For the more than 100,000 years humans have been on Earth, we have looked up at night and seen the stars and our celestial home, the Milky Way galaxy. Cultures all around the world have stories and records incorporating this majestic, sublime sight.
However, nearly 3 billion people can no longer see the Milky Way when they look skyward at night. In turn, their connection to the cosmos – and to the sense of deep time it represents – has also been lost.
Light pollution is the culprit of this loss. But it is a relatively recent problem. In fact, roughly a century ago, the skies above some of even the biggest cities in the world were still dark enough to see the gaseous clouds of the Milky Way and the infinite specks of flickering light shining in the farthest reaches of the universe.
