Why No One Can See The Stars Anymore

Morning Light Polluters!

Here’s a quick story for you.

On January 17, 1994, a super powerful earthquake hit the Los Angeles area.

Plunging the city into a massive blackout.

All of a sudden, the nearby Griffith Observatory started receiving numerous calls from residents asking about the weird sky they were seeing.

But what these people were seeing was not some weird sky alien god thing, it was actually just the milky way.

With no artificial light coming from street lights or people's homes, these people could see what the night sky actually looks like.

But because the night sky is basically always lit up by thousands of lights all night, when they saw what the night sky actually looked like, they had no clue what they were looking at lol.

But this isn’t just a Los Angeles problem, it's actually a world problem.

More than 80% of the world and more than 99% of the US and Europe live under skies that are obscured by light.

Literally, a third of humans on Earth can never see the Milky Way where they live..

And I would wager that percentage is much higher among Smart Nonsense readers.

Places where you can go to see the night sky in its entirety are becoming rarer and rarer.

Here’s a light pollution map of the world:

The areas where there is no light are the only places where people can still see the milky way at night.

Pretty crazy, right?

In fact, some amateur astronomer guy named John Bortle came up with a way to measure this.

Based on how many objects are visible in the sky, called the Bortle scale:

Unfortunately, most Americans live at AT LEAST Bortle scale 5 or higher, meaning they are missing out on 98% of the stars in the sky.

The thing is, this kinda sucks for the natural world.

Scientists study this stuff and keep finding that the lights we have on all the time are having quite a bad effect on some wildlife.

Everything from fireflies that can't find mates because every LED to them looks like a sexy mate.

Dung beetles who can no longer navigate by the position of the milky way.

Millions of birds killed every year in collisions with buildings.

But other than all that.

Just look at what we're missing:

I mean come on…

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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