The night sky is disappearing at a rate that would alarm anyone paying attention to compounding curves. A 10% annual increase in sky brightness means the night overhead is roughly twice as bright every seven years. Eighty percent of the global population already lives under light-polluted skies, and the trend line bends in only one direction. The sources are banal: street lights, parking lots, commercial buildings, garage floodlights left burning all night. None of these individually seem like a crisis. Collectively, they've erased the Milky Way from the lived experience of most humans alive today. Writer Tove Danovich had to drive to a 2.5-million-acre Dark Sky Sanctuary in southeast Oregon just to see what pre-industrial humans saw every night for free. Some jurisdictions have acted. Flagstaff, Arizona, adopted outdoor lighting rules in 1958 and became the first recognized Dark Sky City in 2001. New York state is considering a Dark Skies Protection Act that would regulate outdoor lighting intensity, direction, and color temperature. These are real policy tools — zoning law, not moonshot technology — but adoption remains the exception rather than the norm. The ecological costs are not speculative. Artificial light disrupts sea turtle navigation, moth behavior, lightning bug courtship, frog reproduction, and migratory bird routes. Research shows it alters plant-pollinator relationships, shifts tree flowering schedules, and degrades circadian rhythms across species, including humans. These are systemic biological effects, not aesthetic complaints. A newer and harder-to-regulate vector is orbital. More than 11,000 Starlink satellites are currently in orbit, bright enough to be visible from even remote dark-sky sites. At least one company is pursuing satellite-based artificial sunlight capable of illuminating three-mile areas on demand. Nothing launched into orbit is currently subject to environmental review for its light-pollution effects on Earth. The distributional question is straightforward: darkness is becoming a resource that tracks wealth and mobility. If you can afford to travel to southeast Oregon or live in Flagstaff, you can sleep and see stars. If you live in a dense urban area with no dark-sky ordinance, you absorb the biological costs of 24-hour illumination with no recourse. The amenity is being extracted from the commons and relocated to destinations. The policy toolkit exists and is not complicated — shielded fixtures, color-temperature limits, brightness caps, directional requirements. Flagstaff proved it works at city scale over six decades. The obstacle is not technical but political: lighting manufacturers, commercial property owners, and satellite operators face no cost for the externality they impose. Until darkness is treated as a public good rather than an absence of a product, the 10% annual brightening will continue compounding.
