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Friend Chanda (Hi Chanda! Glad I finally found something that ticked you off enough to make you speak up!) rightfully upbraids me on a point that’s been nagging at me since I posted the Google Black story:

I mean, my god(s), it’d be nice to see the freaking Milky Way again no?

Darn betcha, and I should have followed my instincts and at least mentioned the Dark Sky movement, which I am wholly sympathetic to, and which has nothing to do with the Google Black / Earth Hour insanity.

Light pollution is a serious problem for all of us who see the sun as our nearest star, and the night sky as an ocean of suns.

From Astronomy Magazine’s article on the International Dark-Sky Association:

Without question, lights help us feel secure. Whether in our houses, our cars, or on our sidewalks, we bask in the protective glow of lights. The IDA does not seek to eliminate such useful and necessary forms of lighting. Instead, it just hopes to modify the current excessive lighting practices. Following through with such efforts can conserve energy, reduce harmful glare on the road, and of course, allow for a purer view of the night sky. The IDA, though, is trying to convince local and state governments to light intelligently and, coincidentally, economically.

For this reason, I am not likely to, say, install a “six-bar of 1kw PAR-64’s” as a permanent protest fixture.

Of course, simple thrift dictates turning out unused lights, and being as efficient as possible. I’ve even installed a few CFL’s, although I have some problems with that particular solution to the insane wastefulness of ordinary incandescents. I eagerly await good-looking LED lamps, or even something more exotic.

What I do have a problem with is people wanting to turning out their lights to, in my view, protest civilization. Instapunk eloquently rebuts that trend:

Think about it. Your idea of progress is watching the lights go out on civilization? It’s never occurred to you that the beginning of the self-absorbed obsession you have with yourselves occurred in the torchlight of the aged twenty-somethings who finally had the post-sunset leisure time to invent social criticism (i.e., art) in the Lascaux caves 15,000 years ago?

But you’ve used your so-called rationalism to turn everything 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Your ancestors equated light with life. You’ve tricked yourselves into equating light with death.

Read the whole damning thing. That’s what ‘Punk, Beck, Tremayne, the Grouch, and I and many others were railing about yesterday.

Gah. ‘Punk’s Rand quote is too good to leave out:

There were not many lights on the earth below. The countryside was an empty black sheet, with a few occasional flickers in the windows of some government structures, and the trembling glow of candles in the windows of thriftless homes. Most of the rural population had long since been reduced to the life of those ages when artificial light was an exorbitant luxury, and a sunset put an end to human activity. The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls and power-conservation rules.

But when the place that had once been the source of the tide–New York City–rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its lights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness, almost as if, in an ultimate effort, in a final appeal for help, it were now stretching its arms to the plane that was crossing its sky. Involuntarily, they sat up, as if at respectful attention at the deathbed of what had been greatness.

Looking down, they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane. The news of the continent’s severed artery had now engulfed the city, men were deserting their posts, trying, in panic, to abandon New York, seeking escape where all roads were cut off and escape was no longer possible.

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment realize that the panic had reached the power station–and that the lights of New York had gone out.

Against that, maybe I can rig up a few PAR-64s or something myself, next year about this time.

Tags: Astronomy, Dark Skies, Earth Hour, Google Black, Light Pollution

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:14 am and is filed under Astronomy, Earth Science, My Bad, Political Correctness, Throwing Out the Trash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.