| Many people live in such dire conditions and under such stress, the idea of looking up and 'enjoying' the sky will be meaningless. The stars could be a curtain so far as most of humanity is concerned. We will have to build observatories on the far side of the moon and at lagrange points and in orbit. Between now and then there is and will be a struggle to get out of the planets gravity well and into space. There will be some detrimental effects, but the benefit of planetary connectivity via sat internet will help so many its hard to put a value on it. If capitalist competition is not desired then there must be a state designated max cap on sat numbers forcing them to iterate on the ground and possibly cooperate. As someone who has been on the waiting list for an astrophysics scope for some 9 years (!) I can feel the light pollution trauma, though for normal people observing from the ground the albedo of these things will not approach city light pollution. Disbarring space launches for this reason is similar in the notion to not landing on mars until decades or millenia of sterile robot landers have confirmed or otherwise the presence of life.
Reality, waste decades doing this and find you contaminated it anyway with your robot, but it had no effect on life which is robust. Lets just get out there finally and get stuff done. Most scope viewing is done on cameras anyway now and not by eyeballs. The world is still a big place. The day you can be connected anywhere and take a vtol to tunguska is still some time distant. The sky of such a world will be congested but there may still be sky slices present. |