“The new world is online and loving it, the virtual happily edging out the actual. The darkness is shut out and the night grows lighter and nobody is there to see it.” – Paul Kingsnorth, “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” (2010)
“Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or poetry of night, who have never even seen the night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.” – Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1925)
Collected Thoughts on Satellite Mega-Constellations and my Loathing Thereof
0. Introduction: Crisis in the Heavens
I am writing this piece – based in large part on private notes from 2020 – in the summer of 2022, from a holiday home in rural southern Sweden. I am writing this sentence having just stepped indoors from stargazing on my terrace. The night is dark, the heavens are deep, the Milky Way is clearly visible. The trees now stand as negative space, the jagged outline of the firmament. I take heart in the starry nightscape’s continued ability to enchant. At the same time, however, dark adaptation seemed only to attune my eyes to the ever-presence of satellites.
I’ve not thought much about satellite megaconstellations over the past two years, primarily due to the fact that I’ve spent these years deliberately avoiding any news about them; the blood pressure spikes never seemed worth it. Satellites, no doubt, are numerous – but how many of these, if any, are due to Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon, and other companies in this new megaconstellation industry? How many more satellites are there now than when I first noticed the night sky, and how rapidly is the problem worsening? I try not to think about it.
In an October 2021 article for Space.com, astrophysicist Paul Sutter provided some numbers from those who do think about it: “There are currently more than 3,300 active artificial satellites in Earth orbit, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy group. Meanwhile, the scientists behind new research note, generation 1 of SpaceX’s Starlink will, by itself, consist of 11,926 satellites, and generation 2 will have 30,000 more. OneWeb, Amazon’s Kuiper and China’s SatNet combined will deploy over 20,000 satellites.”
I first heard about Starlink in late 2019, appalled by the news that the launch of 60 satellites “photobombed” the Alpha Monocerotid meteor shower, which was being recorded from the island La Palma – a perennial astrophotography hotspot and birthplace of the “Declaration in Defence of the Night Sky and Right to Starlight” (2007), which declared that “An unpolluted night sky that allows the enjoyment and contemplation of the firmament should be considered an inalienable right equivalent to all other environmental, social, and cultural rights.”
In February 2020, Covid was still something happening “out there,” and Starlink was still in my Facebook feed and on the forefront of my mind. In a moving article for Scientific American, astronomer Ronald Drimmel warned, “Once this satellite constellation is fully deployed, there will be over 100 moving points of light in the night sky within a couple of hours of sunrise and sunset, from any point on the planet. There will be more of them than the brightest stars we can see—the same stars used to delineate the ancient constellations” (“We Must Preserve the Night Sky”).
In March 2020, Covid and its associated lockdowns spread to the United States, and Starlink launches continued (if only we could have sent Elon Musk and minions to social isolate on their precious Mars!), and between the two the looming threat of megaconstellations became the source of an anxiety and dread that was at times nearly overwhelming – much more so than the pandemic itself. I was trapped in a city at the time, and I became gripped by a fear that I would never again see the night sky as 13.8 billion years of astronomical evolution created it. There was a dystopian scenario that replayed itself in my mind: lockdown one day would be lifted only to leave us everywhere immured by the shiny trinkets of technocrats. The world would reopen to travel, but travel as far as we might, we would find nothing but a clearer view of thousands of satellites shot to the sky by a 300,000-year-young species, all within a few years, all within a handful of acts of hubris, greed, and a failure to imagine that anything could possibly matter more than our young species’s newest material comforts and conveniences. And from the most remote corner of Earth, I would fall to my knees and scream to the heavens; I would raise my fist to the sky and wail curses at Elon Musk and his brethren. And I would collapse in the agony of irreversible defeat.
If lockdowns had lasted as long as Covid itself, my existential dread might not have been misplaced. In November 2021, astronomer Aparna Venkatesan spoke at the International Dark Sky Association’s “Under One Sky” Conference, where she warned that we all stand to lose the night sky to satellite megaconstellations within two or three years. As I write this, we may have only a year left – if that – if her prophecy is correct.
But just what is so bad about the loss of the night sky to fleets of bright satellites? whence arises such encumbering angst and dread? Something curious about my revulsion toward satellite megaconstellations is that, on the surface, humans are the only species who are clearly harmed. If the main problem is the loss of the ability to experience awe, wonder, and enchantment, then it seems we’re dealing with a uniquely human problem. And uniquely human problems typically don’t evoke this type or degree of indignation from me.
Subjectively, it feels as though my loathing of this desecration of the heavens is cut from the same cloth as my loathing of the destruction of wild nature down here on Earth; it hits the gut with a similar strength and flavour. Theoretically, however, the concerns seem as though they must be very different. Ignoring the material used to manufacture the satellites, the fuel used to launch them, and perhaps the clearing of land to create a launch site, the damage caused by these projects doesn’t appear to have much effect on our planet’s largest ecological crises: habitat destruction, wildlife population decline, biodiversity loss, and so on. The despoilment of the heavens isn’t obviously an impediment to the continuation of evolutionary processes, nor to ecological integrity, nor the welfare of non-humans. It might very well be so (cf. §2.3, §4.2), but it isn’t obviously so, and my felt indignation doesn’t turn on contingencies regarding the satellites’ impact on biological or ecological processes.
I do suspect that there are root causes to the crises in Heaven and Earth. The disenchantment of humanity. The veneration of the putatively practical. The lack of wonder at – and thus reverence for – Nature as she is in herself. It all comes back, in a way, to affirmation of the useless (as once was the theme of a short-lived blog of mine). It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that I have no use for arguments against megaconstellations based on the premise that a clear view of the night sky is necessary for useful astronomical observations. When opponents of megaconstellation feel the need to cite their own practical concerns, they risk leaning into the same fundamentally problematic presupposition: that practicality overrides awe and wonder. (I have a special disdain for the argument that the megaconstellations may hinder astronomers’ ability to forecast meteor strikes that could imperil human life; sometimes meteors strike Earth and vanquish dominant species, so just get over it, the way people tell me to get over the non-avian dinosaurs.)
In the remainder of this post (essay? novella?), I provide a personal story to further contextualise why the night sky is important to me (§1), and I muse on the tragic irony that such an experience of the pure night sky – an experience of natural wonder that ought to be among the most accessible – has already become attainable nowhere on Earth (§2). After that, I take a few stabs at analysing and precisifying exactly what is (morally) wrong with the deployment of Starlink and other satellite mega-constellations: it creates a humanised planet where it is literally impossible to see beyond the works of our own species (§3); it is a particularly bold and crass form of cultural imperialism, deciding for all that the natural night sky is less important than a convenience for some members of Homo sapiens (§4); the values that enable technologists to launch megaconstellations are simply bad values to hold (§5). Finally, I dismiss the inane notion that the “need” for global internet access provides an excuse to despoil the skies with satellite megaconstellations (§6).
1. My Dark Sky Story
Like many dark-sky advocates, I grew up in a rural area. Unlike many dark-sky advocates, however, I spent my childhood ignoring the night sky. Childlike wonder? Ha! I wasn’t sufficiently mature to experience that until sometime in my late 20s…
1.1 Conversion to the Dark Side
It started by noticing sunsets, which were often stunningly gorgeous even from the urban metropolis where I then lived, and it progressed into sheer enrapturement in the changing colours of the sky through nautical twilight. On clear days, gazing into the sky was a liminal ritual, but as the deep blue of astronomical twilight took hold, it was time to retire to my quarters, for night itself held little fascination in my artificially illuminated downtown neighbourhood. Like most urbanites, I had grown accustomed to perpetual skyglow as what “night” looked like. Yet I did recall “meteor shower parties” at my childhood home – when the adults sat under the night sky on our patio, drinking wine coolers and occasionally shouting “I saw one!” – and I slowly grew curious to re-experience what I took for granted then.
Having forgotten what I’d lost, it took some time to summon the motivation. I hated driving, and I seldom ventured from my pedestrian radius and a few familiar bus routes. But I did still have a car in those days, and I was in a romantic relationship that sometimes gave me reason to stray from my comfort zone (a little bit, within bounds). So one summer’s evening I suggested to my then-partner that we go to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night to watch the Perseid meteor shower (albeit with craft beer instead of wine coolers). It proved to be an utterly profound experience, igniting a romance with the night sky that has never left me.
Leaving my Toyota Corolla by some obscure dirt road, we trudged into what seems to be an abandoned quarry. I’m sure it was not the most scenic spot by day, but on that mostly clear and moonless night, its 360 degrees views were most remarkable, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I found myself in shock and awe – indeed reverie. The meteors themselves were of course captivating, yet even they were not the main source of astonishment. There were stars by the hundreds, thousands, seemingly infinite in their unfathomable depth! And there, clearly visible, sprawled the cloudy band of the Milky Way! This was no photograph. It was no planetarium show. This was the palpable reality that extended before my naked eyes in the warm summer night. The firmament had depth and dimension I’ve never fathomed, and there in the star-studded darkness, I seemed to lose track of the boundaries of my own self and its earthly environs; they faded, dissolved, subsumed into the vastness of space and time – like a transfiguration back into the star-stuff whence our cells once came.
Adrift in the cosmic sea, I was humbled by the ineffable beauty that stretched out far beyond me – with light from long before me – and yet there was also an ease and comfort in the shroud of the night, a sense of homecoming and belonging. I was simultaneously awestruck by grandeur and entirely in my place. It is little exaggeration to call the experience life-changing, a spiritual awakening. The Apostle Paul (then Saul) was blinded by the light; I was brought to my knees by the overwhelming power of darkness.
Back in my urban apartment, my day-to-day life remained much the same, but with renewed perspective, vitality, and hope – for I knew that beyond the drab monotony and cacophony of the city there was beauty and splendour and sublimity, and I had a mission to return.
1.2 The Afterglow
I can’t credit the experience for making me an ecocentrist or conservationist; those dispositions have separate roots traceable to interests arising both before and after my Road to Hocking County conversion experience. It did, however, transform me into a dark-sky advocate – from the next morning on. My predominant interests have since grown more earthbound, yet my dark-sky advocacy lingers on; it would be most remiss to ignore light pollution’s deleterious effects on wildlife and ecosystems. I know, moreover, that the avoidance of artificially bright night sky has a salubrious effect on my mental health (and, conversely, that subjection to light pollution has deleterious one). But there was one conclusion that I now must rescind: when the situation on Earth seems hopeless, and eco-anxiety takes hold, I can no longer repose hope in the recoverability of the heavens.
For a brief time, you see, it was like this: I had discovered the immeasurable mental health benefits of immersion in the sights, sounds, and smells of the more-than-human world – in the woods, the wetlands, the coastlines – even in the daytime. But this revelation had come as a double-edged sword, for I came to fear the loss of the places and creatures that gave me succour. And the more I depended on them for my wellbeing, the more I became addicted, and the more I became addicted, the more I feared their loss – for the more I feared I couldn’t cope without.
Consider, for instance, birds. Sometime between late 2018 through early 2019, I became an irredeemable Bird Person. Birds, I discovered, were my joy and my company, and they were always there for me; in difficult moments, a “bird therapy break” could reliably boost my mood like nothing else. Birds were that whose absence caused loneliness and whose presence instantly took it away. Then, in September 2019, an article was published in Science that sent the North American birding community into frenzied anxiety. Titled simply “Decline of the North American avifauna,” the infamous article revealed a loss of 29 percent of the continent’s breeding birds in less than 50 years. And the situation was growing steadily worse, as the Trump administration was pushing along with its rollback of America’s long-standing Migratory Bird Treaty Act (on top of a multitude of other environmental rollbacks). The economy was doing well, or so I was told, and a reelection of Trump seemed imminent. Meanwhile, the rhetoric from the Left only exacerbated my fear for the feathered ones – plagued as it was by anthropocentric “green growth” fetishism and, with it, a staunchly anti-avian tendency to (for example) downplay or deny the very real fact that wind turbines kill birds.
Birds, it seemed, had few friends – not in government, certainly, and not even in mainstream environmentalism – and I began to wonder how much longer I could count on Class Aves even to exist. No, the reason to protect birds is not that I am personally entitled to them as some type of psychotherapy; birds obviously have their own intrinsic right to exist that has nothing to do with me or anyone else. Nonetheless, I came to fear my own future loss at the same time as I delighted in the birds around me. For my own sake, I needed a back-up plan, a fallback option, a source of connection and enchantment that wasn’t bird-dependent…
And then, despite having resettled in the city, I remembered my resplendent experiences of the star-filled night sky. That, surely, was something that could never be taken away! Not everywhere… Lol, oops.
And so this is the background context of my initial acquaintance with satellite megaconstellations, as described in §0: it was less than three months after the publication of “Decline of the North American avifauna” that I learned about Starlink. And I felt hopeless. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The heavens were supposed to offer our last bastion of hope. After humanity has polluted, ransacked, and degraded the last square inch of the surface of Earth, and when the last wild creatures lay murdered in their concrete tombs, the heavens were still supposed to be there. There was supposed to always be some vague comfort in the thought that no matter how bad things are down here on Earth – no matter how many forests clearcut, wetlands drained, species rendered extinct – there would always be, if nothing else, the ability to turn off the lights and lose ourselves in the endless grandeur of the universe, its limitless potentiality. We might look up and think that, surely, in this vast universe, there are other planets that harbour life. And surely among these there are those upon which life still thrives and diversifies. And even if it’s the unavoidable fate of each verdant and vital planet that a species like ours will arise as its undoing, there is always the reassuring fact that as we gaze into the firmament, we gaze back in time. Perhaps, for instance, the Andromeda galaxy of 2.5 million ago – the Andromeda we see – still contains such a virginal untainted life-giving world. We were always supposed to have this hope, this escape; we were always supposed to have the sky.
But suddenly, without warning, we stood to lose even this. Everywhere. I was paralysed; there seemed nothing left to do but watch helplessly as Earth perishes beneath mechanised skies.
In the ensuing months, the unprecedented disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated my eco-anxiety to a nearly intolerable degree. It welled in the form of more strange apocalyptic thoughts: “What if this is the final spring? What if next year the warblers don’t pass through and egrets and the kinglets and flycatchers don’t return? What if next year the fireflies don’t flash? What if there are no wildflowers left to bloom? What if the evening chorus of the frogs vanishes along with the morning chorus of the songbirds? What if this is the last spring – and I am locked away to miss it all indoors? I, for one, would sooner die from Covid than live to witness the aftermath.”
It turned out that those worries were overstated. Ohio never issued a full lockdown requiring people to remain in their homes. While denizens of less “freedom-loving” countries sheltered indoors, I visited my neighbouring wetland several times daily. The red-winged blackbirds continued to sing. The egret returned. The warblers passed through. The damselflies and dragonflies graced the reeds of the marsh, and then came even the fireflies. Combine that with the guaranteed freedom from most of the tedious and insufferable interactive rituals of humankind, and my spring of 2020 was a time of constant meditative bliss. Almost.
I was still confined to the city under Bortle Class 8 skies, and from my place of confinement, I read the news of the Starlink launches, and post-apocalyptic dystopian nightmares continued – this time, as described in §0, in the form of nightmares about the night.
2. The Tragedy of the Night
“[I]f a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836)
2.1 The Most Accessible Natural Wonder?
As of 2016, approximately 60 percent of Europeans and nearly 80 percent of North Americans lived beneath skies so light-polluted that they cannot see the Milky Way (see Fabio Falchi, et al, “The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness,” Science Advances).
The statistics, I presume, are even worse now: the same study found that artificial sky brightness was increasing by about 6 percent each year. While this loss of the night is reversible in principle, a profound shift in values remains necessary to reverse it in practice.
It is a tragic irony, considering that the celestial firmament ought to be one the most accessible avenues for any man, woman, or child to revel in natural wonder beyond the scale and scope of our young species. There are many earthbound phenomena that offer the potential for enchantment in Nature, but the sky has the distinct benefit that it is everywhere. Unlike particular species of animals or plants, ecosystems, geological formations, and so on, the night sky can be seen from anywhere on the planet, at least for most of the year (those summering in the arctic might be temporarily out of luck). In principle, every person on Earth could enjoy an awe-inspiring view of the stars on any clear and dark night – “every night come out these envoys of beauty,” in Emerson’s words – and enjoy this spellbinding view from their own gardens, terraces, or sidewalks. There is no need, in principle, to drive or hike to see the stars. As Emerson wrote, albeit from a bygone age, “Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!”
Moreover, these envoys of heavenly beauty have the useful quality that they persist undiminished by human interest therein; they would not be threatened by billions of eyes gazing upon them. Even if every person on Earth were to look upward at once, the stars would not flee, frantic and disoriented in the chaos of attention, nor would they be trampled or eroded under the weight of our telescopes. An earthbound wilderness can be “loved to death” by too many tourists vying for their experience of untouched nature, and animals can perish from the stress imposed by eager human observers (witness, for example, the tragic fate of a baby American Oystercatcher at Milford Point following a four-hour stakeout of four wildlife photographers). But the stars and the planets, the comets and the meteors, endure human attention unharmed, and they will continue to do so, night after night after night, however many astrophotographers stay up for an all-night stakeout.
Stargazing is no substitute to fulfil our needs for connection to the more-than-human here on Earth – not even close – but it may be, in principle, the most accessible source of awe and wonder at that which extends beyond our species (underline ‘in principle’).
2.2 The Easiest Pollution to Clean Up?
We have expelled darkness from most of the “civilised” world for over a century (see Henry Beston’s seminal passage at the top). Even so, however, dark-sky advocates have long taken heart in another fact: light pollution is the easiest type of pollution to clean up, or so we assumed until recently.
All it takes, it seems, is a large-scale blackout. In 1994, when an earthquake disrupted power throughout the metropolis, LA residents called the local Griffith Observatory to inquire about a strange giant cloud in the sky: they were seeing the Milky Way for the first time. A similar incident befell New York City after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In February of this year, Ukrainian photographer Pavlo Pakhomenko found solace and inspiration by photographing the night sky when Ukraine introduced a country-wide blackout regime; his work and moving story is documented in the article “Dark skies over Kharkiv, Ukraine” recently published on the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) website. This year’s IDA “Capture the Dark” photo contest honourable mentions also include striking before and after photographs of a programmed blackout in Bariloche, Argentina and a power outage at Iowa State University.
When I joined the IDA less than a decade ago, the morning after my spiritual conversion in rural Ohio, satellite megaconstellations were not yet part of the discussion. Despite the rapid spread of light pollution in recent decades, there was always an optimism that light pollution was easily reversible, if only values could be changed. The night sky was presumed always to be there in the background, instantaneously recoverable to its pristine state. Unlike most types of pollution, light pollution can literally be removed with the flip of a switch – or so we thought until recently.
2.3 Nowhere Truly Dark
Two centuries ago the beauty and wonder of the heavens was everywhere accessible. Two decades ago it was still presumed fully and easily recoverable. And today nowhere is truly dark, not even Dark Sky Sanctuaries in which artificial light sources are heavily regulated. And one of the biggest culprits is not so easily erased, since it’s out of the reach of most of us, up in the sky circling the Earth (and, no, astrophotographers, I don’t mean the Moon).
Light trespass from cities is one major concern today: the famed dark skies of Death Valley are now violated by the light dome of Las Vegas. Fracking sites are also becoming a major contributor to light pollution in rural areas, as are greenhouses. But literally rising above all other artificial light sources, there is one sufficient cause of the global loss of true darkness: space junk. Anthropogenic light pollution is caused not only by our lights down here at the surface – those easily switched off and vulnerable to the actions of storms or monkeywrenchers – but also by our satellites and other artefacts left up in orbit. Satellites’ bright streaks are only the tip of the iceberg. An even bigger problem is not so overtly striking: space junk increases diffuse night sky brightness by reflecting and scattering sunlight, night in and night out.
In an immensely important article published in June 2021 (“The proliferation of space objects is a rapidly increasing source of artificial night sky brightness”), Miroslav Kocifaj and coauthors model the impact of satellites on diffuse night sky brightness (NSB) – that is, how bright the sky itself appears, as opposed to the natural and manmade point sources therein. The authors concluded that light scattered by satellites and space debris had already driven diffuse NSB above the “limiting acceptable value of light pollution at astronomical observatory sites.” According to the researchers’ estimates, the cumulative effect is to increase diffuse light by about 10 percent over natural diffuse NSB; this happens also to be the upper limit set forth by the International Astronomical Union in its standards for observation sites. Nowhere is truly dark, and it’s down to space junk.
Although Kocifaj and coauthors are most worried about the impact on ground-based astronomical observation, it is crucial to note that this level of diffuse NSB is also discernible by the naked eye. In fact, it is perceptible even when individual satellites are not: “Except for the brighter ones, most Earth-orbiting objects cannot be visually detected and tracked individually, since their individual irradiances fall below the visual detection threshold. However, if several such objects are present within the receptive field of a retinal ganglion cell, their combined irradiance may well reach the threshold, and may be perceived as a diffuse skyglow component.” Satellites are brightening our experience of the night sky – and thereby diminishing our ability to see deeper and longer ago into the firmament – even when we don’t realise they’re there.
When existent, SpaceX’s feeble responses have focused on dimming the brightness of the Starlink satellites. Channelling Mick Jagger, the favoured response has been to paint them black. However, it’s unclear (at least to me) whether this will do anything to lessen the major background problem of increasing diffuse NSB. As Kocifaj et al note, “Any piece of matter in Earth orbit illuminated by the Sun reflects or scatters light.” And, in any case, even a complete cessation of the Starlink programme and other megaconstellations will not ameliorate the already dire problem of space-junk-inflicted global light pollution. Only deorbiting existing satellites can do that.
I have set about writing in an attempt to grapple with what’s wrong, fundamentally, with satellite megaconstellations. And perhaps the discussion could rest here: megaconstellations will guarantee that nowhere on Earth is truly dark, worsening an existing problem by orders of magnitude. It is deeply worrying to learn about the contribution of satellites and other space junk to the night sky’s luminosity, especially in light of (so to speak) how ecological deleterious we now understand light pollution to be; see, for example, Dirk Sanders et al’s “A meta-analysis of biological impacts of artificial light at night,” published in Nature: Ecology & Evolution in November 2020, and the numerous footnoted articles in Section 2 of the International Dark-Sky Association’s report “Artificial Light at Night: State of the Science 2022.” (I have also written a series of three short articles covering research on the impact of light pollution on bird migration and other bird behaviours.)
Intuitively, however, satellite megaconstellations were abhorrent even before the publication of the should-be seminal “The proliferation of space objects is a rapidly increasing source of artificial night sky brightness.” Starlink was an atrocity even when we knew only that its gaudy trinkets tried to steal the show from a rare meteor shower in one of Earth’s best stargazing locations. Intuitively, in other words, satellite megaconstellations would be wrong even if background luminosity weren’t an issue. We now know background luminosity is a concern – and quite a major one. In fact, I believe it’s a strong enough worry that it ought to be sufficient to lead to the cessation of the projects. At the same time, however, I don’t believe that it’s necessary for an argument against them, and resting our case here would preempt a deeper dive into the moral problems inherent in littering the night sky with bright shiny satellites. And, thus, onward to §3…
3. A World Without Wilderness
“We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. […] We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.” – Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Here is a proposal: what makes satellite megaconstellations bad is that they effectively make it the case that there is no remaining vantage point on Earth where a human observer can see beyond the bounds of the “handiwork” of our own species. We might say, evoking Abbey’s dictum, that in the Starlinked world there will be no wilderness, no refuge, no possibility of escape, no hope.
3.1 A Trammelled and Imprinted Night Sky
The United States’ Wilderness Act of 1964 defines ‘wilderness’ in part as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” “retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements [sic!] or human habitation,” “with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.” Satellite megaconstellations impinge on all of these definitive qualities of wilderness. A sky visibly littered with broadband satellites is hardly “primeval” or “untrammeled by man.” Beneath such a sky, the “imprint of man’s work” is substantially noticeable, unavoidable.
On a page about light pollution, the US National Park Service states, “Dark night skies are a wilderness characteristic, a part that cannot be cut out without leaving the land wanting” (“Night Skies: Wilderness Value”). Of course, this is a critical point when considering the conservation importance of wilderness and the ecological impacts of light pollution; life on the land evolved with regular daily and seasonal cycles of light and dark, and the latter cannot be ignored without leaving the former wanting. But I believe that the NPS is further correct when speaking – as in the present context – about the subjective, experiential value of wilderness to the human spirit.
The NPS goes on to say, “The opportunity for stepping back in time, removing ourselves from evidence of human development and infrastructure, must include the nighttime hours.” This opportunity is thwarted not only by terrestrial sources of light pollution, as the NPS has in mind, but also by excessively satellit skies. But the NPS lacks the power to regulate the latter, even in the skies above its own parks, and satellite megaconstellations are poised to deprive “the possibility of escape” from everyone, everywhere on Earth.
Other commentators have also stressed the inescapability of satellite megaconstellations. Take, for example, this important line from an International Dark-Sky Association statement on the topic (“Comment in Response to PRM: Update to the Regulations Implementing the Procedural Provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act”): “Unlike conventional sources of light pollution, such as skyglow associated with cities, the view of satellites cannot be evaded simply by traveling to more remote locations. These objects will be visible from everywhere on Earth, except possibly in its extreme polar regions.”
Krzysztof Stanek, an astronomy professor at Ohio State University (hey, that’s where I work), makes a similar point in a statement to The Atlantic (Marina Koren, “The Night Sky Will Never Be the Same,” Feb 2020): “We can’t opt out. If I get sick and tired of living in Columbus, Ohio, I could move out to a remote cabin and disconnect from the internet. But here, everybody on the entire Earth that ever wants to look at the sky has to look at the Starlink satellites.”
More generally, Starlink, takes away our ability to access any point on the surface (or waters) of Earth from which to escape the intrusion of the works of Man. In so doing, it effectively precludes any vantage point from which we can see beyond the bounds of our own species. We won’t be able to opt out of the technosphere. We won’t have the option to escape into anything that is truly a wilderness.
3.2 Objections and Limitations
Undoubtedly, satellite megaconstellations will compromise the view of the night sky for people globally, with the result that we will all lose the opportunity to experience the view of nightscape free from artefacts of human contrivance. One still might question, however, whether this is a sufficient or indefeasible reason to halt the launching of satellite megaconstellations. Here are a few types of potential objections:
3.2.1 “Wilderness is a luxury, not a right”
One might question why it is important that humans be able to experience “wilderness values” at all. Sure, witnessing a dark and star-filled sky – in which meteors outshone satellites – was a profound, humbling, and inspiring experience to me. But it doesn’t follow that I or anyone else is entitled to such experiences. My experience, however profound, might be dismissed as a mere luxury.
This objection is most likely to be delivered by technophiles who believe that “progress” and global internet defeat the supposedly romantic ideal that wilderness ought to exist. This order of priorities is narrow and provincial in its outlook – anthropocentric, Western, and presentist (i.e. failing to reimagine a state of affairs, not so long ago, in which the internet did not exist and therefore was never assumed necessary for happiness, and meanwhile forgetting that the stars have inspired human creativity for millennia). I say more about the internet in §6. More compelling to me, ecocentrists can also hold, for quite different reasons, that human experience of wilderness is a luxury, not a right; I say more about this in §3.2.3.
3.2.2 “Wilderness is already gone; give it up”
One might point out that there are other respects in which we’re already forced to give up on the possibility of genuine wilderness. For example, nowhere on Earth is unaffected by anthropogenic climate change. Thus (the argument goes), it is already impossible to achieve what is allegedly sought, and the goal of pristine “wilderness” must be jettisoned.
This potential objection is, I think, rather easily dismissed. While it is true that climate change entails that no person or place on Earth is unaffected by the works of humanity, this point seems like a non-starter where the aforementioned wilderness qualities are concerned. The visual effect of satellites is phenomenologically salient and obtrusive in a way that the effects of climate change are not. Extreme weather events have become more common and more extreme in ways that only anthropogenic climate change can explain, but phenomenologically they still present as weather; the human activity that lies behind them does not impress on the senses as do manmade objects or sources of artificial light.
Similar could be said about other sources of pollution that are inescapable yet invisible and inaudible. Even ubiquitous microplastics are, well, micro. And what about that sad fact that existing satellites already prohibit the experience of genuine darkness due to their cumulative effect on sky brightness (§2.3)? It does impact our subjective experience of the night sky, such as by increasing the threshold brightness of the stars we can see even in designated wilderness areas. But sky brightness also varies due to natural causes, such as the moon or auroras, and I don’t believe that this change – even though detectable – overtly impinges on wilderness experience in the same way as a hundred or moving points of light brighter than the brightest stars.
3.2.3 The (prima facie) compelling objection: “Wilderness experience is a human interest; what matters is the interest of wilderness and wildlife themselves”
Finally, one might raise the concern that “wilderness values,” as here presented, are limited to human experience, but the strongest case against satellite megaconstellations ought to be an ecocentric one; they are, after all, a global environmental issue. We already know, moreover, that any human “right” to experience wilderness must be defeasible from an ecocentric perspective. As mentioned in passing in §2.1, humans can “love a wilderness to death,” not only undermining the wilderness characteristics for other human visitors but also – and more damningly – destroying the integrity of the land itself. More fundamental than any human right to experience wilderness is the right of wilderness to human non-interference.
This objection, if compelling, may point in the direction of an even stronger argument against satellite megaconstellations: perhaps the deployment of megaconstellations is wrong because it represents gratuitous human meddling in wild Nature that has a basic right to self-existence and self-determination. So, then, if we are to advance the Wilderness Argument Against Megaconstellations, which version shall we pursue: anthropocentric or ecocentric?
3.3 Anthropocentric or Ecocentric?
I believe that the ability to experience an unpolluted night sky should be protected as our birthright (see, e.g., the La Palma Declaration, as quoted way back in §0) and that it trumps other purported “rights” like the right to an internet connection (§6). At the same time, I fully concur with the hypothetical critic (i.e. me) that the human right to experience wilderness is defeasible and, specifically, can be overridden by wild Nature’s inherent right to “untrammelled” self-existence. It would cause some discomfort, to say the least, to rest the case against satellite megaconstellations on a matter of human entitlement.
It must be granted, however, that some moral issues just are anthropocentric issues. Breach of contract, for example, is generally morally wrong (ceteris paribus) even if no non-humans are harmed in the process. Racism, sexism, and other discriminatory “-isms” are wrongs internal to the human domain. Rape and murder of fellow humans are wrong irrespective of any effects, or lack thereof, on the more-than-human world. Many more examples could be given, but I presume that it’s a pretty obvious point, even to other diehard ecocentrists.
To be sure, satellite megaconstellations don’t exist in the same physical space where humans live, work, cheat, lie, discriminate, harass, murder, rape, and enslave one another. But does this physical separation entail that satellite megaconstellations can’t fall under the domain of solely anthropocentric moral concerns? There are numerous other ways in which humans are unique. Only humans, as far as we know, have devised art, music, poetry, myth, and astronomy – all endeavours that might be severely compromised along with the universal despoilment of the Heavens. Some of our non-human kin possess the perceptual faculties to notice the changes in the night sky wrought by satellite megaconstellations, yet they will not be affected in the same way as us psychologically, spiritually, socially, or culturally.
I can imagine that some ecocentrists might attempt this tack in replying to objection 3.2.3: “the ability to experience wilderness – or, more broadly, vantage points from which to witness a world beyond humanity – is instrumentally valuable to the realisation of ecocentric ends, for it promotes humbleness and reverence and respect for Nature; thus, the human right to experience wilderness is an ecocentric matter, albeit indirectly.”
Now, I don’t particularly like the above line of reasoning myself, chiefly because it’s empirically false that a person needs to experience wilderness to adopt ecocentric values, and it’s also empirically false that a person needs to experience a pristine night sky in order to adopt ecocentric values. A person could become an ecocentrist without any experience of either wilderness or natural night. I myself was intuitively ecocentric even when confined to a city, due to a long-standing fascination with the deep-time history of life on Earth, and I was later motivated to become active in conservation following daytime experiences of the more-than-human world in decidedly non-wilderness areas.
There is another weakness in attempting to force satellite megaconstellations to be an ecocentric issue. Consider one of the pithiest statements of ecocentrism, Aldo Leopold’s land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” There are two possibilities: either (a) satellite megaconstellations will have an impact on the “integrity, stability, and beauty” of Earth’s biotic communities or (b) they won’t. Either case leads to philosophical issues.
Take first (a). It is quite likely that “integrity, stability, and beauty” of biotic communities will be affected by satellite megaconstellations, due to their impact on non-human celestial navigators (§4.2) and increasing overall levels of light pollution (§2.3). The problem, as I’ve already emphasised, is that the wrongness of launching megaconstellations doesn’t seem to turn on this contingency. Moreover, the wrongness of satellite megaconstellations seem independent of the wrongness of other ecocidal acts behind their creation and deployment, such as the mining of minerals to construct the satellites, the clearing of land for a launch site, the pollution caused by fuels used for the launches, etc. So while it might be that Leopold’s land ethic is sufficient to identify megaconstellations as a moral ill, it doesn’t seem that it is necessary.
Now consider (b). If satellite megaconstellations don’t impact the integrity, stability, and beauty of biotic communities down here on Earth, then in what sense could there be an ecocentric mandate not to deploy them? There are no “biotic communities” 550 km above the Earth’s surface. Should we supplement the land ethic with a “space ethic” that condemns the violation of the integrity, stability, and beauty of regions beyond Earth’s habitable zones? We might consider it. It might look similar to philosopher Stan Godlovitch’s acentric environmental aesthetics (see “Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics”). The problem is that this can’t clearly be done merely by extension of the intuitions that underlie the land ethic – which are founded, for Leopold and the many of the rest of us, on our membership in a broader community of life – and an attempt to analogise the land ethic into regions beyond the biosphere would risk losing sight of what is importantly distinct and precious here on our verdant and life-giving planet.
Indeed, Godlovitch’s own description of acentrism might strike many as a reductio against the view: “Any moral relevance in the distinction between living and non-living is lost in acentrism. Strip-mining the moon becomes morally as problematic as strip-whaling the seas. Nothing distinguishes leaving be Venusian craters or the Amazon rainforest, between active lava flows and the ecology of the Serengeti” (p. 17). I, for one, believe that there is something uniquely important about protecting evolutionary processes in the few places that can sustain them. Protecting the integrity, stability, and beauty of biotic communities on Earth does seem to be a moral demand with a special import that goes beyond any aesthetic imperative to “leave be” planets, stars, or expanses of space (et cetera) that do not, cannot, and near will support life.
That said, I don’t think we should dismiss “acentrism” entirely. There is, I think, something to be said in favour of adopting a “hands off” policy toward all of the non-human universe, life-giving or not. It has a mark of virtue – a demonstration of an ability to impose and respect limits, to adhere to a default policy of leaving the natural world (and universe) to its own devices rather than meddling needlessly, to keep our dirty hands off of that which doesn’t belong to us. And, here, we begin to make progress to where there’s real potential to reconcile the anthropocentric consequences with the ecocentric intuitions: we need to examine not only the consequences of a sky filled with satellites but also the values and attitudes that have rendered this our planet’s probable fate.
Indeed, I think there is something inherently virtue-theoretic about the intuitions that underlie my slight partial attraction to acentrism. Note that we can’t imagine a strip-mining of the dark side of the moon, for instance, without imagining human actors doing the strip-mining. And those human actors have reasons and motives. Why are they strip-mining the moon? Is it out of greed? Is it some silly sense of competitiveness or the need to prove their power? Is it nothing but the urge to tamper and destroy? It is hard to imagine someone bothering to strip-mine the moon without some perverse motive — the same kind of motives, incidentally, that actually promote ecocide down here on Earth. Even if the goal of the hypothetical lunar mining is to obtain resources for the use of humankind, that presupposes either sheer greed or a failure to manage human overshoot down on Earth; our terrestrial species ought not to depend on the moon for anything more than a beacon and the governance of tides, and any inability to live within our means on Earth presents a gross collective failure. But the point is just this: in any thought experiment in which a person destroys something, there is never just the destruction; there is the person and their reasons for action. And so it is, too, in real-world cases.
4. Techno-Imperialism
In §3, we examined the conjecture that the basic wrongness of satellite megaconstellations is that they undermine the possibility for the human experience of wilderness values (well, I examined that anyhow; your mileage may vary). In this section, I entertain a different approach to the issue: the deployment of satellite megaconstellations is imperialistic. It is wrong because it imposes the technosphere on others – indeed, on everyone – without their consent or, in most cases, even consultation. Elon Musk and other responsible parties are blameworthy because they dictate for everyone that global high-speed internet access is more important than a natural night sky – despite the fact that it’s quite ludicrous to assume that even all humans (§4.1), let alone all non-humans (§4.2), would share this preference.
The claim here is compatible with the position in §3, but it shifts the locus of attention. Specifically, the primary issue shifts from the consequences of megaconstellations to the attitudes of those responsible for them. According to the former viewpoint, the core problem is an inability to access true wilderness, and the appropriate attitude may be one of grief or mourning at the loss. The present viewpoint, in contrast, might admit that this is a grievous loss, but would refocus attention on the decision makers’ lack of concern or sympathy for those who need the experience of wilderness; the appropriate attitude may be one of moral outrage and indignation directed at human actors. The culpable parties demonstrate a deficit of care or empathy for those affected by their actions, as well as a crude lack of foresight and imagination in considering all of those who might be impacted and what their values and interests might be. By imposing a view of a littered and mechanised night sky upon the entire world, Musk and his enablers exercise a form of cultural imperialism.
4.1 Respecting Human Values
Perhaps Musk wouldn’t recognise the Big Dipper if it was shoved up his ass. For many, however, the stars and constellations remain an important part of cultural heritage and tradition. Of course we must be careful here: heritage and tradition tend to be quite poor reasons to attempt to justify decisions that impact wild nature (see, e.g., my swift dismal of such rationales in §3.1 of “In Memory of Anholt as I Never Knew Her”). With this caveat, though, it is nonetheless important to be mindful of human cultural diversity: not everyone on Earth fetishises shallow technophilia, and divergent voices demand a hearing.
4.1.1 “Astrocolonialism” and Indigenous Viewpoints
Recently, there has been some much-needed discussion of the importance of consulting Indigenous people, some of whom have decried satellite megaconstellations as astrocolonialism, as it is described in an article in Vice (Becky Ferreira, 5 Oct 2021, “SpaceX’s Satellite Megaconstellations Are Astrocolonialism, Indigenous Advocates Say”). (See also, e.g., Nikita Amir, 27 Oct 2021, “Light Pollution Threatens Millennia-old Indigenous Navigation Methods,” Discover and Karlie Noon, 20 Apr 2022, “Thousands of satellites are polluting Australian skies, and threatening ancient Indigenous astronomy practices,” The Conversation.)
While I join in condemning the exclusion or underrepresentation of Indigenous voices, I am loath to agree with Ferreira that “Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by this interference with the night sky.” The night sky ought to be regarded as everyone’s birthright, and megaconstellations are so abhorrent precisely because they deprive everyone of the possibility of reaching a vantage point from which to see beyond the artefacts of humanity and our modern technological society. Presumably, it’s more socially acceptable to argue that marginalised communities will be adversely affected than that the natural night sky is an invaluable source of beauty and inspiration that should be deprived to no one; enchantment in Nature has precious little political purchase, but colonial guilt has some.
The erasure of Indigenous practices is an important worry, but is it the fundamental worry where megaconstellations are concerned? I think not. For one, appeal to Indigenous culture per se hardly hits ethical bedrock; even when practised by Indigenous people, cultural tradition is not necessarily ethical. Claims of indigenousness cannot right a wrong such as, say, the Faroese Grindadrap (or, in English, “dolphin massacre”) or Aborginal hunting of dugongs in Torres Strait. As a general rule, however, Indigenous cultures have adopted practices that represent a much greater degree of connection with and respect for Nature than the norms of modern Western society, and these include the traditions of celestial navigation, time-keeping, and storytelling that threatened by satellites and light pollution. While not infallible, Indigenous cultures have much more to teach the modern world than Musk and his tech-bro cronies – and reverence for the night sky is one. The loss of the sky is everyone’s loss, but Indigenous communities might generally be better poised to recognise the severity of what is lost, and it is partly for this reason that their consultation is so important: they offer perspectives on the value of the night sky that can and should help all of us to dislodge our own narrowly technocratic and materialistic paradigm.
Erasure of Indigenous cultures may be indirectly relevant in another way. As Nikita Amir points out, “colonial ideas are pervasive in the language we use to describe space. When they’re conceptualized as conquering the ‘final frontier,’ space missions mark yet another chapter in the story of Western expansionism.” Perhaps the same basic attitude of greed and wanton destruction underlies White Man’s conquest of both Earth and Heaven. There is surely something about the attitude of imperialism – its arrogance, destruction, and blind indifference – that deeply offends even irrespective of the harm done. It chauvinistically dismisses other cultures and viewpoints as even potentially valid. This is true even if some Indigenous voices are offered the gesture of nominal consideration. The inclusion of Indigenous perspectives comes with the expectation that these communities will want reliable broadband and, thus, ultimately support the megaconstellations. There is no real attempt to empathetically entertain a difference perspective on technology and Nature.
Astronomers themselves are not necessarily exemplars of virtue when they demand inclusion of Indigenous voices. Since when does the astronomy community care about what Indigenous people regard as sacred? Surely not when it “needs” to build ground-based telescopes! Opposition to satellite megaconstellations may have led to a marriage of convenience between astronomers and Indigenous people, but perhaps no more than that. Here again, there may be a missed opportunity to learn from a worldview that recognises the sacred on Heaven and Earth. One need not appropriate Indigenous myth or religion to be inspired. The natural world – the natural universe – is more than sufficient as source of awe, reverence, and humility, spiritual qualities. We can choose to say of the expanse of the sky, just as we can choose to say of a parcel of land, “Here is a place that our works mustn’t debase and profane.”
4.1.2 Inherently Unheard Voices
Let us now go further and consider two groups who by their very nature are excluded from the conversation about satellite megaconstellations (the first a rather small one, the second a rather large one): (A) Contactless tribes. (B) The would-be informed perspectives of all humans who, as is, have never had the opportunity to experience a pristine night sky, and thus cannot make an informed judgement.
A. Contactless tribes, by their nature, choose to resist contact with other human communities, including (a) digital communications and (b) consultation with SpaceX executives.
We do not know for sure whether, say, the residents of North Sentinel Island or uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest have any practices or traditions that require a clear and unobstructed view of the starry sky. It is likely, given the prominence of celestial observation in many Indigenous practices throughout the world, but we can’t be certain. We do know, however, that these peoples do not have any practices or traditions that require an internet connection. We don’t need to intrude upon their isolation to gather their opinion on Starlink. Contactless tribes stand to gain nothing from Elon Musk’s pretensions for global high-speed internet. We impose only risk – the threat of losing traditional astronomical knowledge, practices, and customs – with no promise of benefit.
There may be an even deeper injustice: contactless tribes choose to live in isolation from technological society, a right that even modern Westerners can generally recognise as an important one to respect. But satellite megaconstellations will defile their skies as much as the rest of ours. Such an intrusion might be regarded as violating their chosen isolation, in a way, just as it deprives the rest of us of our wilderness refuge. The defilement of the heavens precludes our retreats to isolation; it precludes their lives in isolation.
B. Individuals who have never had the opportunity to witness a natural night sky – and who now never will – have thereby been denied the ability to form adequately informed judgement on satellite megaconstellations. We will thus never hear what their thoughts and opinions might have been if they had engaged in potentially transformative experiences such as my own night-sky story relayed in §1.1.
Recall the alarming six-year-old statistics from Falchi et al (cited in §2.1): about 60 percent of Europeans and 80 percent of North Americans live(d) in regions in which artificial light renders the sky too bright to see the Milky Way even on the clearest nights. In Singapore, the world’s most light-polluted country, “the entire population lives under skies so bright that the eye cannot fully dark-adapt to night vision.” There was a time even in my own life when I might have uncritically accepted an expansion of internet access over the pristine night sky; I had not yet experienced the profound impact of the star-studded darkness, and thus I simply didn’t think about natural night or its loss. Now I would give up the internet to save the sky, if it were to come down to such a bargain. Had it not been for my own transformative experience, it’s unlikely that I would have ever arrived at this assignment of values. How, then, can we expect others to arrive at an informed valuation for their artificially illuminated armchairs? The megaconstellations will be launched before the majority of Earth’s internet-users will have had a chance to experience a much deeper and more profound type of connectivity – a possibility that we’ll now lose forever.
Today’s children are likely to grow up with no possibility for the awe-inspiring experience of a pristine night sky, and thus little hope of coming to value the night in the manner impressed upon me and many other dark-sky advocates of my own and older generations. If future generations “choose” technology over nature, it is not necessary their own choice at all, but the fate chosen for them by the technocrats of today – a self-fulfilling prophecy implicit in the decision to allow technology to shut out the more-than-human universe and its erstwhile power to overwhelm and inspire. (This point could be made not merely about the night sky.)
4.2 Respecting Non-Human Values
It is almost certain that no (extant) non-human species shares humanity’s aesthetic, spiritual, or scientific interest in the stars. It is also possible that no non-human species are so dependent on celestial navigation that their lifeways would be undone by satellite megaconstellations alone – but here we can be less certain, and it would be just as brazen to presume that no non-humans need a clear view of the stars as to presume that no humans would choose it over a broadband connection. What we do know is that there are non-human species that refer to the stars for navigation.
Celestial navigation has been attributed to species ranging from Harbour Seals (Phoca vitulina) to the Large Yellow Underwing moth (Noctua pronuba). Even the lowly African dung beetle (Scarabaeus satyrus) is famed for its ability to navigate by the stars and the Milky Way “like ancient sailors once did, but without the giant ball of s–t.” Indeed, Scarabaeus satyrus has already been demonstrated to be adversely affected by light pollution; when artificial night sky brightness obscures the beetles’ typical celestial cues, they adopt artificial point sources of light as beacons. Artificial lights are often also associated with artificial surfaces, which dung beetles have a special reason to detest: you can’t bury your poop ball in concrete or asphalt! Orienting toward an artificial light beacon also increases the chances that multiple beetles will meet and come into conflict. It is also bad when African dung beetles find themselves under light-polluted skies with no point sources of light; in this case, they simply become disoriented. (For the studies demonstrating the previous, see Foster et al, 29 July 2021, “Light pollution forces a change in dung beetle orientation behavior,” Cell Biology.)
The impact of satellite megaconstellations on dung beetle orientation has not been tested, to my knowledge, but it would be sheer luck if Scarabaeus satyrus were disoriented in such a way that Elon Musk found himself with thousands of dung balls piled up at his doorstep.
Let’s now consider a more traditionally beautiful species, and one which is known to become disoriented by false displays of the stars in the night sky: the stunningly gorgeous Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea). The migratory propensities of Indigo Buntings are not entirely innate. Young birds learn which way to fly by studying the stars in the night sky.
In the 1960s, a Cornell scientist by the name of Stephen Emlen hand-reared Indigo Buntings for the purpose of deliberately confusing and disorienting them by entrapping them in a planetarium with false displays of the night sky. Specifically, Emlen created a deceptive scene in which the night sky appeared to circle around Betelgeuse instead of Polaris. When time came for autumn migration, the deceived buntings innocently oriented themselves in the wrong direction. In other experiments, mature birds were deliberately confused by being placed in planetariums in which certain stars or constellations were missing. Indigo Buntings could properly orient themselves if Polaris was missing as long as they could see familiar northern constellations. But when these constellations were also removed, the birds lost their way. (Emlen’s results were published in 1970 in Science: “Celestial Rotation: Its Importance in the Development of Migratory Orientation.”)
Now, I should pause here to say that I can’t help but find it ethically problematic to treat Indigo Buntings as mere lab rats – to entrap them in a funnel and deceive them with altered skyscapes, or merely to raise and confine them in a lab at all, rather than allowing them the lives of the wild and free stargazing birds they ought to be. Quite simply, songbirds are not humans, and they cannot give informed consent to research participation in the way that human subjects can; we should, then, err on the side of caution in assuming when an informed bird would fail to give consent. But, hey, this was the 60s, and at least the young birds were not harassed and humiliated by other Indigo Buntings assigned to the role of “planetarium guards,” nor were they made to believe they were administering potentially fatal electric shocks to other buntings who oriented themselves toward the wrong stars.
(Ethical standards have improved since then, right? Hmm, well, a study published in Nature in 2009 reveals that scientists kidnapped robins from their natural habitat and lesioned their brains to test their ability to navigate using celestial cues. I admit that I didn’t make it past the methodology to read the results; it might be relevant to the present discussion, or it might be mere avian sadism disguised as relevant research.)
If Indigo Buntings and other birds can become disoriented by the alteration of the night sky in planetariums, could they also be disoriented by the alteration of the night sky by thousands of satellites in low-earth orbit? In comments for a Vice article, Emlen himself said, “I do think that will completely screw up birds that are up there at night.” This expert testimony should be enough to halt the launches, if we have any empathy for our feathered friends at all. Perhaps Indigo Buntings and other nocturnal migrants will be able to rely successfully on other cues, like the Earth’s magnetic field, or perhaps they will be able still find their lodestars despite the mess of megaconstellations. But we don’t know that, and there is good reason to doubt it. It is sheer speciesistic arrogance and indifference to fail to pause future launches until the impact on non-human celestial wayfarers can be proven negligible – and stop them entirely if it can’t.
It might not be too difficult to study: entrap fledgling songbirds, put them in funnels in which they can only look upward, and show them mock-ups of the night sky that simulate its appearance once the sky is fully bloated with the satellite constellations of Starlink and competitors. Or, much better, don’t needlessly stress innocent songbirds who are unable to give informed consent to research participation, and instead apply precautionary thinking: if there is any notable risk that satellites will hamper the navigational abilities of songbirds – and there is – then don’t launch them.
On the night before the fateful launch of the Challenger space shuttle, NASA’s engineers advised their bosses to delay the launch: the temperatures at the launch were too far out of the range of existing data, and there was insufficient evidence to prove that the launch would be safe, and there was good reason to believe that at least one component – the o-rings between the joints of the solid rocket booster – might fail to operate properly. And of course none of us will forget what happened (except possibly the NASA employees responsible for addressing safety concerns during the reentry of the Columbia; they might have forgotten). Where am I going with this? Well, despite my preference for birds over people, I admit that the thought of confused Indigo Buntings doesn’t bring tears to the eyes like recalling the footage of Christa McAuliffe’s students witnessing the shuttle’s “major malfunction”. And I don’t deny that there is a special reason for risk aversion when human lives are in imminent danger. But I contend that an analogous risk-averse principle should also hold in the case of Starlink and other satellite megaconstellations: if there’s insufficient basis to prove the technology safe – for all Earthlings – and good reason for doubt, then don’t launch.
Another analogy is that the moral blameworthiness lies in the knowing and willful exposure of others to an unnecessary degree of risk, merely in an attempt to advantage oneself. Suppose that, by a fluke, the Challenger space shuttle did not combust on launch and indeed completed its entire voyage safely. Given the strength of the concerns voiced by the engineering experts the night before, such a lucky success would hardly exonerate the NASA managers for deciding in favour of the high-risk launch; they would still have knowingly put seven lives at grave risk, merely out of impatience – a crass undervaluing of human life. Now perhaps migratory birds and other non-human celestial wayfarers will get lucky in the face of satellite megaconstellations; perhaps they’ll find other ways to orient themselves in their journeys (whereupon they will perish of other anthropogenic causes such as destruction of habitats and food sources, disruptions of seasonal timings due to climate change, collisions with windows, or predation by feral cats). Even if so, it would not exculpate those who press forward with the launches without even pausing to care.
5. Conclusions?
Let us take stock. Or, well, let me take stock, for this has become quite a rambling essay, and I am beginning to grow impatient to wrap it up and get on with the next one on a new topic.
The main purpose of this writing has been to take a deep dive into what basic intuitions and moral stances might underlie my visceral opposition to satellite megaconstellations, even though I made clear at the outset what my eventual conclusion would be: “I do suspect that there are root causes to the crises in Heaven and Earth. The disenchantment of humanity. The veneration of the putatively practical. The lack of wonder at – and thus reverence for – Nature as she is in herself” (§0). So where have we been? And what, if anything, is left to say?
5.1 Stock Taking
Here is what is easy to establish: I have been deeply inspired by the experience of the night sky (§1) and believe it’s a tragedy that such a should-be accessible natural wonder is being rapidly cut off from everyone (§2); satellite megaconstellations will be the final death knell for our experience of the natural night sky. But I remain curious exactly where the fundamental wrongdoing lies, and whether it is related (as it feels) to my strong ecocentric leanings.
According to one possible view, what’s fundamentally wrong about satellite megaconstellations is simply that they will deprive all humans from the opportunity to experience true wilderness values anywhere on Earth (§3); as the sun goes down, our viewshed will always be bound by the works of Man. Note that this is an anthropocentric argument, not an ecocentric one, despite the fact that many ecocentrists value the experience of wilderness and that the experience of wilderness can inspire ecocentrism.
According to another possible view, the fundamental wrong isn’t any particular consequence of the satellite megaconstellations (including the deprivation of the wilderness experience) but the attitudes of those who authorise their launches. Specifically, the attitude is one of destructive and imperialistic conquest – one that betrays a lack of genuine concern for the interests and points of view of those who continue to value or rely upon the natural night sky (§4). Some humans (e.g. contactless peoples) and all non-humans clearly have no use for the internet, while they might have use for the star-filled sky; these populations stand only to lose, yet their perspectives are entirely ignored. Here, lack of ecocentric (or biocentric) thought is a subcase, insofar as the potential interests of non-humans are among those ignored (§4.2).
5.2 More on Revealed Attitudes
I think that there’s something to the theses of both §3 and §4 (well, duh, I wouldn’t’ve written them otherwise). But neither goes quite far enough. I believe that §4 may be on the right track in refocusing attention on the attitudes revealed by the willingness to deploy satellite megaconstellations. But I think there is something deeper than the failure to empathetically consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders (whether humans, buntings, dung beetles, or all the rest). The problem, after all, cannot merely be a lack of democratic decision-making, for it seems that there is a correct decision, and that is to choose the glorious wonder of the night sky over the convenience and instant gratification of newfangled digital technologies. The problem isn’t only that the technocrats don’t entertain the idea that other viewpoints and valuations might be valid, but that they themselves are valuing the wrong thing, or valuing it disproportionately. After all, if they deeply and personally understood the human need for the potential of wilderness experience – or the enrapturement of awe and wonder under the natural night sky – then they couldn’t seriously consider going through with the launch of satellite megaconstellations; it wouldn’t be psychologically possible.
Arguably, what is most egregious about the launch of Starlink and other such satellites is not what it causes but what it reveals. Hubris. Disenchantment. Shallowness. Complacency. By all rights, civilisation should be aghast. Both literally and idiomatically, the satellites just shouldn’t fly. To accept them as the “unavoidable” result of technological progress is weak and unimaginative. It is to shit upon the human need and longing not merely for the convenient and practical but for the sacred and transcendent, the spiritual and aesthetic, the connection to a world – an entire universe – beyond ourselves. It is to forget or ignore that these experiences must be direct and authentic, unmediated by virtual channels.
5.3 Whither Ecocentrism?
Here is my standing hypothesis for the connection between my ecocentrism and my viscerally felt repulsion at satellite megaconstellations: the attitudes that a person must hold to countenance megaconstellations are attitudes that cannot be held by an ecocentrist. (Note that this entailment does not run in the opposite direction: an anthropocentrist could hold, for example, that the experience of a natural night sky is a basic human right whereas 5G is not, and thereby also oppose satellite megaconstellations.)
I am, it should be noted, an ecocentrist of a certain flavour. My ecocentrism is rooted very strongly in a sort of virtue ethics, which valorises such personal qualities as wonder, curiosity, engagement, mindfulness, humility, imagination, empathy, and of course affirmation of the “useless” – a long-standing interest of mine. I believe that ecocentrism is all-but inevitable if one approaches the natural world with an attention that is curious, imaginative, and above all selfless – and this is so whether speaking of direct experience of the natural world or engaged attention to the natural sciences (my own ecocentrism has its deepest roots in book learning: fascination with the lost worlds revealed by palaeontology and cognate disciplines).
These virtues are lacking in those who believe it’s okay to destroy the night sky for everyone if it means that everyone can have an internet connection. Most grotesque, perhaps, is the entrenched fetishisation of the useful and practical, which is inherent in the presupposition that internet access is a more basic human right than the opportunity to experience wonder, awe, and enchantment in natural night sky, or to the ability to access a place of refuge to immerse oneself in Nature untrammelled by the works of man.
If the basic sin of those who countenance satellite megaconstellations is disenchantment, the sin of those who develop and deploy them may be hubris. Modesty and humbleness are virtues, and they are virtues that can be instilled by experiences like gazing into a pure night at the staggering depths of the universe, that unfathomable vast space beyond us, without us. We are a species 0.3 million years old on a planet 4,540 million years old in a universe 13,800 million years old. We are one of an untold number of species currently living on Earth, a number likely to be over 10 million. And these 10 million or so species of our own time represent less than one percent of all species to have lived over the past 4 billion years. And our planet is 7.9×103 miles in diameter in a universe about 5.47×1023 miles (93 billion light-years) in diameter. We are small. Yet under a night sky filled with satellites, we will gaze out into the “universe” only to see the consequences of our shallowness, our trivialities and trifles, projected upward broadcast back to our phones, entrenching the cycle of disenchantment. It demands a certain anthropocentric hubris to create such a state of affairs.
5.4 Towards Practical Action? (i.e. Self-Care)
So much for the pretence of objective philosophising. Let’s get back to the real question: where have we gotten as far as my own deep loathing of satellite megaconstellations? What can explain my tendency to be plunged into an abyss of hopelessness and despair whenever I read news about them? Well, I think it comes to just this: if it is my bitter fate to live trapped inside a humanised world, then the least I ask is that those humans share my core values; conversely, if I must lived surrounded by humans with the kind of values and attitudes that make satellite megaconstellations possible, then the least I ask is some vantage point from which I can look beyond this miserable lot and hope and dream. But if humanity allows megaconstellations to continue – as now seems unavoidable – then I am condemned to a life-sentence imprisoned in the same cell as my captors.
I can forgive humanity its disenchantment only by recalling that, once, I was disenchanted myself, living life in the city and on the screen. It is easy to live day by day in oblivion to the true beauty that exists beyond the cages we’ve built and labelled as progress. I could learn to think of the masses of humanity as not enemies but hapless victims; they were simply never given a proper chance to learn to love the universe, and they were never given a chance to live in a society in which acceptance and survival is not contingent on adoption of the latest technologies sold to us as essential. I could learn to see the masses of humanity as victims rather than perpetrators – but that is nonetheless little consolation. It won’t bring back the sky; the damage there will be done. And whether I’ll be imprisoned with enemies who lack my core values or with hapless victims who lack my core values, I’ll still be imprisoned with a lot of people who lack my core values.
If this is to be the future, then what practical steps can one take? I don’t mean “How can one stop it?” – for though we should protest it, it is far from a foregone conclusion that any of us can stop it, and it is prudent to prepare for the worst. So when I speak of practical steps, I mean “How does one prepare to live with it?”
I do have a few ideas:
- Take pleasure in Nature’s delights during the daytime hours, as a reminder that beauty and wonder still exist. Birds, for one, are not quite extinct yet.
- Avoid, as needed, any news publications that focus on space, astronomy, technology, or other sources that might announce further satellite launches; sometimes it breeds only preemptive grief and despair. This strategy helped me immensely these past two years (and not only with respect to satellite megaconstellations).
- Connect with other humans who share in the sense of loathing and loss, to understand and support one another. For me, for example, this might be something venting to – or, ideally, with – the IDA Dark Sky Advocate Slack community.Granted, I am not always sure about the advisability of this one. At best, it comes with an important caveat: the attempt to connect with others can backfire when potential allies fail to share the strength of one’s convictions. Even among dark-sky advocates, for example, there are many who think “it’s great that underserved communities can now have broadband” and find themselves in a quandary about satellite megaconstellations rather than a resolute and wholesale rejection. And I would say that most dark-sky advocates lack my deep ecocentric leanings, most ecocentrists don’t count satellite megaconstellations among their main sources of despair, and most modern humans don’t seem to share the strength of my loathing of the cult of usefulness and practicality (perhaps because they themselves are too caught up in it as a means to “earn a living” or save for their retirement on a dead and barren planet under mechanised skies). Connecting with genuinely empathetic humans is wonderful but rare, and the attempt to find them is fraught with danger, for it is often worse to seek empathy and find oneself spurned than to fail to seek it and merely reserve the hope that empathetic humans exist out there. (Well, this “action step” turned dark – and not in the good way. Let’s move on, shall we?)
- Remember that satellite megaconstellations aren’t eternal. They will not continue to corrupt the sky for the new species that evolve, or any old ones that reclaim the Earth, after our demise. And even if a remnant of humanity survives (for a while) and grows curious about the stars, they won’t need to actively deorbit Starlink and other satellite constellations. They might require some patience, but those who live for more than a few years post-apocalypse might again see a clear view of the constellations. All currently planned megaconstellations (to my awareness) will be in low-earth orbit, with an operating altitude of about 550 km, and as NASA points out on its page about orbital debris, “Debris left in orbits below 370 miles (600 km) normally fall back to Earth within several years.”
Admittedly, I don’t like the thought that humanity will leave an enduring blight in the skies, but the real worry as far as persistence are satellites in geostationary orbit (above 36,000 km); space litter at this altitude can stay in orbit indefinitely (see this “handy chart”). But satellites at this altitude can’t be seen by the naked eye – not by us, not by seals or dung beetles or indigo buntings, and presumably not by any new stargazing lifeforms who evolved after we’re gone. - Write the present essay. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I write as personal therapy – to give shape and structure to my own fears and broodings so that I can confront them – not for an audience, not to be read, not to have an impact, not to change the world, not to change the skies above. That is what this piece is.
If I wanted to transform human attitudes, and thus to change the world, I wouldn’t write. I’m not sure what I would do. Suffice it to say that the true value of the unsullied heavens is that which cannot be stated or argued in words but only experienced and felt. (We could say the same about the intrinsic value of Nature more generally.)
This could be the end of this piece. But I had written more in response to the common “objection” as to why satellite constellations are purportedly worth the loss of the night sky.
6. “But Our Emails!” – Why the “Right” to the Internet is No Excuse
There are no remotely interesting countervailing considerations in favour of satellite megaconstellations. The usual argument given in defence of these monstrosities rests on the premises that (i) everyone needs internet access and (ii) satellite mega-constellations are necessary (or the best way) to make the internet accessible to people around the globe.
Both premises are false. I will examine each in more detail below.
TL;DR: Even if we grant that internet access is a good thing to have, that doesn’t entail that the internet must be broadcast to every remote area of Earth (Starlink’s putative selling point), for the simple reason that people shouldn’t be living and working in every remote area of Earth. Once humans decolonise a significant portion (e.g. half) of Earth’s habitable surface, and once humans realise that they don’t need to be online 24-7, then it should be all the more obvious that satellite megaconstellations are a needlessly grandiose means to provide humans with the luxury of internet access.
6.1 The Internet is Not a Human Right
First, the internet is not a human right. As someone who remembers a world in which personal computers were uncommon and the internet still unimagined by most, I find that a patently ridiculous thing to say. Is the internet f’ing great? Yes. Is it a human right? No.
As a child, I did have not an internet connection in my life, whether at home, school, Daddy’s office, or the public library. Neither did anyone else I knew. Allegedly, the internet was invented in 1983, but it took well over a decade to make significant inroads into my town. As I recall it, the pre-internet world was not one of mass impoverishment. We had food, shelter, heat, sanitation, and medicine. We were able to communicate, navigate, work, entertain ourselves, tell the time of day, and keep abreast of current affairs (perhaps with more accuracy than in the present era of social media and fake news). And perhaps most notably of all, no one missed or longed for the internet. There was, to be sure, poverty, homelessness, starvation, famine, and numerous other social maladies, but no one would ever have thought to blame such ills on a lack of broadband coverage.
At the same time, some people did stargaze. I mentioned the meteor-viewing parties in the backyard of our five-acre rural lot (with wine coolers and occasionally excitement at a shooting star), but there were surely more serious amateur astronomers as well. And plenty of children had a fascination with outer space. (I was one of them, although my fascination derived more from the experience of reading the National Geographic classic Our Universe than actually looking up at the night sky.) No one in those days missed the internet, as I mentioned, having never had it to begin with, but it’s hard to believe that there wouldn’t’ve been some people – perhaps a lot of people – who would have missed the night sky had it suddenly been yanked away everywhere and indelibly.
Indeed, for most of history, humankind has drawn wonder, myth, art, poetry, and science from the stars, while knowing nothing of the internet, and hence not regretting its absence. Only in past two or three decades has the baseline has shifted: today, nearly all denizens of the developed world know the internet, but only a small portion have seen the Milky Way or the majority of the once-visible stars. Given this baseline, it is unsurprising that most people believe themselves to carry on just fine without a clear night sky, while they could scarcely imagine life without the internet; it is always much harder to relinquish that which we know. The problem is that this baseline is a historical anomaly – an artefact of this highly non-representative timeslice of human history. It is shortsighted and unimaginative to presume that internet access is more important – even from a purely anthropocentric standpoint – than the ability to gain inspiration, awe, and humility from the star-filled night sky. What if we had surveyed any former generation that knew the stars and the Milky Way but not the internet?
The internet is an extremely useful tool, but it is ultimately non-essential. We could satisfy our basic survival needs without it; people have been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, in fact. And some would argue that we can satisfy our social and spiritual needs and desires better without it. Indeed, what would make more sense to me is for a society to guarantee the right to one’s basic needs whether or not one has access to an internet connection. In general, it makes little sense to posit a “human right” to any particular modern technology. It makes much more sense to recognise a human right to opt out of the use of any particular technology (cars, smartphones, internet, etc) – or even to opt out of modern technological society in its entirety – while still being treated with dignity and respect. Participation in modern high-tech society should be non-mandatory, an option at best, not a life sentence imposed on us. I personally find the internet quite useful, and often fun, yet some find it an unwanted distraction or even addiction. Such individuals – indeed, any individuals – should have the right to disconnect. It is our birthright as Earthlings, and as members of the species Homo sapiens, to live in a way that is much simpler, low-tech, and more nature-based than that which technocracy now thrusts upon us.
This is not the same, mind you, as saying that we as a species must collectively abandon modern technology. That might or might not be true from an ecocentric moral perspective (that’s something I’m still thinking through), and personally there’s quite a lot that I appreciate about modern technology, including the internet. I’d sure like to believe that I can square my internet addiction with my fundamental moral principles. And, as detractors like to point as soon as one begins railing against Starlink, yes, I am posting this from an internet connection.
In light of the above concession, let’s agree that it would be nice to grant everyone on Earth the opportunity to access the internet, even if not strictly speaking a human right. Even then, it doesn’t follow that an internet connection must be always available from all points on Earth (Starlink’s putative selling point). It merely needs to be accessible where people live, and even then not necessarily at everyone’s fingertips 24-7. This should throw into doubt whether megaconstellations are necessary, or even the most reasonable option, to achieve the objective of universal human internet access.
6.2 Universal (Human) Internet Access Doesn’t Require Megaconstellations
Even if we did declare internet access to be human right, that doesn’t entail that it must be broadcast to every square inch of Earth’s surface. Consider the following:
- First, 71 percent of Earth’s surface is water. Is it really necessary to be able to access an internet connection on the ocean and seas? No, it is not. There are other ways to navigate and communicate from seafaring vessels, and if you fall overboard, then I’m sorry to say that satellite mega-constellations will do nothing to make your beloved smartphone waterproof.
- Second, not all of Earth’s land is habitable; one estimate has it that about 15 percent of Earth’s land is uninhabitable. Do people living on uninhabitable land need an internet connection? No, because the land is uninhabitable, so it was a trick question.
- Third, humans are not the sole inheritors of Earth, and on brute principles of fairness, large portions of the planet’s habitable land ought to be set aside for the self-directed flourishing of natural processes, safeguards of biodiversity, and arenas for the continuation of evolution apart from human influence. Half is a popular percentage here. Given that no other species on Earth uses the internet, there is no reason that the “Half Earth” reserved for Nature needs broadband. Insofar as humans are still permitted to enter as visitors, then they may also use the excursion into wilderness as a time to take a break from their damn text messaging and YouTube cat videos.This brings us down to 12.3 percent of Earth’s surface as candidate grounds for internet coverage.
- Fourth, consider that even this 12.3 percent of Earth’s surface will not consist entirely of humans sitting at desks (all of whom can be crowded into the state of Texas, as we all know from overpopulation deniers). Much of this land, for instance, would need to be devoted to agriculture. Is an internet connection necessary on every square inch of every farm? Presumably not.
- Fifth, universal human internet access also doesn’t necessarily require that the internet be accessible to all people at every moment in time. Indeed, as many overworked professionals realise, there indeed is a danger to the normalisation of 24-7 internet access: it also normalises 24-7 availability to employers (or, for that matter, to nosy or overbearing partners, friends, or family members; hell, sometimes I wish I didn’t have 24-7 access to WebMD and other useful tools for self-diagnosing rare lethal diseases based on a single new symptom). Could an adequate version of the “right” to the internet be guaranteed by ensuring, for example, that public libraries or other access points exist and are accessible to all? I don’t think we should rule it out.
- Finally, even if satellite megaconstellations were determined to be the most effective way to guarantee a right to access the internet within the inhabited 12.3 percent of Earth’s surface, it doesn’t follow that this project should be realised through the work of multiple competing private firms with extremely little regulation or oversight, and no sense at all of caution or respect and deference to Nature.
I can’t lie: I do enjoy my internet connection quite a lot. I especially cherish being able to work, stay in touch with friends, and remain actively involved in communities of thinkers or advocates, even whilst living as a hermit on a small and remote island. I cherish the boundless access to information as well as the novel sources of comic relief. At the end of the day, however, we don’t genuinely “need” the internet at all – and we certainly don’t need multiple competing companies broadcasting it to every corner of the earth.
This, then, would be my recommendation going forth. Let us first deal with human overshoot and setting aside space for wild Nature; let us decide which half of Earth to spare, and let us determine how best to share the other half. Meanwhile, let us get on with providing for basic human needs without requiring everyone to have an personal internet connection, smartphone data plan, or other source of 24-7 internet access. Once these ends are met, we can think about how to allocate the luxury of internet access to all humans, including how to do so without harm to wilderness or wild creatures. And if we can’t do the latter, then we should rethink our addiction to the technology. I’m not saying that would be easy. But, seriously, the internet is not the most important thing.