There was a time, a few days ago in human history, really, when people spent a lot of time looking at the sky at night.   To read Greek mythology, and Shakespeare’s plays, one might guess that people were as familiar with the constellations, as they are with corporate brands today. Or close at least.   Of course, it was possible back then to see the sky at night.  As David Owen pointed out in a recent New Yorker piece (August 20th), in Galileo’s day – about 400 years ago –people thought the Milky Way was a continuous ooze, so densely packed were the heavens to the naked eye.

Today we can see only a fraction of what was easily visible back then.  We are enclosed in a visual cocoon, and the cause is not just the smog and fumes that fill the sky.  Even more it is the light.  “Today a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night,” Owen writes, would see “less than one percent of what Galileo would have been able to see.” We emit so much illumination – if that’s the word – down here below, that we have lost the capacity to see above.

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