The Last Dark Sky

It is midnight in Las Vegas, and a beam of light powerful enough to be seen from space is shooting straight up into the desert sky - drawing insects by the hundreds of thousands, and the bats that feed on them, into an ecosystem that exists for no reason other than that we built a light and pointed it upward. A continent away, an astronomer is waiting patiently for photons that have traveled for eleven billion years, hoping nothing gets in their way before they land.For nearly the whole of human history, the night sky was not a special occasion - it was the Milky Way overhead, thousands of stars, a shared inheritance that guided sailors, timed harvests, and filled every mythology on Earth. Today, a third of humanity, and four out of five people in North America, can no longer see it from home.The Last Dark Sky tells the story of how we got here - from whale-oil lamps and gaslit boulevards to Edison’s bulb, the neon strip, and the Las Vegas beam that started it all - and then takes an unexpected turn skyward. Because just as artificial light finished conquering our own backyards, a new threat arrived from orbit: tens of thousands of satellites, streaking across telescope images and threatening the very darkness that billion-dollar observatories were built in remote deserts to protect.Blending history, astronomy, ecology, and hard-won optimism, this is the story of a species racing to see farther into the universe than ever before - while making it harder, with every passing year, to simply step outside and look up.The night sky was never really ours to keep. The only question this book leaves you with is whether we’re willing to give any of it back.