elfs | Dark Skies: A Tool of SATAN!

The Dark Skies Initiative is a collaboration among several groups, notably amateur astronomers, professional astronomers, and people who are just plain interested in saving electricity and money, to modify many various sources of nighttime light. The idea is that by using motion sensors, reflectors, downward-facing shields, high- efficiency directional LEDs, and a lot of other simple technologies we have available, the amount of light wasted by being thrown up into the night sky can be severely reduced. This saves power and money, reduces maintainence costs (LEDs need replacing less often than lightbulbs), and, for the astronomers, returns the night sky to an earlier state full of stars.

Right now, less than 40% of the kids living in America can see the Milky Way galaxy. It's drowned out by light pollution. I used to think this was a sad thing, and that the Dark Skies Initiative was a good idea.

No More! I Have Seen The Light! This morning, Tim Kimmel, widely touted to be one of the more "accessible to the mainstream" Christian talk show hosts, explained to me in a ten-minute RANT that the Dark Skies Initiative was the work of the Devil! Yes indeedeedo. There is no such thing as light pollution! Light is the gift of the Lord, yessiree, and the Dark Skies Initiative is fueled by a force older than the lightbulb, a force that wants to keep us in the dark, keep our souls from being exposed to the light, allow us to scuttle about, stumbling over the obstacles of life, doing what men do under the cover of darkness. It is EVIL!

I am not making this up. I laughed so hard I had to pull over to the side of the road. Stuff like that almost makes the OECs look sane by comparison.

[Edit: It now appears that what I was listening to was a replay of an old, recorded message, since the date on the written version appears to be May, 1999.]