Cavefires

Stars are beautiful. Yet in most places in the modern world you can't see them. Above is a map - the black areas where you can see lots of stars. The pink areas, including cities like Paris, very few.

Here is another view of Europe, showing the lights of the continent at night. Wow that's a lot of light. And this was taken from space.

Hmmm.....



I'm figuring there are billions of lights on the planet. Possibly a trillion if you look at the pictures. In fact, I saw this great article on geology.com about satellite images of the world at night.

My friend Jeff Cook and I were both at the DCpodcasters monthly meeting at Rhed Pixel and we were talking about his new podcast Offorbit.tv which is about astronomy.

Jeff went on a hilarious tear about light pollution and how the amateur astronomy community is actually taking part in reducing energy use by reducing light pollution. I'm paraphrasing here but in essence Jeff's point was - "Why in the world are we lighting space?"

It was a simple, obvious and great point. Why in the world can we see lights from space? What would be the point of that, outside an airport?


I mean, look at it. Look at the United States and tell me that this intuitively makes any kind of sense.

If you look at the images. It is a profound observation that indeed we are pouring incredible amounts of energy into our atmosphere for no other reason than stupidity. While some of this wasted energy could be reflected from super efficient lights that no doubt exist somewhere in Germany, 99% of this light is simply wasted. If you're a utility company presumably this is a great wonderful thing as all those mall parking lots, and highways need light even at 3am for legal reasons and thus are lining your pockets.

Still, it seems to make a huge amount of sense to not piss away our resources and clearly something should be done. I'd suggest walking around turning off lights.

One of the most current sources for renewable stats in wikipedia. Here is a great wiki entry showing the predominance of hydroelectric power versus other types of energy production, including most notably, the oft touted ethanol gambit.

Of course the more disturbing graphic is below showing the actual energy we use. See that little tiny sliver of blue, amber etc? That's the above graphic.


Hrumph.

Fossil fuel still rules.

Woods Hole is now using a submarine that is powered soley on the ocean's heat differential.

This is another example of the huge energy resources that are available for free, under our nose.