What do we lose when our connection with our cosmic environment is broken? The night sky is humankind's only truly global common, shared by all of us across civilizations and millennia. Yet, today a majority of us lives in cities, where increasing light pollution compromises our view of the stars. Even worse, a new kind of threat is rapidly encroaching: thousands of low-earth orbit satellites have been launched in the last five years to deliver global internet connection, and appear as fast-moving dots across the starry sky.
Over the millennia, the sight of the heavens subtly and silently guided humankind's steps: It influenced religion and spirituality, inspired great works of art, enabled navigation in the open seas, which the Polynesian masters accomplished thousands of years before Western sailors and without the help of any chart nor instrument. Indeed, astronomy is the midwife of science: It is the study of the motion of the heavenly bodies
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