This made me reminisce the time I went to a beach somewhere in Quezon province. I vividly remember my friends being amazed at how many shooting stars we were seeing each minute it was around 1-5 shooting stars per minute. I told them that in the province it was normal to see that many shooting stars. Someone countered that he was also from the province but he never noticed. I countered back with , because you never looked, and he realized I was right. Most people just don’t notice, some people don’t spend the time looking out to the stars or even smelling the flowers and all the other cliches. It is said that cliches are
from Jason Kottke here:
At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that only ended with the dawn of space exploration.
That’s Carl Sagan in Contact from 1985. The effects of light pollution were documented in the New Yorker last August.