We will now turn on our Romulan cloaking device, so that the satellite sees smooth ground where in reality we have installations...
1
I spent most of a career using the imagery that came from aerial photography and satellites. From the top down, it provided a much bigger picture of the interconnected environmental ecosystems than we previously knew and showed us the incremental destruction humans are waging against the planet. Using that imagery to show a midwest farmer or a manufacturing facility that their own actions were a small but significant part of a much wider problem beyond their boundaries gave them a difference perspective and often changed their viewpoint. On the flip side, I am now retired but live where there are truly dark skies. New moon nights are truly pitch black. Just about everyone that visits marvels at actually seeing the night sky in all its glory but many of them also see the ISS and any number of satellites pass by that they never saw before.
4
Well I was just outside looking up at rapidly moving clouds passing the moon and several stars -- in my opinion for us little fellows on the ground (I have never flown, visited a B-29 once on the airport tarmac) the sky is still pretty awesome, and limitless.
1
I don’t agree with the premise of this article! The vast majority of satellites are military based or sponsored because that is where the most technological advancements take place. For the last 50 years, it only made sense that very few privately owned satellites have been flown. The authors lack scientific knowledge, or basic understanding when using terms like “gadget” to describe satellites, that space is “nongravitational”, or saying that we view the sky in a “schizophrenic” or “aimless” way. They also contradict themselves in the same paragraph with a link to the goals of space exploration and regulation expressed by one of NASA’s administrators. Holding on the notion of the sky as a “place of the gods” is bordering on nostalgia and drawing an air of grandeur to the sky (no pun intended) over the lands or the sea is just wrong. Humanity has and will continue to expand its boarders as long as technological advancement allows it. The fact that countries used satellites to spy on each other is no worse than people discovering parabolas to launch projectiles from catapults. When the arctic was first explored, no one touted the scientists that set up camp to study the magnetic fields as some sort of loss of the North Pole and Santa Claus. The advancement of technology can be used in negative or bad ways, but it is never inherently bad to learn more about something. We have not lost the sky. Its mysticism has simply given way to understanding, and that is good, very good!
7
drones in the sky - but at least we don't have the shiny shape-shifting Terminator 2 chasing us down the street yet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVE-7x9Usvw
1
Essentially "sky" is a synonym for "outer space" here. The central theme appears to be that we are losing/have lost our humanity/innocence to technology.
Daytime sky: we have airplanes/contrails and air pollution, but these are not new things. More contrails and pollution in sprawling urban areas like LA. Can we get rid of them? Hopefully air pollution, over time. But air pollution also can produce beautiful sunrises/sunsets (a "benefit" of technology?)
Nighttime sky: same airplanes (lights and noise) and light pollution from cities. We can work for dark skies (e.g., national parks), or dark-sky cities such as where I live in Tucson (for astronomy here; but we have some deaths with pedestrians and bicyclists at night because it is dark).
Space: we have a lot of orbiting space junk, in low-Earth and geosynchronous orbits. We can readily travel "through" this stuff to go to the Moon or Mars or wherever we want to go. Also, it's great Hubble takes awesome data, but we still have all the surveillance/war technology in orbit and in our skies.
But consider that while many of us have "lost" the sky at night (e.g., Milky Way), through technology we have "found" the sky in radio, IR, UV, x-rays, and gamma rays, along with cosmic rays and neutrinos. So technology has been a boon there, if any of that counts.
If we survive climate change, war, and genetic engineering, AI/technology will still do us in. It is in our nature to destroy ourselves. Poetry can't save us.
2
"How We Lost the Sky" by Weisbrode and Yeung is such a stunning piece of prose! I thoroughly enjoyed being able to read its content and ponder the depth of its ideas.
I just finished reading this marvelous article as an online subscriber to The New York Times, sitting at my computer desk in northern New Mexico, viewing the content on a computer screen.
I'm thankful for the satellite orbiting above that beams back a signal to Earth that enables the Internet connection to be picked up by the tower standing quietly atop a not-too-high mountain across the little canyon where I reside.
3
Dear Ms. Yeung and Mr. Weisbrode,
Your essay brings to mind Rousseau: "Civilization is a hopeless race to remedy the evils it produces."
Assess the moral giants throughout history and inquire as to their technology. Does it not amount to the four cardinal virtues?
Assess the beneficiaries of enlightenment and inquire as to the nature of their collective character. Does it not resemble the seven deadly sins?
We are losing the sky, the land, the water, the air, and every last vestige of whatever nobility once existed in the soul of our species.
Our consolation is that the delusional belief in unfettered progress will blind most of the us until our very last day, no matter how many forests burn, no matter how many lakes dry up, no matter how many glaciers melt, no matter how many coral reefs get bleached, no matter how many sandstorms start crossing oceans, no matter how many wildfires reach the Arctic Circle.
No matter what, no matter why, no matter how. The fanaticism of science trumps even the fanaticism of faith. And why shouldn't it? HDTV, stuff shipped to your door, little blue pills.
What more could a naked ape ask for?
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
2
In viewing this article on my I-pad I saw irony in accompanying ad images of a lone elegant woman being chauffeured about in a large luxury vehicle, clearly oblivious to the authors' atmospheric concerns.
1
Regarding Space:
I would think that the junk to knowledge ratio is de minimis.
Space exploration has caused the development digital cameras (1990s) and Cat Scans, et al.
2
"Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me "
6
@Phil
“Firefly” theme song?
1
Too many men, too many people, making too many problems.....but not much love to go around......Phil Collins.....
4
The sky, or rather the starry night, has been lost to most citizens of the US for decades now, since most of us live in regions where light pollution prevents more than a select few stars from being seen. Most people never have, nor never will, see the Milky Way in the sky. Hard to have imagination for something you can't see, and easy to see how satellites and their eyes have become the only suchview remaining. It is difficult to imagine our smallness, our comparative place in the universe, when we have shuttered the infinity of the nighttime sky, leaving so many of us inwardly turned and void of imagination.
9
The Ango-Irish poet Robert Graves, whose birthday is tomorrow (born on July24, 1895, he would be 123) was horrified at the moon landing, and said it was the most shocking thing that ever happened since Alexander cut the Gordian Knot. I think the author's sense of a "deeper sense of aimlessness" or rather a deep sense of a lost purposefulness is what he was frightened by--and what all of us are frightened by in the modern world. And yet, folks with a certain lofty sense of high purposefulness, who would pull down the scientific apparatus of our world in the name of a bygone purity are frightening as well.
6
Go high enough, far beyond those sky placed weapons of war, and use your imagination. Soar and ask questions even if you answer them with your own mind.
My favorite is searching for my deceased husband: I am in a far away galaxy when I meet a strange, but powerful being. He asks me, yes, it is a he, sorry, what I am looking for. I tell him my husband and he replies, around the next corner is a bed of moss. He is there waiting for you.
For some reason this gives me peace and makes me smile. Silly me.
9
Building mental maps is nothing new. The practice predates human flight by thousands of years. The earliest compelling evidence generally comes from Polynesia. Islanders who don't know how to read or write in any formal sense can draw you an almost perfect map of their home island from memory alone. They've never seen a satellite image of the island. They might never have seen a photograph. However, the map is almost always drawn from a bird's eye view.
You could easily draw parallels to our first globally reliable naval charts. There was no GPS. You had latitude if the sky was clear and longitude if your watch kept decent time. Researchers like Humboldt sent ships around the world throwing weighted ropes off boats. Eventually, enough data were collected to form a general picture through consensus. The "blue marble" only existed as a scientific principle. The closest anyone came to a bird's eye view was a tall mountain, a tall building, or a ship's mast.
As a more practical example, consider the island of Manhattan. Imagine you never saw a map of the island. However, you spent your entire life there crisscrossing the city. Wouldn't you eventually have a map in your head? Now imagine the Burroughs. Now all the surrounding states. Humans figure these things out eventually. As a matter of fact, satellite directions are said to diminish the human brain's innate ability to form mental maps in real time.
We're losing the sky alright but not quite in the way the authors suggest.
4
As I read this piece by Weisbrode and Yeung I was reminded of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Near the beginning of that film we see primitive man invent the first tool: a bone which he uses to kill a member of the competing tribe. He throws the bone into the air, and it transform into a nuclear weapon orbiting the earth.
2
I love the title of the painting by Samuel Levi Jones "Blue Skies Matter".
I think those who disparage the lack of praise in your essay for the science that gives us the ability to study the sky for ecological, mapping and military reasons--or the sad search for new planets to live on--miss the point of the grief we feel, consciously or or unconsciously, for the wreckage of the beauty and mystery of the our dome of sky and beyond.
If our technological and political directions had not taken such a wrong turn, we would not have needed to clutter so much of space and perhaps would have found a less intrusive and competitive way to explore its vast new wonders. Like so much of technological advancement, we have end up using it for destruction.
And, sigh, many times when I look up to find planets or stars, I cannot tell what is a satellite and what is Venus!
When I was young, night-hiking to the Horse Heaven Hills in silence, far from small city lights, we could look up and feel the deepest awe I have ever felt--the moon, the stars, the dark surround.
3
This very perceptive opinion piece, along with the story here of the "wave after wave" of trash hitting Dominican beaches, along with the daily evidence of our debased politics and violent society, the widespread retreat into tribalism and demagoguery, into willful ignorance and endless diversion...
The conviction grows that human beings are unworthy of the planet, too small of mind and soul. In this case a divine Creator might choose to turn away from his creation, or at least issue an apology to other life forms.
3
A wonderful book by Stanislaw Lem ("Fiasco") tells of an expedition from Earth to a distant, civilized planet tasked with making contact with aliens. When the earthlings arrive, they send a congenial greeting to the planet below but there are so many satellites and other communications junk surrounding the planet that the signal can't get through. Wouldn't it be funny if alien visitors have visited and encountered the same thing here in the last 60 years?
2
In 1966 I excitedly caught a glimpse of the Echo satellite in my 4.25" Newtonian telescope. It was like in the 1920s when everyone rushed out in the yard to see an airplane overhead. I'm still an amateur astronomer but now one or two dozen pieces of space junk cross my telescope's small field of view every night. Newcomers to the hobby often get excited at the sight, but the novelty quickly wears. The prospect of having that thick layer of junk coming in lower in the form of drones is dismaying.
8
In the Noe-Platonic imagination, the heavens were by no means a singular realm. There were hierarchical angelologies, and in particular a Deus Absconditus. So the 'monad,' the personified image of unity was not perceivable directly and had to be implied or deduces by the imagination.
It was no Copernican, but a Ptolemaic heavens, with astrological retrogrades, and compound orbits that closely mimic the complexity of what today we might call an "archetypal" imagination. That complexity is charming and persists in our psyches, and resembles what the authors are critical of. No need to quash that in fear.
In effect the Neo-Platonists allowed a polytheistic and Classical caelum to exist under an imaginary and remote singular godhead.
I don't think that the multiplicity of perspectives that the authors critique are out of line with the rich imaginary geography that birthed the Renaissance. In fact science itself came from this sort of complex cosmology. (See Feyerabend)
Blue skies need not remain pure and remote from our technologies to retain their imaginary scope. Indeed I prefer the myriad of perspectives available now - and in the public domain! - to a secret and Bentham -ized Panopticon of secret surveillance. Indeed the cat is out of the bag and thank the gods for that!
2
Except smog in California was way worse in 1960 than now:
http://waterandpower.org/museum/Smog_in_Early_Los_Angeles.html
As much as humans have started to exploit the sky, and, the ocean, the amazing thing is how both appear to be still relatively pristine. A clear, moonless night from the mountains is still breathtaking, as is an evening on the ocean 100 miles from the nearest coastline.
2
Many of these satellites you so disparage are to aid in the study of earth science-sea level and the ice sheets and heat and gas patterns among other important things. Your article encourages fear of science by not even mentioning this and that is the last thing we need in today’s world.
17
@Kate Chambers I disagree. That is not the article's subject. Since the Reagan administration, a number unknown (because secret) of military satellites have been sent up by the US, sparking some competition. And this is also science.
Sounds rather like the Internet - so much imagination, so much potential, so much promise ... and look at it now.
4
I watched HBO's Vice the other week and one of the topics they brought to light the amount of space trash and satellites orbiting around us and the US Air Force monitoring system of the satellites and debris. Our need for sate little communications is imbedded into our society. Basically we moved the telephone poles higher up into space and sky.
Will there be a time that we remain Earth bound because there is enough clutter that rockets will need opportunity windows to maneuver through the debris.
We have a lot of building development in Jacksonville, Florida, currently a new set of apartments went up along a creek. No one at first noticed this but now that the homeowners on the other side of the creek will no longer have an expansive sky. From their drive they see a building.
Roxanne Henkle, Spazhouse, Intuitive Research
1
Read “The Second Variety”, a quaint short story by P. K. Dick. The future will be bleak
2
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994
23
@oldBassGuy
All true but a human is a combination of beast and angel. Looking from the other direction, mankind has also accomplished extraordinary feats in, what, 200,000 years and without a manual.
We are continually running on the edge between precipices.
We may be in for long dark times but in due geological time, we will blossom again. At least this is my hope.
In the meantime, and as said by many, some of us are delivering carnage on a daily basis for selfish and irreverent desires.
1
@oldBassGuy
That is one of the greatest passages ever spoken/written.....
3
@BG The "extraordinary feats" that "mankind has...accomplished" have all come since the end of the last ice age, far less than 200,000 years. Is this a good thing? See the Sagan quotation above.
We humans have made the skies ours.
i published a law review article on space law back in 1984 that unfortunately predicted some of the concerns. near space should be a public commons.
3
@Larry Schnapf Mazel tov. So did so many others, especially in Hollywood.
3
That's almost the exact same thing I was thinking when I saw this photo of satellite tracks -
https://robotworkersparty.tumblr.com/post/175604754195/we-shall-never-be...
..that we'll never be alone, or have the magic of true wilderness again. Every place, every surface is now part of someone's database.
2
Wow, when I read this headline I immediately thought that China or Russia had made some incredible breakthrough, leaving us, the U.S. of A., in the dust.
I'm afraid we're in Trump's America all right: not only are we not "great," we automatically assume second- or even third-world status when reading about technological advances.
What a shame.
2
@sarasotaliz Not everything is about human tribal (national) competition. Ironically you interpreted this headline exactly the way one would in the Trumpian world view, where there is always a "them" to define the meaning of "us." In this headline, the "we" is inclusive, every human who has ever lived.
1
We.
The mistake in this article is by saying there is such a thing, a "We" that includes us all.
"We" died in the 1960's, what is left is eternal war of the rich private world against the notion of a public cooperative people who own power.
The sky is just there, a resource for cutthroat capitalism to use. Like the air, the water, the hearts and muscles of humans, and of course, the decimated animal world, it is all seen by "them" our master class, as gifts to enrich them in their golden culture.
FDR was right when he said we needed a second bill of rights...
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights)
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
11
That is why I never look up ... afraid to get hit on the face by some space debris. My homeowner's insurance cover errant spacecraft crashing into my house ... not me.
1
We are broadcasting in the open our presence as an advanced civilization. Other species looking for habitable planets only need to scan for radio or television signals, then send probes to look for visible light from the surface at night.
There is no faster nor more efficient way to find a habitable planet.
1
@Robin Foor except at the rate alien civilizations are knocking at the door Earth might not be habitable by the time they get here. at least for bi-pedal, bi-nocular, oxygen utilizing creatures like us. they may be out there, but they are oh so very far away.
1
Back in '95 I flew from New England to California. Somewhere "out west" I noticed a huge dust cloud being generated by something invisible to me. It rose up into the sky.... I kept watching the dust cloud as we flew along.... I don't remember how long it took to reach it. But I was amazed when the source was revealed: it was a single pick-up truck, racing along a dirt road, with a huge dust plume thrown high into the air behind it!
As I meditated on this, the image of Earth as a basketball came to mind.... a basketball with a thin skin of atmosphere, in which everything we prize lives and moves and breathes. Destroy that almost paper-thin skin, and we all die.
I will never forget that single pick-up, racing across desert-dry country, throwing a huge plume of dust into our sky..... visible for perhaps 50 miles.... as an image of pollution.
13
The atmosphere we all breathe is a layer just 7 miles deep.
7
I guess i am just shallow enough to find the early paragraphs thought provoking. Never considered how the ability to look down on topography from great heights is unique to the twentieth century. Air travel provided a window seat to seeing the earth. As a child flying cross country in the 1950s I recall being enthralled at the view.
6
"That it took until 1992 for an open-skies treaty to be signed between the former Cold War rivals suggests that some people like to keep their secrets hidden."
The US proposals tended to be more limited in reality. The US wanted to see all of the other guy's secrets, but did not want to reveal its own. No open skies were considered over US uranium enrichment or plutonium production, or national HQ wartime sanctuaries. There were reasons for that of course, there are always "reasons." But the US wanted to see the other guy's.
Furthermore, the open skies were not for use by everyone, just for the USSR. Not China. Not anybody else. Yet the US would be over them too.
I don't mention this to bash the US. My point is that technology made the continuing desire for secrecy impossible, even for those who talked the biggest and made the most exceptions for themselves.
Technology advancing relentlessly is the key to this, not our imagination or our vision. We do things because we can, because we can't stop the other guy, not because we have a more open mind.
Now we can find lost cities and river beds beneath the earth, and lost things on the sea bed. No matter what we'd agreed before, we could not have done those things. It is relentless technology advance.
Technology may not always be "good." I'd argue atomic weapons and biological weapons are more negative than positive, even though they have their uses to make war less likely.
We are experiencing technology, not imagination.
11
@Mark Thomason
Nuclear weapons have made their own use less likely since we made such a war very likely in 1945.
Still, no shortage of "conventional" (commonplace) wars since then; certainly nothing severe enough to disturb the conventional killer's rest.
Let’s call it what it is: the Biosphere.
It keeps us alive.
An indicator that could affect our continued existence is seen in the biosphere change coming from the excessive amounts of coal, oil and gas burned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, enormous amounts of CO2 have been added to the earth’s biosphere. At the same time deforestation is limiting the amount of CO2 being absorbed back. Rising global temperatures are the result.
This has been well known in the scientific community for some time. Back in 2012, the World Bank warned that resultant high temperatures from CO2 could trigger what is called a Methane Hydrate Feedback Loop in the Arctic. Scientists there are now telling us that this has already begun. Recent temperatures there have been the highest in recorded history.
So here is the question. Are we about to face a test of our “sky” vulnerability? And if we are, why is there no outcry?
www.InquiryAbraham.com
18
And people say the Ivory Tower exists no more.
These two need to spend some time down at Wal-Mart where they will get a lesson in how the average, and not-so-average, person sees the Universe.
1
Or spend some time at any ivory tower where there is a department of astronomy, astrophysics, physics, chemistry, biology, or dare I say, English to get an idea how the nominally educated view the universe. Don’t blame the Walmorons for blindness; it may be the best they can do, or the best they’ve been told on Sunday. Blame the educated folk who should know how to express ideas in writing.
4
Daedalus, it's not "ivory tower" to get outside at night and gaze at the stars and think about where you come from. Anyone can do it. No advanced degree required. Even the folks who shop at Walmart walk underneath the same sky as you and me.
1
As Psalms 19 tells us " The heavens declare the glory of God,the skies proclaim the work of his hands". This is one of the best reasons to pay attention to the sky, as it helps us to keep our sense of humility and to remember how insignificant we would be without the grace of God.
3
@Aaron Adams
And how very dead our grandchildren will be if we don't suddenly become better stewards of the glory that God has given us.
3
The nativist and populist convulsions that have rocked the world in recent years seem to issue from an earth which is darker, more primitive and more disturbing than the pretty blue one we see reproduced in bookstores across the land, visible from all angles like a well-lit actress in a pornographic movie. Could it be that the true earth has been hiding from our all-seeing satellites all along? Poets once spoke of Gaia and Ouranos and the marriage of heaven and earth. The sky once tempered, transformed and enriched the dark earth with its light, but true light was swallowed up in a false dream of technological surveillance by darkness masquerading as light. Could it be that the goddess earth is taking revenge for being caught in the objectifying gaze of a clueless humanity?
3
@Stephen Hoffman probably not.
3
Romanticising ignorance doesn't make it less harmful. Knowing something is not inherently "schizophrenic". And in every sense, populating the sky is definitely not aimless.
On the other hand, the authors' notion of closure has less to do with knowledge or technology and more to do with our own ever increasing presence and impact upon our planet.
3
@Pete How could the latter two not be almost infinitely entwined with the others? Knowledge and technology are by no means innocent. Far from it.
A meta-comment: I really like this idea of matching up, in this case, a historian with a poet. Could the NYT expand its pool of poets and have them join reporters in the field. This is poetry in everything, even coverage of the Trump administration.
2
@Gerald
I - on the other hand - prefer my Philosophy blogs to be the province of actual Philosophers - or in the case of atmospheric and space physics - folks who can actually do the math.
2
Great article, but with one glaring omission:light pollution. Few Americans can go out on a clear night and see the Big Dipper, the North Star or even a glimpse of the Milky Way. The inability to see the night sky diminishes our sense of being part of the larger cosmos.
I live in Fort Lauderdale and after Hurricane Wilma passed in 2005 we lost all power and it was totally dark. But the night was very clear and even though I lived there for 25 years, this was the first time that I saw the night sky in all its glory. We went down to the beach and saw what sailors and others saw for centuries before the advent of electrical lighting. I understood now how barren our relationship to the sky has become.
57
@Fred Fejes When first reading the headline of this piece I thought that light pollution would be the subject.
Our family visits the coast of Maine each summer, our only opportunity to see the Milky Way.
1
“We have arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” – Carl Sagan
64
@Socrates
Sagan was one of the greatest men who ever lived....
1
One cannot gain the immense advances in weather forecasting, for example, without the satellites. And to look outwards to the stars and the sun and celebrate Cassini's years of success with our probes, without having the research which preceded it.
The author wants it all, without the work and failures that come with it. Is he completely willing to give up cell phones, GPS, safer air travel, mapping, study of earth science all to keep one more or all satellites out of the sky?
I am not sure I got his point entirely due to his writing style, but I did, as was mentioned by one of the other readers, reflect upon my passion for the out of doors, the sky, photography, astronomy and just watching clouds.
11
Now there's something we can blame on the Russians after they launched Sputnik into space. Thus the Space Race began in earnest. The newspapers were filled with stories of tough, no nonsense Russian schools where little Ivan was immersed in studying algebra. Lyndon Johnson said he was apprehensive about sleeping under a Communist moon. There was genuine fear that the Russians could not only get to the moon first but use it for a military base to shoot nuclear missiles at the Earth. We have the Russians to thank for making the evening sky less appealing.
3
@sharon5101 Oh, yes, it's those nasty Russians again. Without them, we'd still be the intergalactic virgins we always were.
4
There are perhaps two trillion galaxies--each with one hundred billion stars and countless planets.
We have been entrusted with a single one of those planets-- a grain of sand on an endless beach.
And we are making a mess of it.
We can't help ourselves, it seems. But in the end, it does not matter to anyone but us.
60
The Hubble Telescope is the antithesis of this downward and inward focus. It allows us to see the whole universe as man never saw it before, and has done a lot to stretch the imaginations and vision of humans. The technology can also allow us to explore the universe, providing respite from the focus on the often trivial and rapacious human world.
22
The sky is lost, "the space above us, once filled by the human imagination, is now crowded with technologies of surveillance and war"?
That's not even half the problem. The major problem is this: The human race has never figured out, even in the most open societies, how to keep from confusing the genius human being with the criminal, how to genuinely progress, develop toward the highest potentialities of mind without the average human being feeling threatened this way or that and condemning the best minds as if common criminals in society.
Precisely because society has never solved this problem it makes a painful compromise: Only so much genius, truth allowed, and the best minds at best restrained, at worst prevented from thought and action. This means all technological advancement, all knowledge in control of at best experts just short of stunning human achievement and at worst in hands of typically cold oligarchy, the social system operating at median level, a public sphere kept at a rather low I.Q. level, both high genius and the criminal kept as invisible as possible.
This is obviously reflected in say, American politics: Right wing thick with military bureaucracy, religious outlook, emphasis on wealth, and a left wing driving toward total socialistic control of society. In both cases we have little departure from, and in music terms, the midrange, no real ear for the highs and lows in society. Technological advance appears headed to locking in midrange in society.
1
@Daniel12, The left wing has been fighting for:
Healthcare
Minority, workers, voters and women's rights
Reducing money and gerrymandering in elections
Sustainable energy and food
Equitable education for all
Corporate regulation
If that's " total socialistic control of society", then I say control away. We want the human race to survive, not just the most greedy.
31
@Ken
Yeah, Daniel, but the right wing has doomed us, finally, with its breathless determination to refuse birth control to women, which hits the poorest and least able to afford that sixth or seventh or eleventh child. I put the so-called religious right at the crosshairs of the end of civilization.
Just look who is immigrating: populations with no access to family planning. Fighting access to family planning has been a cornerstone of every Republican administration since Reagan, and look where it's brought us.
1
We will never be rid of humanity's built environment, including in space, because it is there to "make our lives better" and military interests will never let it go. Artificial intelligence will ultimately be the end of us for the same reasons.
6
@Blue Moon
One would have to prove we have natural intelligence first.
1
This is what happens to writing when poets take too many courses in Theory (and when a historian indulges one of them). This piece has one or two interesting points to make -- for example, that we are now used to views of the earth from the sky -- but these are buried in a lot of abstract verbiage, while the loss mentioned in the headline goes unexplored. We haven't lost the sky by putting up satellites. We've lost the sky to air pollution, light pollution, and the downward gaze at screens. Perhaps Pew or Gallup could tell us what percentage of Americans under 30 have never seen the Milky Way.
93
@GordonDR you should have written this article. I have spoken with people who had no idea that the moon rises and sets. “Really, it’s just always there.” Forget about the mechanics of how it all happens.
We, as modern beings, have lost touch with not only the sky, the earth and the Earth; we’ve lost touch with each other and all living things around us. Look at the current EPA. Our species is quickly (geologically) coming to an end, through no one else’s fault but our own.
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@GordonDR
Completely agree about the loss of the night sky, Gordon, and folks' inability to gaze upward at a dark yet luminous sky with awe due to the light and haze that has walled it away from so many. Added to that is the paradoxical ability of modern camera chips to capture so much more in a few seconds than the human eye that few individuals stay outside for 30 minutes or longer for their eyes to adapt to the dark to really be able to take in all that we can.
Another thing I missed in this piece is the lack of acknowledgement of that visceral synthesis that came when our cameras in space sent back images of the whole earth unified, without borders, swaddled in clouds that washed effortlessly across its surface. This is a visual confirmation that mirrors our connections to each other that has been for many including myself an antidote for those so many things that divide us.
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@GordonDR For thousands of years, the earth virtually remained unchanged and generation after generation accepted what was always there and always visible. Now as populations explode and the world changes in one generation, all of the natural world that never changed is changing quickly. It is sad to see how one generation on will not see the world as it used to be. They will not know how things used to be. We are destined to be a world in strife because of our own doing. Controlling the outcome of 7, 8, 9 billion people will be impossible. Because natural resources are limited wars and famine will be in our near future. Even here in sparsely populated NM, our skies are not as clear as they used to be. This summer, the march of climate change going on around the globe is once again bringing smoke from fires all across the west reducing our views of the heavens that generation after generation have taken for granted.
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This is an excellent argument for the importance of manned spaceflight. Former marvels like space telescopes, satellite radio, and GPS are now commonplace in our mundane lives.
Nothing else is so inspiring as the perspectives given from far above by people just like us who are actually up there.
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Got me thinking about my three favorite hobbies, sailing, amateur astronomy and flying and the importance of the sky for all three of them.
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Who is "we"?
The military-industrial complex of nation states that strives to rule land, sea and air is not nor will it ever be "we". Them or they is more apt. Everything is theirs and thus we never had anything to lose.
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