Satellites were big news in 1957 when Russia sent the first one into space. Now they are scarcely news at all, although they still seem pretty miraculous to most of us. Every nation wants to get into the act, sending up satellites for espionage, communications, scientific research and, above all, for profit.
In urban areas we rarely look up at the sky at night because there’s no point. Light pollution blots everything out. But out in the countryside – the deep countryside beyond the towns and villages, and the roads, away from the glow of street lights or any lights at all – the stars shine very bright in nature’s planetarium. On a clear night, in the right place, I can see some of those satellites, or think I can, shining and winking out there in what used to be called the heavens, but now I suppose must be called the military-industrial communications resource region.
It’s getting crowded in space. There are about five thousand satellites in earth’s orbit, and there will soon be twelve thousand soon. Astronomers have warned that the night sky will eventually be so cluttered with space junk, that our view of the universe will be blotted out entirely. Companies like Space X are tossing satellites into the sky fifty at a time. Their job is to bounce back to earth billions of pointless phone calls and tweets, GPS coordinates for those who don’t have a map, idiotic TV programs, political lies, and all the other things we imagine we can’t do without. There are some good and valuable uses for satellites of course, like relaying the radio program you’re listening to now. But for the most part the trivial human ends don’t justify the enormously complicated and expensive technical means.
When the stars vanish entirely it will be like drawing down the blinds on the universe. We will no longer have that uneasy feeling of being watched and obscurely threatened by it all. The universe is infinite, which means that there are an infinity of stars with an infinity of planets.
How likely is it that so much valuable real estate remains uninhabited, and that we on our speck of dust are the only thinking creatures in the entire universe? There must be intelligent aliens out there, perhaps observing us and wondering why we are destroying our own planet, or why we don’t have term limits on Congress, or simply treating us as a cosmic entertainment. It’s a disturbing thought.
Of course we are being spied upon from the sky anyway by the Chinese, The Russians, and just about everyone else who can afford a satellite. But they are at least familiar enemies. It’s the unfamiliar ones we worry about. An impenetrable screen of satellites will effectively seal us off from the sight of the rest of the universe – a cosmic wall beyond all walls that will keep the aliens away, or at least invisible so we don’t have to think about them anymore. We will see no stars, but only what is reflected back to us from our own friendly swarm of satellites. Whoever or whatever is out there in deep space we will be safe in our own small bubble, watching our own small world, shining back at us from our own small screens.
Copyright: David Bouchier
