Charles Foster at Literary Review:
God does not approve of street lighting, observed Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That wasn’t an oblique aphorism: it was simple biblical exposition. The God of Genesis is famously keen on maintaining boundaries between domains. There is supposed to be light (‘Let there be light’) and darkness (‘He separated the light from the darkness’ and called ‘the light “day”, and the darkness “night”’). Now, over much of the globe, night has been cancelled. The night sky in Hong Kong is 1,200 times brighter than the unilluminated sky. Millions will never see the constellations so central to the stories humans have told about the cosmos.
The cancellation began when humans discovered fire and used it to extend their days. This was a gentle type of hubris, different in kind as well as scale from the hubris of the Chinese engineers who are said to be about to put artificial moons into space, their orbits synchronised with the night hours of each commissioning city, pumping out light eight times stronger than the light of the real moon.
more here.