Visual pollution or natural evolution

[ChrisGreaves]

I understand visual pollution in terms of
(1) Street lights that inhibit my viewing of the night sky and
(2) Satellites that inhibit our astronomer's viewing of the night sky.

But I and the astronomers basically stand on Terra Firma. (Yes, I know that astronomers use Hubble which is not on Terra Firma).
Today I visited Heaven's Above and am now impressed with the thousands of Red Dots circling Terra Firma.

"Wow! Now THAT is pollution!" I exclaimed, as might you.
Then I thought of those red dots as building a sphere that surrounds Terra Firma.

An extra layer, you might say, and it seemed to me that that new layer (of red-dot satellites) was in effect human activity extending into space.
So that "Humans populating the galaxy" might not be a few humans in a space ship as much as the (on our time-scale) slow but deliberate and methodical establishment of concentric sphere.
The next sphere might be defined as "human settlement on all planets of our solar system"
The sphere after that would be "human settlement on many solar systems"of our Galaxy".

The numbers and the timescales are enormous, it is true, but look at how big a step Sputnik seemed 60 years ago and how blah-blah is an Elon Musk launch nowadays ("Of course the first stage(s) will land on the drone ships, of course the satellites will deploy on schedule, of course ...")

Cheers
Chris

[jonwallace]

The ultimate sphere being a Dyson one. Many, many Earth area equivalents AND harvesting the full output of the star...

[Graeme]

That's an interesting thought. The link you quote only displays the 835 Starlink Satellites. The true picture looks more like this:

Satellites.jpg

A headlong rush towards a Kessler Syndrome scenario!

Human settlement in other places might happen but machine settlement will happen first. It's already started!

Regards

Graeme

[ChrisGreaves]

I understand visual pollution in terms of ...

Here is a BBC article about light pollution's effects on plants and insects.
How light pollution disrupts plants' senses
Cheers, Chris