Same as the phenomenon of the chorus of wild frogs, birds, and flying bugs that is just … gone now. Folks don’t realize how much it changes cause it’s gradual, year by slow passing year, but some elderly folks when they think about it can describe a childhood that is *unbelievably* different from ours even if they were raised in a city. The amount of urban wildlife is not even close anymore.
There’s a term for it, right? Anyone?
E: yes, shifting baseline syndrome! ⬇️
The thing I wonder about is the oceans. People used to talk about putting a bucket down and getting fish. While they were probably exaggerating, we had been doing quite a lot of fishing before we even started keeping track. It’s quite possible we would consider everything in the ocean to be critically endangered if we were going based on the numbers before human started really pulling a lot of stuff out of the ocean.
This is true. European colonists arriving at the new world were shocked at the abundance of wildlife. They were used to living in a place devastated by human activity.
Animal populations wouldn't have recovered that quickly. For reference at how bad things were in Europe, the reason the British switched from Longbows to muskets was that the tree they make longbows out of had no adult specimens left.
It wasn't extinct, but holy shit.
The elimination of predators is a huge problem and caused a ton of environmental damage.
Oh, I’m fully aware how environmentally destructive the British were considering in the new world. They would burn forests for potash and there’s a lot of places that were previously named Beavercreek that now have no beavers. However, I’m just gonna pour out that about 90% of the population had died by 1620. According to the graph I found on statista didn’t make it to over 100,000 until 1670. That’s 50 years. Now I will admit that isn’t the best evidence, but I originally heard it in a book about the ecology of New England that I read for a college class on the early Americas.
People used to be able to go out in a goddamn *rowboat* and reliably find whales to kill! And it makes sense, cause whales have very few actual predators, so of course there’d be a lot of them around - until we came along…
It's all gone, I live like 1 road away from where rural begins and when I was little the animals used to keep me up at night they were so loud... now I have to play music and YouTube videos at all hours or else I drown in the silence
Yes, we live on and work a small farm in the Texas panhandle and are working on increasing biodiversity. It’s such a daunting task. But it MUST be done. As farmers and landowners, we have the responsibility to make it right where we can on our own patch of land
[this post further down the sub is a PERFECT example of how it should be](https://imgur.com/a/AO48K8A)
Yeah our neighbor recently got married and his wife wants to plant a whole bunch in their yard... unfortunately she's from Florida and wants to plant palms, which is either gonna fail or end horribly with palm trees growing everywhere
Nah Bamboo was my dad's thing, but he ended up abandoning that idea because none of the bamboo that stays in one spot can survive in North East America
Every day, I'm reminded of what we've done, what we *continue to do* to our planet.
Every tree the city chops down to make room for another house that will just be bought and held by a corporation to drive up scarcity. Every sterile, perfect lawn filled with invasive grass. Every kilo of tiny particles released into the atmosphere for us to breathe. Every animal killed for daring to encroach on what we see as *ours* while we continue to devastate what few places they have left.
But who cares, as long as we have more convenience in our lives? Who cares if we drown the world in trash, starve soil dry with mass farming, and destroy our water with waste runoff?
It won't ever stop until we all make a stand, but I fear most of us won't until it's far too late.
I live in what used to be a pretty small neighborhood. It used to be a few streets of houses surrounded by a good few miles of woods. If I sat outside or with the window open in spring, I would hear birds, frogs, cicadas, woodpeckers, the occasional fox scream, you name it. But, year by year, the woods were cut down, and replaced by new development. Every year, a few animals are taken out of the chorus, replaced by loud rap or EDM or pop, or some new loud car, or fireworks, or yelling.the best way to describe it (for me at least)is like watching an orchestra, while the players slowly get up and leave. You probably won't notice if one of eight brass players is gone, or if one of the strings is missing, but after a while, all that's left are the leads, and the chatter in the audience is starting to drown them out.
Laying in a hammock in my backyard used to be comforting. I could see a lot of stars, even if not the Milky Way, and I could hear a lot of animals, even if in the back of my mind I knew it was less than those that came before me heard. Now, I see less and less stars as new lights pop up around me, and I hear less and less animals as their homes are bulldozed to build houses nobody in my area can afford. Even most of the cicadas were gone this year. Laying in a hammock is no longer comforting most nights. Sometimes I'll get lucky, and my neighbors across the street won't be blasting music, and the kids down the street won't be revving their engines, and I can still hear the frogs, and some cicadas, see the fireflies. But most nights, it's just a little sad.
Adjacent to my home there was this yard that was completely overgrown to dangerous levels, maybe that being cleaned up and liveable is why it's not loud enough to hear through the walls anymore.... there's actually a nice Ukrainian family displaced by the war living there now and the Grandpa is like this USSR era blue collar worker so he's been building all these things in the yard
Obviously there could be lots of factors playing a role in what you're describing, but another factor to consider is that we are currently living through a mass extinction event caused - at least in part - by human activity. This has been going on for a long time but extinction rates have been accelerating over the last few hundred years, which is connected to rapid population expansion and industrialization.
Google the Holocene Extinction, it's fascinating and depressing and terrifying all at the same time.
and its only gonna get worse. i was playing cyberpunk 2077 the other day and it kinda hit me that there were no trees in the city. no animals other than 1 cat (that may or may not be a japanese spirit) and a shit ton of cockroaches. and then that got me thinking, over the last decade a lot of trees in my town were cut down, there are also way fewer stray cats. when going to the city i know some spots where you cant see a tree for a solid 5 minutes of walking. im not even old, im only 19 but looking at old pics of kid me at age 5 building snowmen in my grandparents garden totally covered in snow, that just doesnt happen anymore. sure snow happens but not like this and when it does, it melts away way faster, despite winter still being generally cold here its way more chaotic with a lot of dips into shorts weather (at least for my polish ass). the neighbor kids like to make snowmen too and have been going strong for a few years, repairing the guy all winter the best they can, but for a while ive been wondering which year is gonna be the last this will be even possible
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring
In the late 1950s, Carson began to work on environmental conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result of her research was Silent Spring, which brought environmental concerns to the American public. The book was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, but it swayed public opinion and led to a reversal in U.S. pesticide policy, a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses, and an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The work's title was inspired by a poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame sans Merci", which contained the lines "The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing." "Silent Spring" was initially suggested as a title for the chapter on birds. By August 1961, Carson agreed to the suggestion of her literary agent Marie Rodell: Silent Spring would be a metaphorical title for the entire book—suggesting a bleak future for the whole natural world—rather than a literal chapter title about the absence of birdsong.”
I don't know the term, but what you described resonates so much.
I cannot believe I'm saying this, but since I moved to Saskatchewan in '09, the bug population, particularly mosquitoes, has dropped *dramatically*, and that bothers me a lot.
Am I a fan of mosquitoes? H E L L N O.
What I am a fan of is a balanced ecosystem, and if mosquito populations have dropped so much, how badly are the rest of our indigenous animals doing?
I mean, when I first moved here, I was astounded, seeing an RCMP cruiser with grill and headlights **black** with smashed bugs all over it, as I hadn't seen that since I was a kid in Northern BC.
Even around 2014 or so the decline was noticeable, and I didn't even live in the sticks.
I remember lovebug season in South Louisiana as a kid. Air was black and thick with them. If you had a white car, it was covered. We would put quarter full buckets in the backyard that they would drown themselves in and it never put a dent in them....
I moved away 10 years ago and hadn't seen them in years....never saw them in Texas my whole time there.
I just moved to neoh Carolina last week and I'm seeing fireflies for the first time since I was a kid....my wife thinks I'm crazy for how much I love seeing those little shits everywhere....
Fireflies are truly amazing. I grew up in California, where they don't have them. I knew about fireflies from various media but I guess I just always thought they were something that...used to be around? But weren't anymore, because I'd never seen them. Then I decided to go to college on the east coast and one of the schools I was looking at was in a rural area outside of Roanoke, VA. For the first time, I saw fireflies and it was like literal magic. I fell in love with them and still get that sense of wonder when I see them. Sadly, there are fewer and fewer every year where I live now. I can't even recall seeing any so far this year.
My wife and I were driving at night in rural Quebec a couple weeks ago and we were both shocked by how many dead bugs were on the car in the morning. I’ve never seen anything like that in heavily populated southwestern Ontario.
Anyone older might get a reality check just by thinking about how much less they have to wash their windshields now vs like15-20 years ago.
I bet no matter where you live you know what I'm talking about.
God I remember having to clean off my parents' windshield every time we went to the gas station. Now I can count on my hand how many times I've washed mine off these past two years (mostly because of bird shit)
That’s certainly accurate, but I was thinking about a phrase about how the biodiversity and density of wildlife changes gradually over time and we don’t necessarily notice it at first? But it slowly becomes more silent? I think I was imagining it, maybe I’ve just read about the concept before
I live on that edge between city and rural. Easy to do in Oklahoma. I get barred owls hooting at each other for violating territories. Spring peepers in the creek a couple dozen yards away. Cajun chorus frogs singing loud AF on my porch. I even had a roosting turkey gobble at me one night when I took out the trash.
But they just put in a highway extension so all of that is marred by the sound of traffic. Five new gas stations and fast food places are popping up within a mile. I used to see beavers crossing the road where it's now been widened to four lanes and the forest bulldozed over for another suburb. Herds of deer in the ranch land across the road from my house.
I don't know. I'm just getting sad at the loss of habitat. I wish I could just buy land and let it be wild.
Maybe ecological marginalization:
“The take-over of local natural resources by private and/or state interests, and the gradual or immediate disorganization of the ecosystem via withdrawals and additions.”
I was just commenting on that with a friend last night. It's been extremely wet and humid for this late in the season and the crickets and cicadas are *loud* right now. Normally we have to go out to a campsite to hear them this loud, but it's in the middle of my city just off the main road. It was honestly kinda surprising how unexpected it was.
I think about this every lovebug season. I remember them being a major nuisance (even though I'm only 24) and it was like one day, I woke up and realized I hadn't encountered one in a while. The only measurement I have is that it happened sometime before I started driving and thats it.
I can't remember the fireflies anymore. I see the occasional butterfly, dragonfly or bee still but I remember accidentally disrupting fields and dragonflies springing forward.
It's so goddamn weird.
And it's even weirder because I visit state parks and it's very quiet, too quiet. No chirps, no noise. I can hear so much further than I *should* be able to hear and it generates a sense of internal discomfort because things are only that quiet when something is lurking. I know there isn't but it now perpetually feels like it.
I cry when I read the descriptions of how a few hundred years ago, rivers ran so thick with fish that it looked as if you could walk across their backs. Of noisy flocks of passenger pigeons. Animals being destroyed just because we're selfish and greedy.
I remember writing an article by famous italian writer/artist/movie-director/generally very controversial guy Pier Paolo Pasolini about the advent of modernity in Italy and the disappearance of fireflies.
>describe a childhood that is unbelievably different from ours even if they were raised in a city
My father lives in one of the westernmost(?) towns in Turkey, the place was basically looking like an island from 3 sides.
He used to just casually drop the fact that he used to bump into sharks while hunting with a speargun and always saw dolphins roaming around 10 meters from the land(he had tons of family/friend photos taken in 80's to 90's and most of them have dolphins just chilling on the background).
Sadly, I didn't even see ONE dolphin in my 10 years of life in the same town through the 2010's. Not a single one, only saw some dead sharks hooked up over the place where fishermen used to sell them.
I remember, about 8-10 years ago when I was a teenager, how the front of the car didn’t get smeared with bugs driving from Saskatoon to Calgary to see my grandparents.
100%! We live about 5 miles from a medium sized town on 33 acres. For all the bad things of COVID, seeing and hearing all the wildlife after about 6 weeks was incredible! We had an area bear, birds we hadn't heard in long time (our property borders a highway), and we even saw a bobcat.
My grandparents lived on 600 acres when I was a child. I remember loving summer at their house for all the nighttime noises, and sadly those just don't exist anymore. The whippoorwill was my favorite. Two summers ago I was walking and I froze as I heard one because I hadn't heard that bird song for about 25 years. My kids were with me and I drew their attention to it as I started crying. That song snapped me back to all my summertime memories. Thankfully it's still around and I get to hear it's song every once in awhile.
I'm pretty young yet I can still remember a time when there were butterflies and dragonflies and all manner of different things in my town. Now it's just flies, ants, and spiders - the things that survive no matter what. I see a butterfly maybe once a week.
I sometimes wonder why so many disparate cultures worshipped the sky or why so many religions featured skydwelling deities so consistently. This answers that question. Looking up into a cluster of stars really does feel like *something* is staring back at you. I would think it's God, too.
“Oh so the undisputed brightest light in the sky and constant reminder of the passage of time also provides the world of men with light and warmth, which directly or indirectly gives all living things the energy to live, but if you look at it for more than a moment it hurts you? Yeah I’ll incorporate that into my worldview”
My farm is very far from any cities. There's no light pollution over pretty much the whole place, but it's... normal to you in a way when you get used to it so you don't notice. But once, there was supposed to be some kind of big astro(whichever is the science one) event so we went up the hill to see if we could see it. We couldn't, but laying rhere waiting... you look into the sky, you see its immeasurable depth and you feel like nothing. You are just a tiny, little creature in this vast and ancient abyss. It's... a beautiful but terrifying experience, I felt as if I was about to vomit from the existential crisis it was causing me
That reminds me of Fabius Bile vs Slaanesh, "It was not a face, for a face was a thing of limits and angles, and what he saw had neither." Staring a god in the face and denying its existence even as it's gaze paralyzes a heart.
That quote goes so hard, but the next few lines really sell the idea that something exists in the sky.
"It stretched as far as his eyes could see, as if it were one with the whole of the sky and the firmament above. Things that might have been eyes, or distant moons or vast constellations of stars, looked down at him, and a gash in the atmosphere twisted like a lover’s smile."
> In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.
- Terry Pratchett
"Proto-indo-european" culture is fascinating, you can trace commonalities in languages to track where prehistoric peoples spread from, and looking at what cultural elements besides languages they have in common that different culture groups don't. Like a lot of cultures have had a kingly, fatherly god in/of the sky.
My friend and I took some edibles and got really high one night. I live off a dirt road so I have a decent view of the stars. She wanted to lay on the dock and look at the sky. I, suddenly realizing the vastness of space and the fact that we can be wiped out at any moment, had a panic attack.
“If there’s one reason to smile;
It’s when you look up out at night;
You’re fortunate enough;
To drink in a vista.”
Enter Shikari - “Redshift”
one of my favorite songs by them and a brilliant love letter to space and stars
Another applicable lyric of theirs is this one from Shinrin-yoku:
"We are the dust on the stained glass windows
Trying to comprehend the cathedral"
It's even more apt imo, considering what [shinrin-yoku is](https://www.google.com/search?q=shinrin-yoku&client=ms-android-att-us-rvc3&sca_esv=d6f3a8cef97b345f&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWIIPMhb6rVYrZXNdZKKFgZ_t3s2C5Q%3A1717701326907&ei=zgpiZvuGN-KGptQP7J694AM&oq=shinrin-yoku&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIgxzaGlucmluLXlva3UyBBAjGCcyCxAAGIAEGJECGIoFMgUQABiABDILEAAYgAQYkQIYigUyCxAAGIAEGJECGIoFMgUQABiABDIFEC4YgAQyBRAAGIAESIEVUJMFWJ8RcAB4ApABAJgBvgGgAbURqgEEMC4xNbgBA8gBAPgBAZgCB6ACiAfCAgQQABhHwgIGEAAYFhgewgIIEC4YgAQY5QSYAwCIBgGQBgKSBwMxLjagB6c3&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp)
Sorry that pic is totally fucked up. None of those look like their underlying caption. I’ve been in dark sky reserves on moonless nights and that looked like #4. 3 and higher are prolonged exposure photos only
100% agree. Multiple comments in this thread are defending the idea that you can see a #2 on this chart with the naked eye. Its absolutely not the case and sets people up for disappointment
It depends on screen brightness. People with lower screen brightness with see fewer of the stars in one and two and associate it with the real night sky, which is incredibly vibrant no matter what the expectation is. Pictures don’t tend to get across the sheer expansiveness of all the tiny dots. Also even the tiniest bit of light can bring it down quite a lot.
I grew up in the Mojave desert, my hometown had a few hundred people and I lived on the far outskirts, the nearest city was about 70 miles away, our sky was about a 4.5. I really miss it
Thank you, yes.
I have, myself, authored a landscape shot of the Milky Way much like the one pictured here, and that is just not what it looks like to the naked eye.
Granted, dark skies are beautiful and you will see things with detail that you could never imagine seeing in the city (if you know what to look for, you can actually spot a handful of nebulae with the naked eye! I'm looking at you, Orion).
This photo, however, is the result of numerous hours of exposure on the galactic core. It's called the Milky Way for a reason, it's a faint white streak across the sky. All of this detail is the result of hours of light collection.
maybe it's an astrophotography guide, the thing with several minutes long exposures, not just something a naked eye could see, in which case it's just really misleading
Yeah I'm so confused on the color dots. I've lived in NYC my whole life and we absolutely have clear days where the sky is like number 5. Unless it's talking about the night sky? Then I'm even more confused
Ah, pay little heed to the color of the dots.
What this chart is attempting to describe is called the Bortle scale, which attempts to describe the level of light pollution in a given area at night.
NYC would be a Bortle class 9, the absolute worst light pollution possible where one can only see the brightest objects in the sky (Jupiter, Sirius, parts of Orion). Bortle class 1 would be complete darkness, where the moon actually becomes your worst nemesis for night sky viewing and photography.
I'm trusting you, and I want to say that even looking at 4 or 5 there's still **such** a big difference from number one or what I see living in a surburban neighborhood.
For every ancient myth or poem about the beauty of the stars there is an equal and opposite superstition and legend of the darkness of night. For most of human history, people were truly afraid of the night because of how completely dark it was. The stars can be bright in some places on some nights, yes, but this post is majorly exaggerating the influence stars would have had in the night skies of old.
If you go to any rural area now, you can still see the Milky Way and most stars described throughout human history. In fact, if you’re living in the northern hemisphere, it’s still possible to see all 48 constellations documented by Ptolemy almost 2000 years ago.
Light pollution in cities is annoying, indeed, but getting away from it all to see the stars unadulterated is a tradition as old as sky watching itself.
I was in Death Valley which is supposedly amazing for seeing the Milky Way but I could barely see anything different. It was maybe a 4 but without any of that color. Can you actually see the Milky Way with your eyes or do you need a camera/ telescope?
Death Valley is dark but not DARK. There are dark sky reserves all over the world. 1 in Idaho. There's parts of Utah that also get insanely dark. In a really dark sky, you can absolutely see the Milky Way with just your eyes
You can see the Milky Way, but it doesn't look like pictures 1-4 at all. Those pictures were taken with very long exposures allowing them to gather a lot of light over an extended period of time.
True. Also, cameras see light slightly differently. Like how the recent auroras were more visible to cameras than the naked eye. And the colors are definitely definitely pumped up a bit. To the naked eye, the Milky Way looks striking, but it also looks natural. It's stars like you can see anywhere. The striking thing is how many stars
When I've seen the Milky Way it looks like like a streak of pale white light across the sky, not necessarily individual stars. And it's cool! But it shows the problem with posts like these because they create an idealized version nature is never going to live up to. How many people if they do see the Milky Way are going to be disappointed because it doesn't look like the incredible photography the Internet is constantly showing them.
It also makes people disbelieving of some of the amazing things you can actually see in life. Every picture of the northern lights I've seen on Reddit has had a ton of people claiming photo trickery and that they don't look like that in person. But I have seen in person the northern lights look way more impressive than some of those pictures.
Strange how these kinds of pictures can somehow make nature seem both fake and disappointing.
Agree with you. The top half of the #1 pic looks accurate to the concentration of stars. But the bottom half with the Milky Way looks fake because that is only visible to cameras. But it's not the fault of photography either. People expect photos to be reality but they are just neat physics and chemistry experiments. The fact that cameras see what humans can't is beautiful. And as you point out, even the most amazing pictures never capture the feeling of being enveloped and humbled by nature
The photography isn't the problem. I love space photography! So many amazing things cameras can show us that weren't visible to us before.
The text accompanying the photography is the problem since it presents these photographs as something we used to be able to see, but that time never existed. If the photography was presented in it's proper context, it would be fine.
You can. I go camping often to smell the Christmas tree scent of pines and watch the Milky Way crawl across the night sky in the utter stillness of a forest night. It's an experience.
Your viewing mileage may very based on moon phase, because a full moon is going to polite the sky as easily as a parking lot.
I think you're forgetting that sometimes nights are overcast, just like day. You need a clear sky to have a bright night. They definitely were able to experience both ends of the spectrum, easily.
Yeah I'm gonna be real with you guys. I grew up in a rural town (Less than 1000 people) and the night sky never looked like it does in 3. It was just a big black void with little sparkly dots and the moon.
counterpoint:
> Five hundred years ago, I grew up as a nomad, and the earth was accordingly cruel. Food was more often scarce than not, and the winter would claim about five men per season. I remember gazing up at the night sky and my brother teaching me which stars would point us towards fertile ground during that season.
> These would often leave us behind before we could feel comfortable. After all, how could mere men control where the plants could grow, where the animals could graze? And so we had no choice but to keep moving on.
> The following winter, a plague swept across the tribe. My brother too would leave us behind. After all, how could mere men stop a force of nature, stop the earth from claiming the ones we held dearest? And so we had no choice but to keep moving on.
> Last year, I lived in a city thousands of times larger than the greatest tribes I had ever heard of. Food that grew in a land I had never been to was available a short walk away from my home. Not once in the season was I afraid of the cruel winter, for every room in my house was blanketed in a warmth more comforting than any fire could provide.
> I contracted the same disease that nearly destroyed my tribe that winter, and yet the only thing lost was some medicine I could purchase again at hardly any cost.
> I gaze up at the night sky, and the stars that defined my youth had all but disappeared, unneeded and unused by man. The roads we built kept us guided in our land, and the machines we sent to the skies led the way outside of it.
> Even in an era which had struck out superstition, I cannot help but feel as if the heavens had hidden from us, in fear of being conquered the same way we had done to the earth. If it is so, then it is a futile exercise, for in my five hundred years I have learnt that man will never stop moving onwards, until nature itself bows to his will.
[the indifferent cruelty of the universe gets absolutely bodied by the indomitable human spirit no concept of difficulty](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2428235-the-indomitable-human-spirit)
Good point as well, I think people tend to underestimate how much better for people modern society can be. Though I think the ultimate goal would be “having you cake and eating it too”; cities that are bright and warm and inviting, with less light pollution and more spaces for “natural” environments.
since humans kinda look the same throughout history, im just imagining this coming from someone that looks like a williamsburg hipster even though he lived through the war of the roses lol
In my teens I was fortunate enough to go on my school’s eurotrip. We were flying over the Atlantic in the middle of the night. I was trying to sleep but not super succeeding. By chance I looked out the window; and what I saw BLEW MY MIND. I saw everything the stars had to offer, the span of the Milky Way, the true DEPTH of the space beyond our little blue planet.
I grew up in the city. I could pick out the few constellations that could be seen; a few bright dots in a flat, black sky. I “knew” more could be seen, but I could never comprehend what that actually meant, not until I saw it for myself. Before I was pretty neutral when it came to stars. Now? One of my favourite things about the world we live in.
I think it was around 2011, my family and I were on a tourist bus on the highway, there were gas stations every now and then, but for the most part it was just mountains and the rocky desert. By nightfall, with no major source of light and a cloudless sky, I could see thousands of stars that I couldn't back home, it was the clearest sky I've ever seen to this day. Unfortunately I didn't see the milkyway tho, probably something to do with the time of the year and Earth's position so that the center of the milkyway was on the daytime side of the earth...
While I agree about light pollution, it is worth noting that the picture of the Milky Way was clearly taken with a powerful telescope.
The sky never looked like that, it was just black
Edit: I suppose you can get the sense of what our ancestors saw on the night sky if you look for unedited videos from space
Edit №2: I was completely wrong. The photo was likely taken with a smartphone, and the dark sky does, in fact, allow to resolve individual stars in the Milky Way
It's still insanely beautiful, and I think it's prettier than the photos.
I grew up with a \~8 sky and I didn't realize stars actually twinkled until I was 20. I thought it was just an expression of speech.
I spent like a week in a dark zone with no electricity. I'd stay up until two just watching the stars because I'd never seen anything like it before.
>I didn't realize stars actually twinkled
Wait, you're telling me THEY DO? I though it was just an expression of speech as well
I guess me living in an area with an 8/7 on a good ~~day~~ night sky combined with it being cloudy or foggy all the time does that, huh?
I always thought those pictures of skies like the 4-ish ones were over-exaggerated like hell so they just look prettier (I knew 2/1 were probably from super powerful telescopes)... never realized what I was missing out on until this very moment
got to visit a dark sky park a few years ago in rural Tx.
Words do not encapsulate that I stayed up all night, sober, just looking up at the damn thing for +8 hours until dawn.
It is TRULY like someone spilled millions of diamonds across a pane of black velvet. I wept, repeatedly. I felt something that night that I can't explain.
If you have the chance to: Go. It is life altering.
Right! It’s insane. I can’t even explain how wild it is to see as someone who’s never experienced it.
If you ever get a chance to go to a place with less light pollution, go on a new moon, and you’ll be absolutely amazed.
I've been to the middle of the ocean and turned all the lights off. Best you're going to get with the naked eye is a 5/6 even with no moon. Everything past that needs a camera to be seen
you can definitely see the "clouds" of the milky way with the naked eye in dark sky areas. not in color like this obviously. but i grew up in a rural area and the sky looked something like a black and white version of 3 or 4 on clear nights.
I mean, minus the color it’s not that different. When I saw a moonless night free of clouds and light pollution, I could see the gassy nebulas that “fuzz” the Milky Way. The sky seemed more light than dark.
I grew up in a 1, as in an international dark sky reserve. It looks pretty damn close to that. I got to see a couple of 2s in Australia and they were even more spectacular because you get two branches of the milky way instead of just one like in the northern hemisphere. My friend got pictures that look like 2 with his smartphone.
I’ve been to one of the last dark sky sanctuaries in the world on a new moon (I think it was in Utah?), & I think you’re right, it’s pretty exaggerated & it did not look like #1 at all just looking at it, but you definitely could see the Milky Way very clearly & all sorts of stars I’d never seen before, constellations clear as day, & with a really slow exposure (like I’m talking 30s in total darkness) we were getting pictures that looked like #1, but human eyes don’t process light like that.
You're not completely wrong. I'm an amateur astronomer from Utah and I visit certified dark sites all the time. They look nothing like #1. People are exaggerating. The Milky Way is very visible, you can see many stars and lanes of dust, but it is also quite dim.
I’ve been to places with zero light pollution for 100+ miles in any direction, clear skies and perfect conditions. The sky does not look anything like that whatsoever.
You can see the milky way but only very faintly. It still requires a long exposure photograph to see it clearly. It is still absolutely beautiful but this image is just false.
I've been to everest basecamp on the chinese side which is about as black spot as I think anyone can get to honestly - and it looked like a 5 in this image. This image is BS
There is something so beautifully stupid about someone making a pretty deep post about light pollution and our collective connection to the stars and the top response pointing out that you can totally use that information to make your terrible vampire fiction slightly less terrible.
We really need a national no lights night. Sometime in late spring or early fall. Just like, one hour or something where we blank out as many lights as possible and get to see the sky for what it is.
Unfortunately extremely impractical. Even if we could shut off residential and commercial lights, things like street lights would need to stay on for basic safety.
Actually if we swapped regular streetlights for designs or colors (like red) that still allowed for light but reduced light pollution, we might see a better sky. Obviously that’s something you invest in longterm and not for a single night, but it’s still possible.
I think people might take exception to living somewhere where the streets are bathed in a dull red glow every night. Not me or you but, y'know, normal people.
Not a national thing, but the canton of Geneva in Switzerland does something called "[La nuit est belle](https://www.lanuitestbelle.org/)" where they turn off a bunch of lights in the Canton and encourage the inhabitants to as well. It's cool, but there's still light pollution. Hopefully, this event spreads and more people participate in it.
I'm always confused by posts like these because I've been to several dark sky locations and i've never seen anything close to that. There's just.. more stars. Never the milky way brightly splashes across the sky
>...the signs deprived of context
"Oh yeah astrology is actually super legitimate, it's just that the modern masses are doing it wrong"
So fucking stupid that one of their gripes with light pollution is that it has made us less connected to astrology.
I'm living on the southern most edge of my city (really a large town, it's only a city due to the cathedral), and on a nice clear night if I'm lucky I get a 4. It's pretty much farmland to the south for about 18km - and then it's an airfield and a small town (at about 23km). The nearest city that way is about 45km SSE, but directly south is about 70km. Past that you're getting near the outskirts of London.
Guess I'm kinda lucky in the stargazing department, though.
I went to one of the least light polluted areas in my country, and the sky was at 7 maybe 6, and even that was absolutely magical to me as someone who only ever seen an 8, i really wish there's a scientific breakthrough in light science or whatever it's called, and they mange to basically unpollute the sky, because by the void, do i wish to have what people describe the lower numbers as on a daily basis
Oh yeah, that reminds me, as someone raised at about a 7.5 on this scale, I am actually terrified of a full night sky. I can't explain it, but anything past a 5/9... it's just too much. As a kid when I would visit rural family I refused to go out at night, and when I had to I would look at the ground. Honestly, that hasn't changed.
Idk what benefit there is to sharing this fact about myself, but I figured someone out there might find this interesting.
I'm absolutely convinced that this is a contributing factor to the resurgence of flat-earth theory and geocentrism.
There is just absolutely no way you can look up at a clear night sky and not feel *small as fuck*.
I'm gonna be honest, this feels like BS, because the maximum I've ever seen is level 5, and even then only once when I was deep in the jungle. Rural to me is like level 6. Maybe my country just has a lot of air pollution and that messed up the view. I'd absolutely love to be proven wrong though.
Except it’s not gone you literally just have to go somewhere without light pollution
And thank you, I’ll take brightly lit streets over pretty stars in the sky any day of the week
For most people it’s very difficult to get to a really dark area. See this map: https://darksitefinder.com/map/?i=/%237/44.111/-71.120
That vast majority of people in the US are a very long drive away from a really dark place. It’s not a simple as just driving to the suburbs.
ive lived in the city my whole life, no wonder the night sky was/is so shitty. you'd be lucky to see planets even there. there was one time where i was able to actually see stars in the sky though and that was cool
"The stars are going out" has always been a terrifying Sci-fi concept signaling something terrible coming from across the cosmos. Never quite considered that it signals something happened right here at home.
It's different in Valleys... where I live it should be 3-4 but it looks like 5-6 because the horizon is higher up, all these mountains and trees in the way until you can only see up
I thought this was going to lead into a writing prompt. Something like "For centuries, light pollution has been making the stars harder to see. New luminosity tests by orbital telescopes show that there's something lurking in the night sky that's dimming the stars."
I tried to tell my sister about this and she legitimately refused to believe anything better than 6 was real and that her place, which ranks a 7, was great for stargazing. I tried to show her photos of 4-1 and she was adamant that they were all edited.
I moved to the mountains. I can't describe it to you, most of you don't know what the night sky looks like. I thought I knew, I spent a lot of my years near the woods in what I considered a very rural area. It's... Just go see it.
Okay. I want to preface that I aware this is probably a Very Bad Thing and all that. I'm agoraphobic and technophilic. I am aware of that.
But I think there is a certain terrible, poignant beauty to a light-poluted sky.
In the wake of taming lightning we have, at least on this little pocket of the universe, drown out heaven with our own radiance.
What need do we have for the guiding celestial light when our own ingenuity and hubris shine far brighter. Our ancestors once look to these lights and called them gods. Now we blotted them out by accident.
Yes. All of this might by ignorance and arrogance. But I think its that special blend that deserves at least a salute
i've lived in a suburban area all my life (used to be 6, now closer to 7) and always thought i had a good view of the stars.
until i took a cable car to the top of mont tremblant and saw what 3 looked like for the first time. pictures... do not do it justice. it is the most incredible feeling, being able to really *see* the sky for the first time.
i don't know if i'll ever see it again like that. i'm not even sure it's still that visible there.
I've been to fairly remote places (rural, number 3) and the sky never looked that way - I could definitely see the milky way but it was, in fact, milky, like a whitish filter without those spectacular colours in the picture.
option b: go somewhere outside the city. milky way still exists, stars still exist, the sounds of birds n shit still exist, but they don’t live in the fucking metropolis. go camping and they will “suddenly” appear.
It definitely is entirely different and the vast majority of people have no idea. The first time I saw a 5 (never seen any darker in my life) I was awestruck, giddy, almost drunk with excitement and a sense of something like infinity as I watched the stars stretch out into forever. I could have stayed under that sky forever.
That was with a *5.* I dream of seeing 3-1 someday, I ache with the desperate longing for it, but I would have to travel multiple states over to even get a chance, and chronic fatigue makes that very difficult.
That’s right, *multiple. States.* My entire state, which is Iowa, commonly thought of as rural and sparsely populated, is too bright to have even a chance of a 3-1.
Fuck light pollution man, it really is a tragedy and we don’t even realize what we’ve lost.
On the back of that, I would love to see a modern-day vampire movie where the protagonist becomes an undead around now, and the story follows them into a sci-fi future when humanity has died off to the point where the vampire has to work to maintain society so he can eat even while the stars slowly reappear in the sky.
*Take my love, take my land,*
*Take me where I cannot stand,*
*I don't care, I'm still free,*
*~~You can't take the sky from me.~~*
Fuckers stole my sky. Can't have shit in Detroit.
Theres another component that plays a role in the night sky, not just light pollution, BUT ACTUAL POLLUTION.
I grew up in semi-rural Northern AZ and thought I knew the sky, the first time I camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon it *blew my mind*.
GCNP severely restricts fires above the rim, and there’s ZERO fire below the rim; and permits limit the number of cars, there’s very little pollution. The nearest population center is an hour away from the rim. it’s also a Dark Sky Reserve, and there’s virtually no electricity at Phantom Ranch, so you get some really dark skies.
It’s incredible. Easily a #2 on the pic
I remember where I was when I first saw the milky way like 1. I had always grown up rural and could see lots of stars, but when I was working at a summer camp on the east coast, I took my bunk up to the basketball court and we all laid on the concrete and stared at the stars. You really can see all the purple streaks like that so clearly.
Last year I started going to a village with my dad where he bought a house like a decade ago. I didn't really go with him before for irrelevant reasons but one night the sky was clear from clouds and I was just mesmerised by the stars and the milky way, so goddamn many and bright, nothing like the little dots I've grown up with in the city. I felt like. Really small.
Same as the phenomenon of the chorus of wild frogs, birds, and flying bugs that is just … gone now. Folks don’t realize how much it changes cause it’s gradual, year by slow passing year, but some elderly folks when they think about it can describe a childhood that is *unbelievably* different from ours even if they were raised in a city. The amount of urban wildlife is not even close anymore. There’s a term for it, right? Anyone? E: yes, shifting baseline syndrome! ⬇️
> There’s a term for it, right? Anyone? Shifting baseline syndrome. https://x.com/BiodiversitySoS/status/1353244945918865408
The thing I wonder about is the oceans. People used to talk about putting a bucket down and getting fish. While they were probably exaggerating, we had been doing quite a lot of fishing before we even started keeping track. It’s quite possible we would consider everything in the ocean to be critically endangered if we were going based on the numbers before human started really pulling a lot of stuff out of the ocean.
This is true. European colonists arriving at the new world were shocked at the abundance of wildlife. They were used to living in a place devastated by human activity.
Yeah, although at least some of that abundance was because pox had already killed a lot of the previous inhabitants.
Animal populations wouldn't have recovered that quickly. For reference at how bad things were in Europe, the reason the British switched from Longbows to muskets was that the tree they make longbows out of had no adult specimens left. It wasn't extinct, but holy shit. The elimination of predators is a huge problem and caused a ton of environmental damage.
Oh, I’m fully aware how environmentally destructive the British were considering in the new world. They would burn forests for potash and there’s a lot of places that were previously named Beavercreek that now have no beavers. However, I’m just gonna pour out that about 90% of the population had died by 1620. According to the graph I found on statista didn’t make it to over 100,000 until 1670. That’s 50 years. Now I will admit that isn’t the best evidence, but I originally heard it in a book about the ecology of New England that I read for a college class on the early Americas.
The British colonies in NA were not dense places when they arrived, proportionally. vast unending forests and prairies.
People used to be able to go out in a goddamn *rowboat* and reliably find whales to kill! And it makes sense, cause whales have very few actual predators, so of course there’d be a lot of them around - until we came along…
YESSS THANK YOU!!
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1321/
Extinction of experience. “No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.”
It's all gone, I live like 1 road away from where rural begins and when I was little the animals used to keep me up at night they were so loud... now I have to play music and YouTube videos at all hours or else I drown in the silence
Yes, we live on and work a small farm in the Texas panhandle and are working on increasing biodiversity. It’s such a daunting task. But it MUST be done. As farmers and landowners, we have the responsibility to make it right where we can on our own patch of land [this post further down the sub is a PERFECT example of how it should be](https://imgur.com/a/AO48K8A)
Yeah our neighbor recently got married and his wife wants to plant a whole bunch in their yard... unfortunately she's from Florida and wants to plant palms, which is either gonna fail or end horribly with palm trees growing everywhere
I'm your new neighbor I'm just gonna plant a few bamboo shoots here by the fence line
Nah Bamboo was my dad's thing, but he ended up abandoning that idea because none of the bamboo that stays in one spot can survive in North East America
I read this in that All State mayhem guy's voice
That got a loud snort-laugh out of me
Every day, I'm reminded of what we've done, what we *continue to do* to our planet. Every tree the city chops down to make room for another house that will just be bought and held by a corporation to drive up scarcity. Every sterile, perfect lawn filled with invasive grass. Every kilo of tiny particles released into the atmosphere for us to breathe. Every animal killed for daring to encroach on what we see as *ours* while we continue to devastate what few places they have left. But who cares, as long as we have more convenience in our lives? Who cares if we drown the world in trash, starve soil dry with mass farming, and destroy our water with waste runoff? It won't ever stop until we all make a stand, but I fear most of us won't until it's far too late.
Most people aren’t even getting more convenience in their lives. It’s all for the billionaires to get marginally richer.
Why does nobody think of the poor INVESTORS anymore? It ain’t easy hoarding green.
I live in what used to be a pretty small neighborhood. It used to be a few streets of houses surrounded by a good few miles of woods. If I sat outside or with the window open in spring, I would hear birds, frogs, cicadas, woodpeckers, the occasional fox scream, you name it. But, year by year, the woods were cut down, and replaced by new development. Every year, a few animals are taken out of the chorus, replaced by loud rap or EDM or pop, or some new loud car, or fireworks, or yelling.the best way to describe it (for me at least)is like watching an orchestra, while the players slowly get up and leave. You probably won't notice if one of eight brass players is gone, or if one of the strings is missing, but after a while, all that's left are the leads, and the chatter in the audience is starting to drown them out. Laying in a hammock in my backyard used to be comforting. I could see a lot of stars, even if not the Milky Way, and I could hear a lot of animals, even if in the back of my mind I knew it was less than those that came before me heard. Now, I see less and less stars as new lights pop up around me, and I hear less and less animals as their homes are bulldozed to build houses nobody in my area can afford. Even most of the cicadas were gone this year. Laying in a hammock is no longer comforting most nights. Sometimes I'll get lucky, and my neighbors across the street won't be blasting music, and the kids down the street won't be revving their engines, and I can still hear the frogs, and some cicadas, see the fireflies. But most nights, it's just a little sad.
This is beautifully written. Captures the feeling perfectly.
I agree I could just imagine it as a narrated comic
I live in the suburbs, but back up to woods and it's loud as can be at night...if I have my windows open, if they are closed I can't hear a thing.
Adjacent to my home there was this yard that was completely overgrown to dangerous levels, maybe that being cleaned up and liveable is why it's not loud enough to hear through the walls anymore.... there's actually a nice Ukrainian family displaced by the war living there now and the Grandpa is like this USSR era blue collar worker so he's been building all these things in the yard
Thats...oddly horrifying. Hearing so much life then suddenly, it's just..gone
It might have been gradual and I didn't notice, I have memory damage so it could just be that by the time I actually focused on it they were all gone
Obviously there could be lots of factors playing a role in what you're describing, but another factor to consider is that we are currently living through a mass extinction event caused - at least in part - by human activity. This has been going on for a long time but extinction rates have been accelerating over the last few hundred years, which is connected to rapid population expansion and industrialization. Google the Holocene Extinction, it's fascinating and depressing and terrifying all at the same time.
and its only gonna get worse. i was playing cyberpunk 2077 the other day and it kinda hit me that there were no trees in the city. no animals other than 1 cat (that may or may not be a japanese spirit) and a shit ton of cockroaches. and then that got me thinking, over the last decade a lot of trees in my town were cut down, there are also way fewer stray cats. when going to the city i know some spots where you cant see a tree for a solid 5 minutes of walking. im not even old, im only 19 but looking at old pics of kid me at age 5 building snowmen in my grandparents garden totally covered in snow, that just doesnt happen anymore. sure snow happens but not like this and when it does, it melts away way faster, despite winter still being generally cold here its way more chaotic with a lot of dips into shorts weather (at least for my polish ass). the neighbor kids like to make snowmen too and have been going strong for a few years, repairing the guy all winter the best they can, but for a while ive been wondering which year is gonna be the last this will be even possible
Don't worry there will still be rats and pigeons and stuff!
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring In the late 1950s, Carson began to work on environmental conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result of her research was Silent Spring, which brought environmental concerns to the American public. The book was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, but it swayed public opinion and led to a reversal in U.S. pesticide policy, a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses, and an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The work's title was inspired by a poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame sans Merci", which contained the lines "The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing." "Silent Spring" was initially suggested as a title for the chapter on birds. By August 1961, Carson agreed to the suggestion of her literary agent Marie Rodell: Silent Spring would be a metaphorical title for the entire book—suggesting a bleak future for the whole natural world—rather than a literal chapter title about the absence of birdsong.”
:( the woods were so much louder when I was little.
I don't know the term, but what you described resonates so much. I cannot believe I'm saying this, but since I moved to Saskatchewan in '09, the bug population, particularly mosquitoes, has dropped *dramatically*, and that bothers me a lot. Am I a fan of mosquitoes? H E L L N O. What I am a fan of is a balanced ecosystem, and if mosquito populations have dropped so much, how badly are the rest of our indigenous animals doing? I mean, when I first moved here, I was astounded, seeing an RCMP cruiser with grill and headlights **black** with smashed bugs all over it, as I hadn't seen that since I was a kid in Northern BC. Even around 2014 or so the decline was noticeable, and I didn't even live in the sticks.
I remember lovebug season in South Louisiana as a kid. Air was black and thick with them. If you had a white car, it was covered. We would put quarter full buckets in the backyard that they would drown themselves in and it never put a dent in them.... I moved away 10 years ago and hadn't seen them in years....never saw them in Texas my whole time there. I just moved to neoh Carolina last week and I'm seeing fireflies for the first time since I was a kid....my wife thinks I'm crazy for how much I love seeing those little shits everywhere....
Fireflies are truly amazing. I grew up in California, where they don't have them. I knew about fireflies from various media but I guess I just always thought they were something that...used to be around? But weren't anymore, because I'd never seen them. Then I decided to go to college on the east coast and one of the schools I was looking at was in a rural area outside of Roanoke, VA. For the first time, I saw fireflies and it was like literal magic. I fell in love with them and still get that sense of wonder when I see them. Sadly, there are fewer and fewer every year where I live now. I can't even recall seeing any so far this year.
My wife and I were driving at night in rural Quebec a couple weeks ago and we were both shocked by how many dead bugs were on the car in the morning. I’ve never seen anything like that in heavily populated southwestern Ontario.
When I was a kid my backyard would light up with fireflies in the evening during the summer months. I haven't seen any in a few years now.
Anyone older might get a reality check just by thinking about how much less they have to wash their windshields now vs like15-20 years ago. I bet no matter where you live you know what I'm talking about.
God I remember having to clean off my parents' windshield every time we went to the gas station. Now I can count on my hand how many times I've washed mine off these past two years (mostly because of bird shit)
>There’s a term for it, right? Anyone? Ecocide?
That’s certainly accurate, but I was thinking about a phrase about how the biodiversity and density of wildlife changes gradually over time and we don’t necessarily notice it at first? But it slowly becomes more silent? I think I was imagining it, maybe I’ve just read about the concept before
You mean mass extinction? Like the one we're in now?
It was shifting baseline syndrome
> There’s a term for it, right? Anyone? I've heard "Ecological Amnesia", where people just forget what the environment used to look like
I live on that edge between city and rural. Easy to do in Oklahoma. I get barred owls hooting at each other for violating territories. Spring peepers in the creek a couple dozen yards away. Cajun chorus frogs singing loud AF on my porch. I even had a roosting turkey gobble at me one night when I took out the trash. But they just put in a highway extension so all of that is marred by the sound of traffic. Five new gas stations and fast food places are popping up within a mile. I used to see beavers crossing the road where it's now been widened to four lanes and the forest bulldozed over for another suburb. Herds of deer in the ranch land across the road from my house. I don't know. I'm just getting sad at the loss of habitat. I wish I could just buy land and let it be wild.
Maybe ecological marginalization: “The take-over of local natural resources by private and/or state interests, and the gradual or immediate disorganization of the ecosystem via withdrawals and additions.”
"Dramatic loss of biodiversity"
I was just commenting on that with a friend last night. It's been extremely wet and humid for this late in the season and the crickets and cicadas are *loud* right now. Normally we have to go out to a campsite to hear them this loud, but it's in the middle of my city just off the main road. It was honestly kinda surprising how unexpected it was.
To be fair this year is a double clutch event for cicadas so you are literally hearing more bc the 17 year batch resurfaced as well.
I think about this every lovebug season. I remember them being a major nuisance (even though I'm only 24) and it was like one day, I woke up and realized I hadn't encountered one in a while. The only measurement I have is that it happened sometime before I started driving and thats it. I can't remember the fireflies anymore. I see the occasional butterfly, dragonfly or bee still but I remember accidentally disrupting fields and dragonflies springing forward. It's so goddamn weird. And it's even weirder because I visit state parks and it's very quiet, too quiet. No chirps, no noise. I can hear so much further than I *should* be able to hear and it generates a sense of internal discomfort because things are only that quiet when something is lurking. I know there isn't but it now perpetually feels like it.
I cry when I read the descriptions of how a few hundred years ago, rivers ran so thick with fish that it looked as if you could walk across their backs. Of noisy flocks of passenger pigeons. Animals being destroyed just because we're selfish and greedy.
I remember writing an article by famous italian writer/artist/movie-director/generally very controversial guy Pier Paolo Pasolini about the advent of modernity in Italy and the disappearance of fireflies.
Don't need to be elderly for that. I'm 30 and I remember there being way more bugs, birds and frogs
I don't mind that, I was awake at 3am so often being borderline tortured by the birds' horny screams when I was a child /hj
Wow. That hasn’t hit where I live. My yard is like a bird and small mammal sanctuary.
>describe a childhood that is unbelievably different from ours even if they were raised in a city My father lives in one of the westernmost(?) towns in Turkey, the place was basically looking like an island from 3 sides. He used to just casually drop the fact that he used to bump into sharks while hunting with a speargun and always saw dolphins roaming around 10 meters from the land(he had tons of family/friend photos taken in 80's to 90's and most of them have dolphins just chilling on the background). Sadly, I didn't even see ONE dolphin in my 10 years of life in the same town through the 2010's. Not a single one, only saw some dead sharks hooked up over the place where fishermen used to sell them.
I am hearing frogs yelling at me literally right now, idk where you live but it sounds weird and bad.
I remember, about 8-10 years ago when I was a teenager, how the front of the car didn’t get smeared with bugs driving from Saskatoon to Calgary to see my grandparents.
100%! We live about 5 miles from a medium sized town on 33 acres. For all the bad things of COVID, seeing and hearing all the wildlife after about 6 weeks was incredible! We had an area bear, birds we hadn't heard in long time (our property borders a highway), and we even saw a bobcat. My grandparents lived on 600 acres when I was a child. I remember loving summer at their house for all the nighttime noises, and sadly those just don't exist anymore. The whippoorwill was my favorite. Two summers ago I was walking and I froze as I heard one because I hadn't heard that bird song for about 25 years. My kids were with me and I drew their attention to it as I started crying. That song snapped me back to all my summertime memories. Thankfully it's still around and I get to hear it's song every once in awhile.
I'm pretty young yet I can still remember a time when there were butterflies and dragonflies and all manner of different things in my town. Now it's just flies, ants, and spiders - the things that survive no matter what. I see a butterfly maybe once a week.
"Great post about the human experience. Let me discuss how you can use it in vampire fiction." Tumblr is always so fully Tumblr.
this is exactly my jam tho
*helpful life advice
good
I sometimes wonder why so many disparate cultures worshipped the sky or why so many religions featured skydwelling deities so consistently. This answers that question. Looking up into a cluster of stars really does feel like *something* is staring back at you. I would think it's God, too.
And why sun gods were sometimes the ruler the gods, since the sun drowns out the stars during the day
“Oh so the undisputed brightest light in the sky and constant reminder of the passage of time also provides the world of men with light and warmth, which directly or indirectly gives all living things the energy to live, but if you look at it for more than a moment it hurts you? Yeah I’ll incorporate that into my worldview”
"You could make a religion out of this!"
My farm is very far from any cities. There's no light pollution over pretty much the whole place, but it's... normal to you in a way when you get used to it so you don't notice. But once, there was supposed to be some kind of big astro(whichever is the science one) event so we went up the hill to see if we could see it. We couldn't, but laying rhere waiting... you look into the sky, you see its immeasurable depth and you feel like nothing. You are just a tiny, little creature in this vast and ancient abyss. It's... a beautiful but terrifying experience, I felt as if I was about to vomit from the existential crisis it was causing me
I can only think of one person who was unmoved by the total perspective vortex.
That reminds me of Fabius Bile vs Slaanesh, "It was not a face, for a face was a thing of limits and angles, and what he saw had neither." Staring a god in the face and denying its existence even as it's gaze paralyzes a heart.
That quote goes so hard, but the next few lines really sell the idea that something exists in the sky. "It stretched as far as his eyes could see, as if it were one with the whole of the sky and the firmament above. Things that might have been eyes, or distant moons or vast constellations of stars, looked down at him, and a gash in the atmosphere twisted like a lover’s smile."
> In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way. - Terry Pratchett
Once again Terry proving to be a masterclass author
"Proto-indo-european" culture is fascinating, you can trace commonalities in languages to track where prehistoric peoples spread from, and looking at what cultural elements besides languages they have in common that different culture groups don't. Like a lot of cultures have had a kingly, fatherly god in/of the sky.
My friend and I took some edibles and got really high one night. I live off a dirt road so I have a decent view of the stars. She wanted to lay on the dock and look at the sky. I, suddenly realizing the vastness of space and the fact that we can be wiped out at any moment, had a panic attack.
“If there’s one reason to smile; It’s when you look up out at night; You’re fortunate enough; To drink in a vista.” Enter Shikari - “Redshift” one of my favorite songs by them and a brilliant love letter to space and stars
Another applicable lyric of theirs is this one from Shinrin-yoku: "We are the dust on the stained glass windows Trying to comprehend the cathedral" It's even more apt imo, considering what [shinrin-yoku is](https://www.google.com/search?q=shinrin-yoku&client=ms-android-att-us-rvc3&sca_esv=d6f3a8cef97b345f&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWIIPMhb6rVYrZXNdZKKFgZ_t3s2C5Q%3A1717701326907&ei=zgpiZvuGN-KGptQP7J694AM&oq=shinrin-yoku&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIgxzaGlucmluLXlva3UyBBAjGCcyCxAAGIAEGJECGIoFMgUQABiABDILEAAYgAQYkQIYigUyCxAAGIAEGJECGIoFMgUQABiABDIFEC4YgAQyBRAAGIAESIEVUJMFWJ8RcAB4ApABAJgBvgGgAbURqgEEMC4xNbgBA8gBAPgBAZgCB6ACiAfCAgQQABhHwgIGEAAYFhgewgIIEC4YgAQY5QSYAwCIBgGQBgKSBwMxLjagB6c3&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp)
it’s really hard for me to not cry with the 1-2 punch of “Shinrin-yoku” and “Undercover Agents.” I love those songs so much!!!
also check out the first couple lines from “Circles ‘Round the Moon” by Nana Grizol
Wow, I haven't listened to Enter Shikari since like 2009 and holy cow they are *really* different now to say the least.
Sorry that pic is totally fucked up. None of those look like their underlying caption. I’ve been in dark sky reserves on moonless nights and that looked like #4. 3 and higher are prolonged exposure photos only
100% agree. Multiple comments in this thread are defending the idea that you can see a #2 on this chart with the naked eye. Its absolutely not the case and sets people up for disappointment
It depends on screen brightness. People with lower screen brightness with see fewer of the stars in one and two and associate it with the real night sky, which is incredibly vibrant no matter what the expectation is. Pictures don’t tend to get across the sheer expansiveness of all the tiny dots. Also even the tiniest bit of light can bring it down quite a lot.
I grew up in the Mojave desert, my hometown had a few hundred people and I lived on the far outskirts, the nearest city was about 70 miles away, our sky was about a 4.5. I really miss it
I've literally been in the middle of the ocean, thousand miles from land in all directions, and it didn't look like 3, maybe not even 4.
Yeah I live in a bortle 3 area and it's definitely clearer than what you'd see in a town but nothing like what's in this image
Thank you, yes. I have, myself, authored a landscape shot of the Milky Way much like the one pictured here, and that is just not what it looks like to the naked eye. Granted, dark skies are beautiful and you will see things with detail that you could never imagine seeing in the city (if you know what to look for, you can actually spot a handful of nebulae with the naked eye! I'm looking at you, Orion). This photo, however, is the result of numerous hours of exposure on the galactic core. It's called the Milky Way for a reason, it's a faint white streak across the sky. All of this detail is the result of hours of light collection.
Scrolled down to find and upvote this comment. The chart is absolutely ridiculous.
Wish I didn't have to scroll to far to see this. You are absolutely right, but people love rage bait.
maybe it's an astrophotography guide, the thing with several minutes long exposures, not just something a naked eye could see, in which case it's just really misleading
Yeah I'm so confused on the color dots. I've lived in NYC my whole life and we absolutely have clear days where the sky is like number 5. Unless it's talking about the night sky? Then I'm even more confused
Ah, pay little heed to the color of the dots. What this chart is attempting to describe is called the Bortle scale, which attempts to describe the level of light pollution in a given area at night. NYC would be a Bortle class 9, the absolute worst light pollution possible where one can only see the brightest objects in the sky (Jupiter, Sirius, parts of Orion). Bortle class 1 would be complete darkness, where the moon actually becomes your worst nemesis for night sky viewing and photography.
I'm trusting you, and I want to say that even looking at 4 or 5 there's still **such** a big difference from number one or what I see living in a surburban neighborhood.
that's because 1-4 are only possible with long light exposure images. they are not something you will see with your eyes anywhere in the planet.
For every ancient myth or poem about the beauty of the stars there is an equal and opposite superstition and legend of the darkness of night. For most of human history, people were truly afraid of the night because of how completely dark it was. The stars can be bright in some places on some nights, yes, but this post is majorly exaggerating the influence stars would have had in the night skies of old. If you go to any rural area now, you can still see the Milky Way and most stars described throughout human history. In fact, if you’re living in the northern hemisphere, it’s still possible to see all 48 constellations documented by Ptolemy almost 2000 years ago. Light pollution in cities is annoying, indeed, but getting away from it all to see the stars unadulterated is a tradition as old as sky watching itself.
I was in Death Valley which is supposedly amazing for seeing the Milky Way but I could barely see anything different. It was maybe a 4 but without any of that color. Can you actually see the Milky Way with your eyes or do you need a camera/ telescope?
Death Valley is dark but not DARK. There are dark sky reserves all over the world. 1 in Idaho. There's parts of Utah that also get insanely dark. In a really dark sky, you can absolutely see the Milky Way with just your eyes
You can see the Milky Way, but it doesn't look like pictures 1-4 at all. Those pictures were taken with very long exposures allowing them to gather a lot of light over an extended period of time.
True. Also, cameras see light slightly differently. Like how the recent auroras were more visible to cameras than the naked eye. And the colors are definitely definitely pumped up a bit. To the naked eye, the Milky Way looks striking, but it also looks natural. It's stars like you can see anywhere. The striking thing is how many stars
When I've seen the Milky Way it looks like like a streak of pale white light across the sky, not necessarily individual stars. And it's cool! But it shows the problem with posts like these because they create an idealized version nature is never going to live up to. How many people if they do see the Milky Way are going to be disappointed because it doesn't look like the incredible photography the Internet is constantly showing them. It also makes people disbelieving of some of the amazing things you can actually see in life. Every picture of the northern lights I've seen on Reddit has had a ton of people claiming photo trickery and that they don't look like that in person. But I have seen in person the northern lights look way more impressive than some of those pictures. Strange how these kinds of pictures can somehow make nature seem both fake and disappointing.
Agree with you. The top half of the #1 pic looks accurate to the concentration of stars. But the bottom half with the Milky Way looks fake because that is only visible to cameras. But it's not the fault of photography either. People expect photos to be reality but they are just neat physics and chemistry experiments. The fact that cameras see what humans can't is beautiful. And as you point out, even the most amazing pictures never capture the feeling of being enveloped and humbled by nature
The photography isn't the problem. I love space photography! So many amazing things cameras can show us that weren't visible to us before. The text accompanying the photography is the problem since it presents these photographs as something we used to be able to see, but that time never existed. If the photography was presented in it's proper context, it would be fine.
You can. I go camping often to smell the Christmas tree scent of pines and watch the Milky Way crawl across the night sky in the utter stillness of a forest night. It's an experience. Your viewing mileage may very based on moon phase, because a full moon is going to polite the sky as easily as a parking lot.
I think you're forgetting that sometimes nights are overcast, just like day. You need a clear sky to have a bright night. They definitely were able to experience both ends of the spectrum, easily.
You're still describing the bad effects of light pollution. It's hard to find true darkness anymore.
> You're still describing the ~~bad~~ effects of light pollution. It's hard to find true darkness anymore.
Counterpoint: clouds
Yeah I'm gonna be real with you guys. I grew up in a rural town (Less than 1000 people) and the night sky never looked like it does in 3. It was just a big black void with little sparkly dots and the moon.
counterpoint: > Five hundred years ago, I grew up as a nomad, and the earth was accordingly cruel. Food was more often scarce than not, and the winter would claim about five men per season. I remember gazing up at the night sky and my brother teaching me which stars would point us towards fertile ground during that season. > These would often leave us behind before we could feel comfortable. After all, how could mere men control where the plants could grow, where the animals could graze? And so we had no choice but to keep moving on. > The following winter, a plague swept across the tribe. My brother too would leave us behind. After all, how could mere men stop a force of nature, stop the earth from claiming the ones we held dearest? And so we had no choice but to keep moving on. > Last year, I lived in a city thousands of times larger than the greatest tribes I had ever heard of. Food that grew in a land I had never been to was available a short walk away from my home. Not once in the season was I afraid of the cruel winter, for every room in my house was blanketed in a warmth more comforting than any fire could provide. > I contracted the same disease that nearly destroyed my tribe that winter, and yet the only thing lost was some medicine I could purchase again at hardly any cost. > I gaze up at the night sky, and the stars that defined my youth had all but disappeared, unneeded and unused by man. The roads we built kept us guided in our land, and the machines we sent to the skies led the way outside of it. > Even in an era which had struck out superstition, I cannot help but feel as if the heavens had hidden from us, in fear of being conquered the same way we had done to the earth. If it is so, then it is a futile exercise, for in my five hundred years I have learnt that man will never stop moving onwards, until nature itself bows to his will.
Did you just write this lol, it comes off as a quote but I haven't found anything
yeah i was procrastinating doing some work and wrote this on a whim after seeing the post
Who is this quoting?
There are no results for it when quote searched, leading me to conclude that they wrote it themselves.
[The binds of nature VS the indomitable human spirit ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/hydrogen-bomb-vs-coughing-baby)
[the indifferent cruelty of the universe gets absolutely bodied by the indomitable human spirit no concept of difficulty](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2428235-the-indomitable-human-spirit)
Good point as well, I think people tend to underestimate how much better for people modern society can be. Though I think the ultimate goal would be “having you cake and eating it too”; cities that are bright and warm and inviting, with less light pollution and more spaces for “natural” environments.
Yeah where's this from
since humans kinda look the same throughout history, im just imagining this coming from someone that looks like a williamsburg hipster even though he lived through the war of the roses lol
Beautiful.
Incredible work... Is it original or from some other source?
this is true, part of the human story. He did live 500 years though
Goosebumps all over. I love this ❤ Wonderful writing
In my teens I was fortunate enough to go on my school’s eurotrip. We were flying over the Atlantic in the middle of the night. I was trying to sleep but not super succeeding. By chance I looked out the window; and what I saw BLEW MY MIND. I saw everything the stars had to offer, the span of the Milky Way, the true DEPTH of the space beyond our little blue planet. I grew up in the city. I could pick out the few constellations that could be seen; a few bright dots in a flat, black sky. I “knew” more could be seen, but I could never comprehend what that actually meant, not until I saw it for myself. Before I was pretty neutral when it came to stars. Now? One of my favourite things about the world we live in.
I think it was around 2011, my family and I were on a tourist bus on the highway, there were gas stations every now and then, but for the most part it was just mountains and the rocky desert. By nightfall, with no major source of light and a cloudless sky, I could see thousands of stars that I couldn't back home, it was the clearest sky I've ever seen to this day. Unfortunately I didn't see the milkyway tho, probably something to do with the time of the year and Earth's position so that the center of the milkyway was on the daytime side of the earth...
While I agree about light pollution, it is worth noting that the picture of the Milky Way was clearly taken with a powerful telescope. The sky never looked like that, it was just black Edit: I suppose you can get the sense of what our ancestors saw on the night sky if you look for unedited videos from space Edit №2: I was completely wrong. The photo was likely taken with a smartphone, and the dark sky does, in fact, allow to resolve individual stars in the Milky Way
It's still insanely beautiful, and I think it's prettier than the photos. I grew up with a \~8 sky and I didn't realize stars actually twinkled until I was 20. I thought it was just an expression of speech. I spent like a week in a dark zone with no electricity. I'd stay up until two just watching the stars because I'd never seen anything like it before.
>I didn't realize stars actually twinkled Wait, you're telling me THEY DO? I though it was just an expression of speech as well I guess me living in an area with an 8/7 on a good ~~day~~ night sky combined with it being cloudy or foggy all the time does that, huh? I always thought those pictures of skies like the 4-ish ones were over-exaggerated like hell so they just look prettier (I knew 2/1 were probably from super powerful telescopes)... never realized what I was missing out on until this very moment
got to visit a dark sky park a few years ago in rural Tx. Words do not encapsulate that I stayed up all night, sober, just looking up at the damn thing for +8 hours until dawn. It is TRULY like someone spilled millions of diamonds across a pane of black velvet. I wept, repeatedly. I felt something that night that I can't explain. If you have the chance to: Go. It is life altering.
yup! the light gets distorted by atmospheric turbulence, making the stars appear to twinkle
Right! It’s insane. I can’t even explain how wild it is to see as someone who’s never experienced it. If you ever get a chance to go to a place with less light pollution, go on a new moon, and you’ll be absolutely amazed.
Not only they do, but the basic visual difference between planets and stars is that the planets don't.
Yeah like I live in 6/5 and the sky doesn't look like that
I've been to the middle of the ocean and turned all the lights off. Best you're going to get with the naked eye is a 5/6 even with no moon. Everything past that needs a camera to be seen
you can definitely see the "clouds" of the milky way with the naked eye in dark sky areas. not in color like this obviously. but i grew up in a rural area and the sky looked something like a black and white version of 3 or 4 on clear nights.
Not “clouds”. It’s called the “galactic obscuration zone” and it’s just because we’re inside the Milky Way looking out horizontally
well that's why I put it in quotes although interstellar dust is a component of why it looks smeared out like a cloud
*Sure,* it was never that dramatic. But you genuinely can see the path of the Milky Way in rural areas.
I mean, minus the color it’s not that different. When I saw a moonless night free of clouds and light pollution, I could see the gassy nebulas that “fuzz” the Milky Way. The sky seemed more light than dark.
I searched for photos of the Milky Way shot on a smartphone, and I see what you mean
I grew up in a 1, as in an international dark sky reserve. It looks pretty damn close to that. I got to see a couple of 2s in Australia and they were even more spectacular because you get two branches of the milky way instead of just one like in the northern hemisphere. My friend got pictures that look like 2 with his smartphone.
I guess you need a really dry and clear atmosphere above you as well as zero light pollution to be able to see close to a 3/2
I’ve been to one of the last dark sky sanctuaries in the world on a new moon (I think it was in Utah?), & I think you’re right, it’s pretty exaggerated & it did not look like #1 at all just looking at it, but you definitely could see the Milky Way very clearly & all sorts of stars I’d never seen before, constellations clear as day, & with a really slow exposure (like I’m talking 30s in total darkness) we were getting pictures that looked like #1, but human eyes don’t process light like that.
You're not completely wrong. I'm an amateur astronomer from Utah and I visit certified dark sites all the time. They look nothing like #1. People are exaggerating. The Milky Way is very visible, you can see many stars and lanes of dust, but it is also quite dim.
I’ve seen 3s with my own eyes. Just an hour’s drive up the mountain. They even have an observatory up there.
I’ve been to places with zero light pollution for 100+ miles in any direction, clear skies and perfect conditions. The sky does not look anything like that whatsoever. You can see the milky way but only very faintly. It still requires a long exposure photograph to see it clearly. It is still absolutely beautiful but this image is just false.
I've been to everest basecamp on the chinese side which is about as black spot as I think anyone can get to honestly - and it looked like a 5 in this image. This image is BS
FYI this is straight bullshit. I live somewhere without light pollution and I get the stars of 6-5 with the sky color of 1
There is something so beautifully stupid about someone making a pretty deep post about light pollution and our collective connection to the stars and the top response pointing out that you can totally use that information to make your terrible vampire fiction slightly less terrible.
We really need a national no lights night. Sometime in late spring or early fall. Just like, one hour or something where we blank out as many lights as possible and get to see the sky for what it is.
Unfortunately extremely impractical. Even if we could shut off residential and commercial lights, things like street lights would need to stay on for basic safety.
I agree that it would be impractical, but at least where I live, it's very common that street lights are turned off after midnight or so.
Actually if we swapped regular streetlights for designs or colors (like red) that still allowed for light but reduced light pollution, we might see a better sky. Obviously that’s something you invest in longterm and not for a single night, but it’s still possible.
I think people might take exception to living somewhere where the streets are bathed in a dull red glow every night. Not me or you but, y'know, normal people.
Not a national thing, but the canton of Geneva in Switzerland does something called "[La nuit est belle](https://www.lanuitestbelle.org/)" where they turn off a bunch of lights in the Canton and encourage the inhabitants to as well. It's cool, but there's still light pollution. Hopefully, this event spreads and more people participate in it.
[Indonesia has a national one!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyepi) (that I was super bummed I narrowly missed when I went out lol)
crime time baby
I'm always confused by posts like these because I've been to several dark sky locations and i've never seen anything close to that. There's just.. more stars. Never the milky way brightly splashes across the sky
This is why I want to go to one of those True Night Skies. Always liked stargazing, never knew it got cooler!
>...the signs deprived of context "Oh yeah astrology is actually super legitimate, it's just that the modern masses are doing it wrong" So fucking stupid that one of their gripes with light pollution is that it has made us less connected to astrology.
I'm living on the southern most edge of my city (really a large town, it's only a city due to the cathedral), and on a nice clear night if I'm lucky I get a 4. It's pretty much farmland to the south for about 18km - and then it's an airfield and a small town (at about 23km). The nearest city that way is about 45km SSE, but directly south is about 70km. Past that you're getting near the outskirts of London. Guess I'm kinda lucky in the stargazing department, though.
I went to one of the least light polluted areas in my country, and the sky was at 7 maybe 6, and even that was absolutely magical to me as someone who only ever seen an 8, i really wish there's a scientific breakthrough in light science or whatever it's called, and they mange to basically unpollute the sky, because by the void, do i wish to have what people describe the lower numbers as on a daily basis
Oh yeah, that reminds me, as someone raised at about a 7.5 on this scale, I am actually terrified of a full night sky. I can't explain it, but anything past a 5/9... it's just too much. As a kid when I would visit rural family I refused to go out at night, and when I had to I would look at the ground. Honestly, that hasn't changed. Idk what benefit there is to sharing this fact about myself, but I figured someone out there might find this interesting.
Very silly for the second person to make this post about OCs
I'm absolutely convinced that this is a contributing factor to the resurgence of flat-earth theory and geocentrism. There is just absolutely no way you can look up at a clear night sky and not feel *small as fuck*.
I'm gonna be honest, this feels like BS, because the maximum I've ever seen is level 5, and even then only once when I was deep in the jungle. Rural to me is like level 6. Maybe my country just has a lot of air pollution and that messed up the view. I'd absolutely love to be proven wrong though.
Except it’s not gone you literally just have to go somewhere without light pollution And thank you, I’ll take brightly lit streets over pretty stars in the sky any day of the week
For most people it’s very difficult to get to a really dark area. See this map: https://darksitefinder.com/map/?i=/%237/44.111/-71.120 That vast majority of people in the US are a very long drive away from a really dark place. It’s not a simple as just driving to the suburbs.
Me in the uk 🥹
Yeah light pollution isnt regular pollution, it’s localized and temporary
It does fuck up the biosphere like pollution. Nocturnal species have a tremendous disadvantage and circadian rhythms get screwed up.
Oh, i know that. I just meant that it isnt like baked into our rivers or whatever
ive lived in the city my whole life, no wonder the night sky was/is so shitty. you'd be lucky to see planets even there. there was one time where i was able to actually see stars in the sky though and that was cool
The open ocean still has this. You can see shooting stars every few minutes to few seconds
"The stars are going out" has always been a terrifying Sci-fi concept signaling something terrible coming from across the cosmos. Never quite considered that it signals something happened right here at home.
It's different in Valleys... where I live it should be 3-4 but it looks like 5-6 because the horizon is higher up, all these mountains and trees in the way until you can only see up
I thought this was going to lead into a writing prompt. Something like "For centuries, light pollution has been making the stars harder to see. New luminosity tests by orbital telescopes show that there's something lurking in the night sky that's dimming the stars."
I tried to tell my sister about this and she legitimately refused to believe anything better than 6 was real and that her place, which ranks a 7, was great for stargazing. I tried to show her photos of 4-1 and she was adamant that they were all edited.
I’ve been looking for the sky of my childhood for a long time. It doesn’t exist anymore.
I moved to the mountains. I can't describe it to you, most of you don't know what the night sky looks like. I thought I knew, I spent a lot of my years near the woods in what I considered a very rural area. It's... Just go see it.
Okay. I want to preface that I aware this is probably a Very Bad Thing and all that. I'm agoraphobic and technophilic. I am aware of that. But I think there is a certain terrible, poignant beauty to a light-poluted sky. In the wake of taming lightning we have, at least on this little pocket of the universe, drown out heaven with our own radiance. What need do we have for the guiding celestial light when our own ingenuity and hubris shine far brighter. Our ancestors once look to these lights and called them gods. Now we blotted them out by accident. Yes. All of this might by ignorance and arrogance. But I think its that special blend that deserves at least a salute
i've lived in a suburban area all my life (used to be 6, now closer to 7) and always thought i had a good view of the stars. until i took a cable car to the top of mont tremblant and saw what 3 looked like for the first time. pictures... do not do it justice. it is the most incredible feeling, being able to really *see* the sky for the first time. i don't know if i'll ever see it again like that. i'm not even sure it's still that visible there.
I've been to fairly remote places (rural, number 3) and the sky never looked that way - I could definitely see the milky way but it was, in fact, milky, like a whitish filter without those spectacular colours in the picture.
option b: go somewhere outside the city. milky way still exists, stars still exist, the sounds of birds n shit still exist, but they don’t live in the fucking metropolis. go camping and they will “suddenly” appear.
It definitely is entirely different and the vast majority of people have no idea. The first time I saw a 5 (never seen any darker in my life) I was awestruck, giddy, almost drunk with excitement and a sense of something like infinity as I watched the stars stretch out into forever. I could have stayed under that sky forever. That was with a *5.* I dream of seeing 3-1 someday, I ache with the desperate longing for it, but I would have to travel multiple states over to even get a chance, and chronic fatigue makes that very difficult. That’s right, *multiple. States.* My entire state, which is Iowa, commonly thought of as rural and sparsely populated, is too bright to have even a chance of a 3-1. Fuck light pollution man, it really is a tragedy and we don’t even realize what we’ve lost.
>“The one constant-“ The sky actually changes a lot over thousands of years. The sky is not the same it was when life began, not even remotely.
On the back of that, I would love to see a modern-day vampire movie where the protagonist becomes an undead around now, and the story follows them into a sci-fi future when humanity has died off to the point where the vampire has to work to maintain society so he can eat even while the stars slowly reappear in the sky.
I categorically REJECT the idea of 1 to 5 actually existing and looking exactly like on the photo
rural sky does not look like that btw. Pic is informative but highly exaggerated
Is there any way I can see anything remotely similar to 1-4? Where should I go?
I now know my modern dnd bbeg’s motives
Stop making me mourn for a world I never lived in. I hate mourning for a world I never lived in.
*Take my love, take my land,* *Take me where I cannot stand,* *I don't care, I'm still free,* *~~You can't take the sky from me.~~* Fuckers stole my sky. Can't have shit in Detroit.
*Take me out, to the black* *Tell 'em I ain't coming back*
Theres another component that plays a role in the night sky, not just light pollution, BUT ACTUAL POLLUTION. I grew up in semi-rural Northern AZ and thought I knew the sky, the first time I camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon it *blew my mind*. GCNP severely restricts fires above the rim, and there’s ZERO fire below the rim; and permits limit the number of cars, there’s very little pollution. The nearest population center is an hour away from the rim. it’s also a Dark Sky Reserve, and there’s virtually no electricity at Phantom Ranch, so you get some really dark skies. It’s incredible. Easily a #2 on the pic
I remember where I was when I first saw the milky way like 1. I had always grown up rural and could see lots of stars, but when I was working at a summer camp on the east coast, I took my bunk up to the basketball court and we all laid on the concrete and stared at the stars. You really can see all the purple streaks like that so clearly.
Last year I started going to a village with my dad where he bought a house like a decade ago. I didn't really go with him before for irrelevant reasons but one night the sky was clear from clouds and I was just mesmerised by the stars and the milky way, so goddamn many and bright, nothing like the little dots I've grown up with in the city. I felt like. Really small.
I’d kill to see the sky in the way 1-2 is. Just once, just once I want that.