Technology

59287 readers

4330 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

648

The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it (www.space.com)

submitted 1 year ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is "noctalgia." In general, it means "sky grief," and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

(page 2) 49 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Skua@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

This feels like it comes from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It'd fit well

[–] virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them.

It varies depending on what country your in, but I don't think people realize how little of a percentage densly populated areas make up of the world. If you're in the US unless you're in a place like NY City a 20-45 min drive can get you to a place zero light minus occasional blinks from cell towers/planes/sattalites - and there will also probably be public land there you can go on for free.

And hey, look, the fact stuff like sattalites are interfering with observing the sky isn't great, but if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I'd say that's a worthy trade off.

Like a life saving drug with side effects, there's always trade offs as technology and society advance. And mitigating side effects when possible are great, but I thinks it's important we don't act like the side effects are occurring in a vacuum, and I would rather live now than in the past without the tech we have now.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I’d say that’s a worthy trade off.

Those are not the satellites that are the problem. It's Starlink and other LEO satellites.

load more comments