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. Perhaps as a result of this 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.
My whole life, I've lived in areas with heavy light pollution. On nights with clear skies, one might have 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 through the sky. Often, I've wondered what it might be like if we paused our light pollution. What if for a night, there was a curfew where—just for that night—nobody was emitted any light into the sky. Because ancient man could look up 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 actually did try that once and it ended up being cloudy.
Whenever I get a window seat on a plane as it takes off, I look out the window for until clouds make that pointless. Tonight was no exception. As the plane climed higher into the sky, 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 was 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 ever higher into the sky and civilization down below gave way to a bright pattern. There were large shapes, smaller shapes, and faint dots of light. In giving up the stars for modern society, we may have made the surface of the earth itself (at night) beautiful. While (from an aesthetic point of view) I don't think of it as a good trade because earth's surface is only visible from a plane; my entire lifestyle is predicated on industrial society so I can't really complain....
And besides, from this plane—with a view less affected by the light pollution of earth—I can still see the stars. :)