July 16, 2025[1]
I had some work today, then I took an Uber to the airport and met up with [a friend] just past security. Our flight was delayed several hours, but—perhaps as a result of the delay—several seats were empty on the plane. This included all of [his] row, so I made myself at home at the window seat, while he took the aisle. There was much more delay (owing to weather?) so by the time the plane took off it was already dark.
Throughout my life, I've lived in areas with heavy light pollution. On nights with clear skies, you might be able to make out the big dipper and maybe one or two more constellations—ones with particularly bright stars. And airplanes; though unlike stars they blink and move in the sky. Often, I've wondered what it might be like if we paused our light pollution. What if for a night, we enforced a curfew where—just for that night—nobody was permitted to emit any light into the sky. Because ancient man could look at the stars, and I would much like that for myself without the hassle of going on a road trip to the middle of nowhere, booking an AirBnB, and hoping for a cloudless night. I did that once and it was cloudy.
Whenever I get a window seat on a plane as it takes off, I look out the window for the entire duration until clouds make that pointless. As the plane reached a certain altitude, I couldn't see anything on the ground except for artificial light. I tried making out what I was looking at, hazarding what was a highway or a parking lot or water. It's all very intricate, which I don't appreciate until I'm actually up there in the sky looking down at the lights. Cars had their lights on the highway and they reminded me of arteries as they fed into larger blobs of lights. At some height the whole thing felt... alive in a strange sense until the plane climbed higher into the sky and whatever civilization down below gave way to merely a pattern. There were large shapes, smaller shapes, and faint dots of light. In giving up the stars for industrial society, we may have made earth's surface at night beautiful. While I don't think of it as a good trade in this particular instance, mainly because earth's surface is only visible from a plane; my entire lifestyle is predicated on there being industrial society so I can't really complain....
And besides, from this plane—with my view less affected by the light pollution of earth—I can still see the stars. :)