We Are Losing Our Stars
This is a light pollution map of the United States, and it shows just how bad the problem is. Only the black areas on the map are those still largely unaffected by the issue.
You can see that light pollution is more prominent in populated areas — not just in urban centers, but across a vast geographical range.
Major cities are highlighted in a bright red color, indicating maximum light pollution, and only unpopulated areas that span many miles achieve the unpolluted black status.
When you think about the night sky, what comes into your mind? A few stars here and there, probably no more than 100. This is thanks to light pollution.
In areas where darkness is still preserved, one should see up to 5,000 stars.
Now, this isn’t a sight you’d catch in the city.
But light pollution isn’t just about pretty sights; it’s about waste. Why are our lights even causing this problem? What do we need to light the sky up for?
While you’re probably familiar with these nighttime Earth from space images, have you ever stopped to wonder why we can see all these lights in the first place?
We see these lights from space because they were beamed up there. All the lights in that picture had to be detected by a satellite; they had to be pointing toward the sky.
All the light we see in that picture is essentially wasted because it was directed at the sky rather than down at what they were supposed to illuminate.
Consider this reasonably common street lamp:
The problem is clear enough. It’s spherical; it beams light in all directions. The pole blocks some of it, so if anything, it’s lighting up the sky more than the ground.
Imagine how many billions of dollars are wasted in electricity and power-grid infrastructure to maintain all the lights that ultimately waste half of that electricity lighting up the sky.
Look at it from the environmental angle — how much carbon do we emit to generate the electricity we end up beaming right into space?
Understandably, we built a lighting infrastructure with lighting rather than efficiency in mind. But that doesn’t allow us to just forget about it and move on to other things — we can improve our street lights, and by extension, we can reduce light pollution.
And it’s not a complicated solution, either. Just point the light where it’s supposed to illuminate and shield it from being beamed elsewhere.
Working on the issue of light pollution could considerably improve people’s lives by allowing them to see a stunningly beautiful night sky, it could save billions of dollars every year by conserving electricity, and it could help the environment as a result of that. Unlike other problems humanity faces, this is trivial. Just stop wasting power by pointing street lights at the sky.
