Frank Baxter Student Choice 3 (entry 10)

Frank Baxter Student Choice 3 (entry 10)

Light Pollution and the heavens.

One thing that his struck me ever since I have been hiking in the wilderness of New Mexico (rocky mountain area) and Hawaii (island of Oahu) is the amount of stars you can see in the sky.  Seeing the sky one a clear night one realizes why the ancient Greeks referred to it as milk (where we get the term milky way) as you can literally see all the stars forming streams. Looking up into one of those skies its nearly impossible to either not believe in some form of higher being, or at least not feeling alone. That somewhere out there within those billions of stars there is life just waiting to be contacted.

However, when you compare that night sky to a city, it’s depressing. Only the brightest stars or planets can show through, the night sky looks empty. Perhaps this is a reason why the amount of atheism or lack of spirituality has increased in urban areas, its quite easy to feel removed from the heavens when they are blocked out by our artificial light. It would be interesting though sad to see what happened when humans spread so much over the world that nearly all night celestial stars are blocked from the human eye. How will the human spirit feel then?