If you live in a city, you’re probably used to not experiencing full darkness after nightfall.  Lights from stores, streetlamps, and nearby apartments are constantly glowing all through the dark hours.  You may even think that it’s normal to barely be able to make out any stars.  It’s certainly the case in Los Angeles, where I first truly noticed this phenomenon.

I remember my first year at UCLA, when I would be walking around campus at night marveling at the sky glowing a strange milky white or orange.  I thought back to the places I had lived on the east coast and Midwest and all I could remember was darkness lit by stars, the moon, and some fireflies.  But here in the middle of Los Angeles, I saw none of that.  The marine would roll in some days and completely obscure the sky.  Other days, the sky would look like it was stuck in a perpetual state of dusk.

For awhile I wondered if I just didn’t remember how the sky looked at night in those other places.  Or maybe LA was just weird and didn’t get a “proper” night sky.  Then I went back to Beijing for the first time in years and found the same thing.  So many lights around you that you never really see past them, into the dark expanse of the universe.  One of my aunts was actually amazed when she came to visit us and you could actually see the stars at night.  Do city people live out their lives hardly ever seeing a truly dark night sky?

The world has changed so much as humans took over.  I can imagine the immense darkness that used to blanket the earth at night.  You can still find that in remote areas, but so much of mankind has gotten used to artificial lighting almost all day long.  That kind of darkness can be lonely, scary even.  I got a reminder of that tonight as I was working on my computer – before I knew it, the sun had set and I was cocooned in a dark house with just the eerie glow of my computer.  When I looked up, I felt small and isolated.  Without the light from my laptop, I would be engulfed by the night, and that felt so odd!

While I really appreciate artificial lighting, sometimes I wish it was easier to look up at the sky and see a vast landscape of stars.  Maybe if we were more used to darkness, it wouldn’t be so scary.