12th February 2021 | Stars, Migrants
Losing the stars; With a migrant caravan
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to write daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Losing the stars
When you read Shakespeare, you realise how familiar everyone in the audience was with the stars. Of course they were: artificial light was both expensive and dangerous. The technology writer L.M. Sacasas starts with Dante, not Shakespeare, in a long and interesting piece on his newsletter about our relatonship with the stars. These days, he says, 80% of Americans may no longer be able to see the Milky Way.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX project has already put 952 of his Starlink satellites into space, and has plans to put 12,000 satellites into space—and more are intended to follow. Amazon has permission to put up more than 6,000. For comparison, so far we’ve put 8,000 satellites into orbit in the 60 years since Sputnik was launched.
The rationale for Starlink: in Musk’s words, anyone “will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed.”
(Starlink satellites as seen in DELVE Survey of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory)
But astronomers fear that all these satellites will damage their efforts to study the universe from earth-based telescopes. Starlink’s satellites are bright enough to be seen by the naked eye, even after improvements, despite agreements about maximum brightness levels. They are another form of technological clutter which makes it harder for us to see the universe.
Sacasas admits his metaphor might be overblown, but he describes the Starlink launches like this:
[I]f we think that the loss of the star-filled night sky is a real and serious loss with significant if also difficult to quantify human consequences, then the final imposition of an artificial network of satellites, where before the old celestial inheritance had been, seems rather like being tossed cheap trinkets to compensate for the theft of some precious treasure.
From this point Sacasas goes into a fascinating exploration of the competition in American history between “the natural sublime” and “the technological sublime”, drawing on the work of David Nye. There’s too much here to paraphrase, but two insights stand out for me.
The first is that the invention of artificial light is a vast and continuing experiment. Whatever the benefits, it has had “less than benign consequences for both humans and non-humans, from the well-documented interruption of the body’s natural sleep cycles and the consequent poor health outcomes to the disruption of natural ecosystems and waste of resources.” The results of the experiment are not in yet.
The second is that “darkness and the starry sky have succumbed to that all too familiar pattern whereby a public good, commonly shared or freely accessible, has been transmuted into a luxury item available only to the privileged classes… We are doomed, it seems, to abide the loss of all that we cannot quantify.”
So maybe it’s not coincidence that all of this satellite activity is being promoted by the two richest men in the world.
One of more depressing aspects of the Trump Presidency was the way it used its diplomatic and economic power to persuade the Mexican government in 2020 to turn its army on the caravan of migrants from Honduras making its way north.
The Mexican-American photographer Ada Trillo was travelling with the caravan and documented its journey, the third of a series of books on migrants. She has just published a collection of her work, La Caravana del Diablo, covered by 1854 (registration required).
(Tear gassed at the Mexican-Guatemalan border. Photo (c) Ada Trillo.)
The photographer told 1854:
“My brother has lived in Mexico all his life,” says Trillo, born in Juarez, just south of the Texas border, before moving to America aged 18. “He said to me recently, ‘I never knew there was so much hate in the US…
“Some people really don’t have a lot of knowledge about Central America,” she says. “They think they’re coming here to steal their jobs or commit crimes. But they’re parents, students and children, with hopes and aspirations. They’re coming here to work. They’re coming here to contribute to society.”
#j2t#030
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