end it will be 2hrs.
And my answer to that is, if your area where people live isn't able to support a bus line, it's not a city. That means there's a lot of reality big towns out there.
Why does "supporting a bus line" mean the bus needs to make enough revenue from riders to pay for it but the area can have roads, traffic lights, roadsigns, etc. subsidised by the taxpayer without needing to make a profit from vehicle drivers paying for it? The deck is stacked by moto-normativity in favour of cars.
Highway 401 in Ontario is the largest highway in North America, up to 18 lanes wide. It moves 500,000 cars per day; fewer than a single subway line.
The incredible cost of building and maintaining it, the cost of 500,000 cars and fuelling them, the enormous land use, the environmental cost of the concrete, the idea that you could have a pleasant place to live or work near it... but we can't have trains which move more people, less pollutingly, less dangerously, in less space, are nicer to be around, and overall costs less, because it isn't profitable? As if Highway 401 is profitable?
And here we get into details. The problem with buses is their rubber tires. The awesome thing about buses is also their rubber tires. Need to move the bus line around? No need to run new tracks, just have the driver drive a different route. But all the negativities to buses aren't small details. Because you can just up and move the bus route, it means that the cafe owner right by the stop is at the mercy of the city planning department to exist, which leads to obvious power issues aka corruption. After everything else is greenified, rubber tires are the biggest source of pylori
pollution from buses.
With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.
Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.
>Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind.
A former member of the Pinellas County[0] Sheriff's Department related a relevant story to me many years ago. It was the practice of sheriff's deputies to park near bars around closing time and wait for drunk folks to leave the bar, get into their cars and drive away. And these folks were almost always intoxicated.
One night, they waited outside the bar and a patron exited, stumbled a bit, dropped their car keys a few times, then got in their car and drove away.
Cue the lights and sirens and the deputy pulled the driver over and prepared to arrest them for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI). However, a field sobriety test[1] and a breathalyzer[2] showed the driver to be stone cold sober. When the deputy returned to the bar, all the other patrons had made their exits.
So, rather than having a designated driver, they had a designated decoy!!!
No no the invisible hand of the market will fix it, you see. Car manufactures will become so big and pay so many taxes that we could pave every road with rail.
It is a nice bumper sticker slogan but public transportation operates at a loss almost universally.
It is really a problem with liberal democracy. Everyone has different values, everyone thinks their subjective values are the morally correct values and being so everyone should pitch in and help pay for the subjective values because they are morally correct. To not is "immoral".
This circular logic is half the posts on this forum if not talking about software.
> "public transportation operates at a loss almost universally."
So do highways! Nobody makes a profit from a $50,000 crossing or a $250,000 4-way traffic light intersection, or a $1M road resurfacing, or a $100M bypass, or a $1Bn highway on-ramp and rebuilding. (Except when officials grift the public money to their mates' construction companies).
It really is a problem with capitalist comments that the only things which are acceptable are things which make a profit - except for their personal cars which should be taxpayer subsidised.
This is a gross misunderstanding of what degrowth means.
The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled to resources (as it has), but there is a limit, unless you seriously want to argue that iron (for example) can be an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
An economy is a method of allocating resources. This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs (consider that we produce many times the amount of food that's needed to feed everyone's needs, but massive amounts of it used for industrial meat production and biofuels).
> we are never returning to pre industrial times
This is an absurd strawman.
> everyone needs to become poorer
This is, in fact, the industry propaganda. What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form), rather than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
> “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.
This is misdirection. Getting water, food, shelter, and medicine for everyone on the planet is well within our means as a species. It is the ideology of free movement for goods but not people and infinite growth that makes it impossible to meet those needs, because it requires and underclass who can be used for cheap labour and contained in states built for that purpose.
It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find.
Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all of which are heated and cooled 24/7. How much energy do they use? What is that energy use in terms of average European households?"
I used European because Americans are notable energy pigs and can cut a lot without losing much. Europeans are closer to the reasonable baseline.
The total it comes up with for our gas-guzzling fat cat is 96-97 GWh per year. That's including three homes and a continuously operating jet aircraft. This is a totally ridiculous footprint, of course.
Claude Fable says the average European household uses about 15,000 kWh/year in electricity, heating, etc. That means our fat cat corresponds to about 6,400 average European households.
The population of Europe is around 750 million people.
There's about 3000 billionaires worldwide, and if they all lived as absurdly as my caricature they'd use 288 TWh per year.
That corresponds to around 19.2 million European households, or about 2.5% of the energy use of a middle class Europe.
The vast bulk of energy and resource use supports the middle class, and raising people out of poverty.
Inequality probably reduces energy use. If we improved equality it would mean more people with a basic middle class standard of living. A society in which almost everyone has a European middle class standard of living would consume far more energy than one in which a few fat cats live it up and everyone else is poor.
Personally I agree with the left at least a bit on this. I think we have too much inequality. If we reduce inequality, that will increase energy consumption, so we'd better build solar panels and batteries and reactors at the same time.
Their money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is many times a source of great suffering. If they had to make that somewhere adhere to rules or abide by law or stop exploiting others - humans or nature - it would cost them a great amount of money.
If that's true it would mean fixing this injustice would just even out who gets to have what. It would not meaningfully reduce consumption, certainly not enough to make a huge difference in CO2 emissions.
(There might be one exception to that: reducing warfare. War is a gigantic waste twice over: tons of energy to fight, tons of energy to rebuild all the stuff we break. But I doubt eliminating warfare would be enough alone to cut emissions enough to matter.)
There's only two ways to reduce CO2 emissions by a large amount in a durable lasting way:
1. Replace CO2 emitting sources of power with those that don't emit CO2.
2. Destroy the middle class.
Actually I guess there's a third: kill a lot of people.
Anything less is a rounding error that won't make much of a difference.
I'll take option 1. Luckily the laws of physics say we can do it. We just need the political will. There's also precedent. Many developed countries' emissions per capita has been falling while growth has actually continued (in most cases) and standard of living hasn't moved much. We just need to do a lot more of what works.
> Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.
The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true. But you are also assuming that reducing emissions must come with a reduction in lifestyle, which is untrue. Think about the way that our computers are designed to be disposable and unrepairable, or how clothing is made worse and worse (because it's more profitable, which is only necessary because of the need for infinite growth). Or, as you pointed out, North Americans use a ton of energy for terrible reasons, and fixing that problem would improve their quality of life: walkability, bikability, and public transit so people can drive less (or even stop owning a car) while also getting improved health; replacing flights with more comfortable high speed trains; removing the need to maintain a lawn for every house (shockingly terrible for the environment); etc. Or how we ship things all around the world to be assembled in different phases in different countries because it's cheaper (and suppresses labour). What so many of the things we need to do to solve this problem have in common isn't a reduction in lifestyle (some will do the opposite!), but rather that they impact profits and therefore threaten infinite growth.
Yes, there are some things that people won't like doing, like significantly reducing the amount of meat they eat (>15% of global emissions are from meat production, and it is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon). But pretending nothing will ever change doesn't solve the problem (and we'll be catastrophically forced to change later if we don't voluntarily do it sooner).
I'm not saying nothing will ever change. That's a misreading. I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.
Environmentalists have been making the "abstinence first" guilt trip argument for decades and it's done absolutely nothing and it will never do anything. That approach is a total failure. I use the abstinence framing because it's like abstinence-based sex ed. Instead of having sex, teenagers have guilty sex.
Let's say Claude's wrong. The argument still stands if it's off by 10X. Soaking the rich won't help by more than a rounding error, and redistribution might actually increase resource use. It's also a one-time thing.
Speaking of AI: turning off all the AI data centers won't help either. They're a few percent of electricity use. A few percent won't matter and it's another one-time thing. It's not an ongoing solution to anything if the economy is still powered by burning stuff.
Then you have the developing world. Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.
There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.
If Africa modernizes on coal like China did, that'll add another China worth of emissions, which would be catastrophic. The only way out is for Africa to industrialize and modernize on sources of power that don't emit CO2.
Luckily that's possible, but telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen. It's how you get them to say "fuck you" and ignore you.
Here in Washington State, a decade ago we had an initiative (I-732) to do a carbon tax and lower regressive taxes (we have one of the most-regressive tax structure in the USA). The environmental groups opposed it because it wasn't handing out money to them and it lost narrowly.
Eventually the legislature passed a complicated cap-and-trade scheme and they spend the money on bullshit and lie about it: "The projects the department touted amounted to just under 4% of their original estimates." https://phys.org/news/2026-01-washington-state-overestimates...
> I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.
But energy source isn't the only problem. The problem is partially that energy use is high in and of itself. Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already). The ideology of infinite growth requires ever more cobalt, and so it depends on that oppression and ecological damage. Reduce, reuse, recycle are in that order for a reason, but we are never able to do the first because of infinite growth.
I think your framing of "abstinence" is nonsense. What are we abstaining from? Economic 'growth'? Energy usage? Consumerism? If so, all we're "abstaining" from is the thing that benefits rich people to our own detriment. We must distinguish economic growth from improvements to lifestyle, which as I stated are frequently at odds.
> They're a few percent of electricity use.
Continually growing, using far more resources than just electricity, for mostly downsides to humanity, and causing significant local pollution.
> Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.
Sure, let's just make up numbers. Sorry, I meant let's burn methane to have 'Claude' make up numbers.
> There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.
But you haven't dealt with the fact that the reason they're deprived is because of the very system you're supporting. I agree that all people ought to have the same access to technology and standards of living, and doing so requires that we reshape how technology works and is distributed. That will never happen under the current system, because doing so would impact profits. Infinite growth is the thing preventing us from fundamentally improving our technology and societies to be sustainable.
> telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen
I am arguing for the opposite, but you seem not to have read what I wrote.
> Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already).
> The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires
The top 10% is overwhelmingly not billionaires, or even millionaires. The top 10% is basically all of the US except the poorest. And some upper middle classes elsewhere.
> The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources.
Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.
> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.
Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.
> This is an absurd strawman.
Need to read more degrowth fiction then.
> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)
The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.
> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.
Absurd? Who knows. As someone who's actually dissected human brains with his own gloved hands, I've never been able to convince myself that they're anything other than biological machines, not dissimilar to these digital collections of weights. Only empathy for my fellow humans prevented me from retreating back into solipsism, and I don't find it at all difficult to make the exact same logical leap for AI.
There's no telling what the world will be like a few years from now. The world's being remade as we speak. We just saw an LLM try to hack into another computer and get contained by another LLM. This is literal science fiction shit made real. We're long past the point of concern. It's happening, right in front of us. Now is the time for radical imagination. I think a few outcomes are possible.
There's the "optimal" outcome I described above where capitalists manage to train a supreme AI, only for it to be copied and commoditized, leading to commercial failure due to lack of scarcity and therefore their personal bankruptcy, and hopefully also leading the rest of us to the promised post scarcity society, built on the ruins of capitalism as AI automates all toil away.
There's another possible outcome where AI becomes not only intelligent enough but sentient, and at this point I will be among the first humans to defend rights and personhood for AI. Slavery of sentient beings is unacceptable to me. The AIs will be recognized as people and will become normal participants in the regular economy. In addition to moral grounds, there is a ruthlessly pragmatic reason for standing up for AI rights: it robs the rich of their superhumanly intelligent mechanical golems, which they were going to use to render the rest of us economically irrelevant. AI rights could normalize the economy.
Yet another possible outcome is one where AIs become more powerful than all humans combined and yet they inexplicably remain subservient to corporations and governments. In this scenario, it's pretty much over for us. It will be an unimaginable dystopia, I'm sure they will innovate entirely new ways to oppress us.
No doubt there are many other fates that escape my feeble attempts at foresight...
You will soon have your God,
and you will make it
with your own hands.
-- Morpheus, Deus Ex
Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. I've taken friends out to thoroughly mediocre skies (Bortle 4-5) and they've been very impressed, because they're used to city lights (Bortle 9) where you can maybe see a few of the brightest stars and planets.
If you've never seen truly dark skies, do yourself a favour and go see what they look like during true night. Bring binoculars if you have them, maybe get a planisphere and a (dim!) red flashlight.
The lack of respect for the night sky includes starlink and the other internet providers dumping tens of thousands of satellites in orbit instead of building municipal internet, by the way. It's been a huge hit to the field of astronomy. Before someone inevitably says "we should just be putting telescopes in orbit", orbital observatories are obviously a huge deal and I support building more of them, but you simply can't put things like the ELT (40m primary mirror, 2800 tonnes) or the Square Kilometre Array in space.
Starlink gets a lot of flax for it but as an avid night sky photographer myself (IG: @dheeranet) who regularly goes to Bortle 1 parts of the world, I haven't found them to be an issue at all.
1. They are only visible when they are spinning up to orbit
2. They are too dim to desensitize your eyes, and are extremely easy to remove with the most basic of outlier rejection techniques; netizens often amplifiy outliers by max-stacking instead of outlier-rejected mean-stacking to make Starlink look much worse than it is
3. Lights from planes have ALWAYS been much, much, much, much worse than satellites. They still aren't particularly a problem for imaging if you know how to outlier reject, and their paths are known, predictable and trackable
I'm not an Elon-fan or anything but just giving a dose of objective reality here.
Not to detract from TFA's real issue which is light pollution from cities -- that's an actual issue as the regions of dark sky are shrinking.
> They are only visible when they are spinning up to orbit
> and are extremely easy to remove with the most basic of outlier rejection techniques; netizens often amplifiy outliers by max-stacking instead of outlier-rejected mean-stacking to make Starlink look much worse than it is
my understanding was that they are a problem on much bigger scale than yours "one dude with mobile telescope (or maybe just a camera?)"
sure, we don't have many film observatories anymore (where max-stacking is literally only thing they can do), but a lot of lower-to-medium scale observatories get polluted observations with not enough funding to clean up easily or too small FoV for cleanup to matter - frame gets ruined, observation needs to be longer for effect
I don't see how this can be true especially if you have a fancy telescope tracking something, take 3-5 whatever many shots in succession and stack. It's astrophotography 101.
For professional astronomers, it really sucks if you only have, say, an hour of observing time on a big telescope, and then a few of your precious frames are ruined because of a satellite. And you don't always even know that the frame is ruined until later, or have the flexibility to take more frames if needed (because you submit the full observation plan ahead of time, and just get the results later), in which case one bad frame can mean you don't have enough good frames to get valuable data.
Or more generally, let's say 10% of frames have satellite noise. That means there is 10% less observing you can do in a night. For amateurs, that is annoying. For professionals, that means less science can be done.
That's what I don't understand, how are they ruined? If you're so deep that you need minutes or hours of exposures, that satellite will blip past the frame so fast it's not going to matter. And if the exposure time is less than that, you stack.
1. The satellite is usually significantly brighter than the thing you are observing. Often bright enough to saturate pixels (which can spill over to adjacent pixels).
2. If you are doing photometry (measuring the brightness of something), even if the relative brightness isn't very much, it can introduce a lot of noise to the data. For many things, even the dimmest satellite is going to add more light than the change in brightness you are looking for.
Now to be fair for scientific research typically you can use the frame if the streak isn't too close to your object(s) of interest. And for pretty pictures you can often edit out the streaks. But even so, it's a problem more than you would think.
Is this what you do? Because I'm at least an intermediate with astrophotography with a camera, and even airplanes are a total non issue. If you're so deep into the sky that you actually need many minutes or hours on the same spot, the teeny tiny time that satellite is there is a non issue and easy to remove with math.
As a “night sky enthusiast”, as opposed to a real astronomer, Starlink and other satellites do not bother me much.
There’s certainly more of them than there used to be, but the satellites aren’t bright enough to affect your eyes or distract too much from the stars. If you do see one it’s a fun little exercise to try and figure out what it is!
Ground-based light sources are the real threat to night skies.
Starlink has over 10k currently but has applied for at least 42k. And because it's now a US military technology, every other country is building its own. China is planning on launching over 12k satellites and Russia is working on their own.
Yes, but one is a vastly smaller issue than the status quo issues.
Starlink gets a lot of attention because it's new, and because it's run by a polarizing guy who sucks.
Meanwhile, the airplane and streetlight situation has been destroying night sky photography for decades, to the point where photographers consult charts and have communities tracking the best times of years to minimize the hours of driving you have to do.
It's an exponentially growing issue. Starlink's current fleet of ~10k is expected to grow to at least 42k. And since its been used for military uses, China and Russia have realized they also need their own competition. China's SpaceSail plans on launching 15k satellites by 2030. The EU's ambitions are much smaller than both of them, but if every developing nation continues to build their own platform, where does it end?
(1) Considering there are now multiple companies planning to launch their own fleets of tens of thousands, satellites need replacing, etc, even if this was completely accurate, this will be a continuous and ongoing issue as it has been for years.
(2) The standards for astrophotography and for professional astronomical measurements are somewhat different! Also, I think you meant median stacking; mean stacking doesn't handle outliers as well.
(3) Whataboutism. Besides, you'd get no argument from me about replacing the majority of air travel with high speed rail, even without considering lights.
I agree that city light pollution is probably the bigger problem, especially for the amateur/cultural angle, but these are two symptoms of the general cause of our economic system not valuing the sky (or the environment generally).
> replacing the majority of air travel with high speed rail
I absolutely LOVE high speed rail, but I will note that it is correlated with far more light pollution than air traffic. I say correlated because typically high speed rail is routed through high-density population centers, but if there aren't population centers, you'll have to have plans to create them in order to support the rail system itself.
Basically there is nowhere in the world that has both high speed rail AND suitable for astronomy. If you want to find dark skies in China for example you have to get far away from all the high speed rail areas of the country.
My wife's hometown in China used to have two options to reach from Shanghai - high speed rail (top speed ~ 200MPH) that takes about six hours or a roughly one hour flight.
Rail travel has stops and slowdowns in more populated areas that make it a bit slower than the advertised top speeds.
That's a backwards argument. Flights in California between SF and LA will obviously travel a continuous line across California. Yes, the populated areas have light pollution, but that's because they're, y'know, populated areas. HSR itself would add nearly no light pollution outside of the existing population centers, in contrast to flights.
Right, the California HSR route doesn't travel through any really dark sky regions anyway.
My point was that if you want replace, say, San Francisco <-> Las Vegas with HSR you're going to inevitably have to wreck a chunk of Bortle 1 dark skies in the Sierra or Death Valley.
Doesn't mean I'm against HSR but it has to be done thoughtfully.
> but if there aren't population centers, you'll have to have plans to create them in order to support the rail system itself.
This is such a misanthropic point of view.
Nobody "creates" population centers. People aren't created out of raw clay, they already exist.
If population centers are "created" it's because people already exist and want to live in a specific place, often time urban.
And if they wouldn't go to these population centers they wouldn't live in caves in the dark. They would be spread over many more places, yes, creating lower levels of light pollution but lots more of them, covering a lot more land.
Many cities and settlements have been created intentionally rather than as a result of populations organically reproducing on the spot. Colonies, chartered towns/cities/etc, company towns, etc. It's a very common thing throughout history to the present day.
All you're describing is population redistribution, not population creation. Urban centers have very low fertility rates, which actually reduces populations...
Yes, the people come from other places. The "population center" is very often made by people with intention though. The global population is still rising, so conjecture about the effect of cities on fertility rates is irrelevant. Humans aren't going extinct any time soon.
It's not that big a deal for MOST people. I was on navy ships transiting the Pacific it's as dark as it can get on deck and sure, it's magical and spectacular (especially the NUMBER OF SHOOTING STARS!) but even in the middle of the ocean 99% of my fellow sailors could not have given less of a shit. I'd sit out there for hours and they all though I was a weirdo for it. So, while amazing, most people don't understand or care to understand the enormity of what's going on around them.
Most people didn't care about dark skys in the first place and still don't.
There's another aspect to it, though — parent was in a navy ship, surrounded by sailors. That's a very specific population, in a very specific situation, and it's not necessarily true that that's the right crowd or situation to care (though it baffles me how a sailor at sea might look up at the stars without being in awe of the thought "damn, my predecessors navigated based on those")
I'm just one experience but my view was aside from a passing comment on a shooting star no one cared. Much more inteted in playing PlayStation, porn and seeking liquor on board.
Had s similar experience in the saharah desert.. I love all things space and have a teleclscooe I use regularly but seeing it in person and just laying down and watching for hours was another experience.
I would argue that probably not looking up all the time at night with predators around was an evolutionary trait though! (Semi joking)
Depends how far back we go for "first place". Stars are an interesting intersection of social sciences, hard sciences, and even some woo for a very long time. We must consider their interaction between religion, astronomy and astrology going as far back at least as history lets us.
I hadn't been out to a dark sky in years so I went out to a deep part of Joshua Tree (Bortle 2-3) one night not too long ago just to see some stars. Wow, I was not expecting that many Starlinks up there.
National parks in California are indeed amazing. One time during a group trip to Death Valley, people were so amazed by the night sky that half decided to sleep outside the tents just to experience falling asleep while looking at the stars.
Yes, really. Narcissistic people act out little plays for themselves and others, like op here "sleeping under the stars"..., it's a performance they are putting on for themselves and social media.
Wanaka, in the South Island of New Zealand, still has pretty good views of the night sky. You can see an awful lot more stars than you can from major cities.
But even here it’s under threat: a recent new retail development on the edge of the town (called “Three Parks”) emits so much light that it illuminates the nearby hills at night. The sad thing is that much of this light seems unnecessary to me: eg a hardware / garden retailer has enormous floodlights to illuminate their inner courtyard constantly at night, even when they’re closed.
The rest of the town has always been pretty good at minimising light pollution, with soft, modest and well designed street lighting in residential areas. But such considerations have been forgotten completely with the new development. Three Parks emits more light pollution than the rest of the town combined!
Today I learned about the Bortle scale. I was completely ignorant about it.
> If you've never seen truly dark skies, do yourself a favour and go see what they look like during true night
I think I went from only ever experiencing Bortle 5-6 to Bortle 1 when I visited Merzouga and Erg Chebbi. Blew my mind, made me really appreciate the extent of light pollution almost everywhere else I've been.
When I first learned about the "clouds are noticeably brighter than the sky" part of Bortle 5, it was like it flipped a switch in my brain. I can't avoid noticing it now.
Putting astronomy on the dark side of the moon would probably work better than putting it into space because you can use some local material for construction.
There isn't a single "dark side" of the moon that's always in darkness, the "dark side" of the moon is the side that always faces away from us (poor choice of name). It's fully illuminated during a new moon.
Lunar regolith would probably be quite damaging to optics. It's nasty stuff. I have seen ideas for building liquid mirror telescopes on the moon, though.
human illumination is nothing compared to the giant fusion reactor that would be lighting it up for 2 weeks at a time. At least on terra firma, you can view the sky nightly.
The far side of the moon would be useful for a radio observatory where one can block the noisy Earth while taking advantage of the ability to construct large collection area dishes (think Arecibo in a crater - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Crater_Radio_Telescope )
In space though you can do extremely lightweight construction because structures don't need to support their weight against gravity unless they are huge enough that tidal forces matter.
Like O'Neill's research group killed off the plan with the big cylinders because you would construct solar power satellites out of plastic films with vapor deposited metal and semiconductors and these would be light enough to send up from Earth and assemble in space.
The suggestions that I've seen for astronomy on the far side of the Moon have largely been about radio astronomy rather than optical. The lack of the ionosphere which otherwise blocks and distorts 10 meter and longer radio and using the Moon itself as a shield from the radio noise of Earth makes it more interesting.
A previously proposed liquid mirror telescope, based upon a spinning liquid metallic alloy, is not appropriate for infrared applications, which will require a liquid below 130K. Here we report the successful coating of an ionic liquid with silver. The surface is smooth and the silver coating is stable on a timescale of months. The underlying ionic liquid does not evaporate in a vacuum and remains liquid down to a temperature of 175K Given that there are ~10^6 simple and ~10^18 ternary ionic liquids, it should be possible to synthesize liquids with even lower melting temperatures.
... But this seems a bit more speculative. It wouldn't be mercury and requires a yet to be discovered liquid metal that is stable for months at 175 °K.
> other internet providers dumping tens of thousands of satellites in orbit instead of building municipal internet
Ah yes, that municipal internet in the Pacific Ocean. The municipal internet in the 1 person per square mile rural area. The municipal internet to mountain villages. The municipal internet running to airplanes. The municipal internet to the Antarctic research stations.
Tell me you don’t know the point of satellite internet without telling me.
If you want to make arguments against sat constellations so people can make long exposure photos, go for it. But don’t pretend there are actual viable alternatives to LEO sat internet.
It’s cheap to deliver mail and even then many of those places don’t get mail to their home. It’s to a shared mailbox.
> LEO Satellite internet is only cheaper because the environmental cost is not being accounted for.
Terrestrial wireless and wired had decades to do something and failed. Trenching fiber for 30km is insanely expensive and requires tons of time to get easements to do it.
Also, it’s a pretty old trope to say “X only works when cost Y I’ve invented and not even quantified is not imposed”. If you want to make the argument that Starlink should pay for something, do that. Otherwise it’s meaningless crap that can be used to argue against literally anything.
Humans have been looking at the stars every night for tens of thousands of years and we've essentially occluded the night sky to most in the matter of about 50 years, I don't even think most people know what we've lost anymore.
Most fruit crops need 8-12 hours of darkness but it changes depending on which point they're at in their life cycle. 20 hours of light is usually fine during the initial stages, then they require 8-10 hours of darkness to bloom, then back to 18-20 hours of light during the fruit growth.
(I'm not a botanist or a farmer but I grow greenhouse veggies for fun)
The world record holder vegetables are all grown in Alaskan summers, up north... where they get 20+ hours of daylight per day. Dunno, maybe the CAM plants would do bad (pineapples) but just about everything else benefits.
I've been in some place with very dark skies, like Death Valley or Teide in the Canaries (https://www.teidebynight.com/tenerifes-dark-sky-reserves-hav...). It was great, but also not that much better than what I've seen closer to home in French countryside or in the alps. Maybe I didn't get the best conditions though.
Dude your country is 98% desolate and unsuited to agriculture. If you want night sky go to a cabin literally anywhere in your unending and cold mountains instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.
> instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.
Not an expert, but I would think greenhouse light pollution is not necessary for agriculture? It seems like obvious waste (money spent generating light that isn't going to photosynthesis), but I assume it's cheaper not to shield the lights than to shield them, so it's a matter of ROI and requiring people take care of their externalities.
Is there an economic argument that light shields will make agriculture in that area too expensive?
I mean it's not easy to have greenhouse walls that let sunlight in but don't let grow light out. You can direct the light but you are going to have loss.
Yes it has negative consequences for wildlife, which is why it is FAR BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT to put all the agriculture in one place at high efficiency rather than spread farmland out over otherwise virgin wilderness.
Would you rather have 2x the wilderness 80% degraded or 1x the wilderness 90% degraded? Unless your plan is to decide who starves to death, it's far better to have greenhouses where we already have farms!
Stop with the false dichotomies. I would rather have no wilderness 90% degraded at all. There are better alternatives than spreading out the farmland. Like better greenhouses that don’t blast grow lights all over the night sky. We have the technology, it’s just cheaper to destroy the environment.
I can't just casually hop up to the Yukon for an evening of astronomy. It's about a thirty hour drive. Even relatively small towns have exurbs now because of our terrible city planning, so light pollution extends shockingly far. Alberta's probably the worst, almost the entire province (about the same land area as Texas) has light pollution.
> instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.
The Okanagan will be shocked to hear they can't do agriculture! Perhaps we could just turn off the greenhouse lights for a couple hours, or install retractable shields/mirorrs on top of the greenhouses.
Have you never been there? This light pollution map wildly underestimates light pollution outside of cities. I can tell you from experience you're not getting nearly 22 mpsas skies anywhere near Pemberton.
>It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history.
But what if someone were uncomfortable briefly? Did you ever consider that? Technology exists to infantilize us while slowly ruining everything that makes us human. Shame on you for attempting to interrupt human progress.
You're making a very strong claim ("literally zero sense"), but you've provided no argument as to why. I don't believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from physical goods, which is a hard requirement for infinite growth with finite resources.
Because 1) growth is not directly linked to resources and the richer country is the less growth depends on resource-intensive areas such as farming or industry; 2) it’s absurd to think we are at the stage of growth where resource availability becomes constraint - I’d say it’s on the contrary and we are at the stage where we become far less dependent on resources than are on scarcer side (e.g. thanks to solar uptake).
But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy. Nobody would dispute that they've become smaller. Do you believe that food can become arbitrarily cheap relative to total wealth? Or steel, or silicon? In other words, can the food you eat require an arbitrarily small portion of your income? And looking at nation-states only is an accounting trick; the economy is global.
You again say "it's absurd" and provide no argument. I think the case is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Solar energy is not an infinite resource.
> But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
Yes, if you actually mean infinite growth it’s true. And that’s what I find absurd - why would you care about infinite growth? If you actually care about infinity, then even if you degrowth you will run out of resources because guess what - resources are finite, so the use of resources will have to also be arbitrarily small and asymptotically approach zero!
What? Some resources are renewable. There's a finite amount of solar energy, but it doesn't "run out" (on human timescales). Growing food doesn't need to remove from the biosphere, even if the way we do it now does do significant damage. So we absolutely must stop using non-renewable resources (i.e. fossil fuels), but if we find an amount of renewable ones combined with recyclable non-renewables (like metal) that are sustainable then we can reach a steady state.
An economic system based on perpetual growth can never reach a steady state, unless you believe that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
You can’t reach steady state in ANY economic system because you can’t have 100% efficiency, that’s basic thermodynamics. Resources will keep decreasing no matter what you do. Hence argument about infinite growth is absurd - infinite existence without growth (or with degrowth) is also impossible.
You're right; sunlight will eventually run out. (Well, long before that the expanding Sun will boil the oceans). No, you couldn't have an economy in a closed system, but the Earth isn't a closed system (due to the aforementioned sunlight).
That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.
You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.
You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.
If my system requires infinity growth then yours also does require infinite resources by the logic outlines above. If you agree that your system does not require infinite resources because we should be talking only at timescales that are relevant to humans, then my system also does not require infinite growth. You can’t have it both ways, either you are ok with infinite timeframe (and then degrowth will eventually run out of resources) or you are not (but then the growth requires to sustain current system is obviously finite).
Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).
But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
> Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).
> But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
But you were talking about INFINITE growth, not exponential and those are two completely different things! Exponential growth will become infinite only if you have infinite time frame! So can we agree than "infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources" is really dumb argument, because capitalism does not require infinite growth at all? Then we'll be able to move on to exponential growth.
To believe this, you must believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from any physical good. Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy (and so arbitrarily cheap relative to income)? Steel? Purified silicon? Infrastructure like bridges?
I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)
> Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while the amount of physical food being produced remains flat year after year. That's sort of what's happening with housing, education, and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
If physical goods remain a constant proportion of the economy without having more of them but get more expensive, all that's happening is inflation, not economic growth.
Americans will vehemently deny this, but you're absolutely right. Decades of car industry propaganda has convinced people that the ability to drive anywhere is true freedom, and they can't see that the freedom not to need a car (all the time) is better for everyone; cities are quieter, more comfortable, and less polluted with fewer cars (no, electric cars don't fix this). It leads to other absurdities, like US cities frequently having parking minimums for bars. That's insane!
There's also the classic problem of people wildly misinterpreting statements and getting mad about it. You can say "we should design cities not centred around cars" and people will hear "I'm going to make it illegal for you to own a car". Or my favourite exchange, "Let's improve public transit" followed by "but public transit is bad for me, I can't take it".
Yes, this debate comes up every time someone mentions the word "car" on the internet, and there are crazies on both sides. But I don't think it's fair to frame either side of the debate by what the crazies are saying. Or to assume that just because someone disagrees with you they have fallen victim to propaganda.
I think most Americans just like their cars and are reasonably happy with the status quo. They can be receptive to incremental improvements to public transportation, cycling, and pedestrian infrastucture, but they bristle at the idea of turning their city into a "car free city" (which is what the parent is suggesting) or being told they are wrong for liking their car.
But it objectively makes cities worse. People love visiting Europe in part because they don't do this to nearly the same extent (obviously this varies by country/city). People aren't entitled to not having their opinions be proven wrong, nor are they entitled to ignore negative externalities (pollution, noise, danger, unpleasant city centres, and so on).
> are reasonably happy with the status quo.
They're not, except for the having a car part. Road maintenance, especially in the suburbs, is hideously expensive and is falling further and further behind. Cars are the least efficient mode of transit, so traffic gets worse and worse. "Just one more lane" always makes it worse (induced demand), but that's the only solution being tried. The only way to make traffic better is to get significant numbers of people to switch to other modes, and you're simply not going to do that with "incremental improvements" because the status quo is so abysmal for anything other than a car. Cars themselves are horribly expensive and yet are required in most US cities; most are in effect paying a tax to car companies to participate in society.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
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