In some ways, the stars above us are the ultimate equalizer: we're all equally far away, we all share the right to look up at them; and, tiny glittering pinpoints that they are, when we contemplate that cosmic glow, our fractious lives seem so brief, so comfortingly insignificant, compared to the light years they've traveled to meet our eyes. Vast, dark expanses glittering with stars are the skies under which we evolved: every creature alive has countless ancestors who existed under the light of stars visible thanks to the velvety darkness of the night sky.
But industrialization has changed that, of course, by introducing light pollution that gradually erased the stars from view before the bright blue light of countless LEDs made the situation so much worse. And now, as the new space race heats up, spawning tens of thousands of satellites in orbit around the Earth, it only stands to make the visible night sky less so. Dimming stars are just one of many problems posed by satellites and especially megaconstellations, groups of hundreds or thousands of small satellites that work together to give us broadband internet and mobile connectivity.
