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by fiatmoney 3660 days ago
Frankly, I'm OK with trading off massive economic growth and reduction of human misery, including conquering darkness itself, in exchange for having to take a trip out to the country if you want to go stargazing.
2 comments

What if it's not a tradeoff we need to make? What if you can have both a dark sky and a thriving civilization?
The fact that 1/3 of the world's population (in a world where 1/2 lives in urban areas) does not live in such circumstances strongly suggests that that is an arrangement is not empirically available, or not empirically valued.

Even more frankly, I'm not sure that availability of stargazing is a universal enough aesthetic preference, compared to extremely widespread desire for nighttime illumination, to give it any significant policy weight at all.

> an arrangement is not empirically available, or not empirically valued.

Maybe its value is beyond your reductionistic analysis. For example, light pollution impacts bats which pollinate flowers which only bloom at night (cactus, etc).

I second this. Who knows, maybe motion sensors can give us the same utility with less power and light pollution.