Dr. John Barentine

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55 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Dr. John Barentine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Friday · Reconnecting with the night sky and reining in light pollution · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

Oh, there are always metaphorical bright spots to be found.

I'm really heartened by the work that a lot of the advocates are out there doing in their communities here in America and elsewhere.

There are whole countries now in some parts of the world, for example, Mexico and France, that have decided that light pollution is environmental pollution and it's serious and it should be built into their environmental laws.

And we're starting to see some results of that in the measurements that we're making.

But at the same time,

We're a long way from solution to this problem.

And in many respects, it gets worse by the year.

Yeah, I'm concerned about this as sort of transferring from one environmental problem to another, which on the surface sounds pretty great.

A lot of people are concerned about data centers on the ground impacting land use and water and

And having these other negative consequences.

And so the thinking as well, maybe if we just put them in orbit, we can deal with a lot of those problems.

The concern is, though, is you have to generate a lot of electricity to run a data center, whether it's on Earth or in space.

In order to do that, you have to put giant solar panels on them.

And we know from observations of the very many now in the tens of thousands of artificial satellites orbiting the Earth that these large reflective surfaces make them bright in the night sky, especially in twilight around evening and in the morning.

So if we put these vastly larger and highly reflective objects into orbit in maybe as many as a million of them, we're looking at a radical transformation of the night sky, unlike anything that we have seen in human history.

Right.

The least of which is that it's making things up there very crowded.

And the chance that we will have some problems with space debris and possibly even closing off space to future access for some indefinite period of time is a very real concern.

That's our hypothesis.

It seems to be backed up by data.

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