CSE has submitted public comments to the U.S. FCC on two pending applications relating to the #SpaceEnvironment: (1) Reflect Orbital's prototype satellite; www.spaceenvironmentalism.org/actions/publ... (2) SpaceX's "1M orbital data centers" proposal; www.spaceenvironmentalism.org/actions/publ...

wrote about something very important www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/s...

Thread: imagine you're a historian surveying 16th century copies of the world's most famous ancient astronomy book, and you see one where somebody with handwriting VERY similar to GALILEO (!?) has transcribed... a psalm. "Galileo, a prayer? That's something that doesn't work," Ivan Malara thought.

An excellent summary of the latest satellite proposals threatening the night sky & how to voice concerns. astrobites.org/2026/02/26/r...

You know how people who go against scientific consensus love to compare themselves to Galileo? I wrote about a cool new discovery that shows the real Galileo sat down and did the homework first. www.science.org/content/arti...

Great multi-act narrative with voices from both sides of the world and frank talk from the American experts.

A million satellites won't happen, but only because the economics of $/kg won't smile on it. The problem's crux is that even small steps toward this quixotic goal are rewriting the sky (go to a dark place; look for yourself) while the US agency that should mind the gates brandishes a rubber stamp.

Whoa: young scholar searching Florence libraries for how the ancient Ptolemy informed Galileo found a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest with marginalia in what looks a lot like Galileo's own hand. Like a frozen moment of torch passing, when a carefully tended fire from antiquity ignited something new.

How does the Predator species has so much advanced technology when all we ever see of their culture is individualist-warrior-honor stuff? Do they make space for master craftspeople, for knowledge sharing, for tinkerers? Do they leave tech and admin up to conquered vassals, like the Mongols?

I think a claim around prediction markets is that success isn't just a gambling trick but a proxy for understanding, but is this true? Like, philosophers of sci have proposed many criteria that make theories of the world desirable or not beyond just prediction...parsimony, falsifiability, etc.

This morning I'm reading a very cool white paper by David W. Hogg at NYU, a big proponent of using machine learning methods on space data, and he's tackling basically nothing less than the SOUL of ASTRONOMY vs. AI. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.10181 Some thoughts, some summary, and some context below.

Interesting & lovely. I wrote a SciAm story on the same transients but the modern observations. Liz Kreusi put them into context & you can't help but want to hold one of those glass plates.

Anyway to make this case, that space ambitions of Musk/ Bezos may causally explain some of our politics, I could mine the many quotes where Musk links his rightward turn to his space plans, plus Bezos deciding Blue Origin needed to follow SpaceX's practice of hustling for govt contracts to catch up.

There’s an interesting lawsuit out of Connecticut I’ve been following that rests on the question of whether darkness — yes, darkness, the primordial Erebus himself— is a natural resource. Here’s why that’s potentially a big deal.

What fraction of it all -- gestures around -- is attributable to one, and then another billionaire realizing a capricious American administration is still for a few years (and who knows) the main customer who could conceivably pay for their particular astrofuturist dreams?

Bystander video exposing atrocities is a nice echo of the ancient idea of the cosmos as a community of watchers. Plutarch: "... the sky was dotted with stars...the eye of Justice is not a single eye only, but through all these eyes of hers God watches ...the deeds that are done here and there"

The power of persistence and community unity! What a great win for #Astronomy American company (AES Andes) was planning on building an industrial facility in the Atacama desert. This would've produced light pollution affecting the pristine skies where some big telescopes are. Well .... no more! 🔭

The bat-signal effect of a post like this on science media Twitter circa 2019 is long gone, but let's try anyway: now the *revised* draft of my book is in, and I'm popping up again from the circular ruins of the publishing process, once again looking for stories and thinking about pitching.

this whole thread had me, but especially the part about how mysterious living towers from 400 million years ago "were not closely related to anything alive today"

Blue Origin has announced its own megaconstellation called TeraWeave, consisting of 5,408 telecom satellites that are "urpose-built to serve enterprise-grade customers" www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-or...

Pairs well with news of the 1st private space telescope, a return to the era of Licks and Lowells. Turn out we've lived in a brief window where cosmic exploration was driven by the curiosity of citizens in a democracy, not rich eccentrics, insecure sovereigns, industries, or navies. It was awesome.

Some good news, if you need it: The city council of Franklin NC has voted to return an important Cherokee mound to the EBCI. "Noquisiyi ("star place") is part of a series of earthen mounds.. the heart of the Cherokee civilization" wlos.com/news/local/t...

My friend, a wall surrounds us, and spheres that do not have any gap. Here we are, like the yolk and the white within an egg, and the universe is an egg. You suppose that there is a shelter for you in bad times, but how could you take refuge? There is neither opening nor way out. -ha-Nagid

awesome how we can now talk about space militarization like TV ads talk about the state lottery

Meanwhile in space www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🔭

My latest labor of editing love is this stunner by @christianelliott.me about herbicide drift, a silent ecological crisis ravaging the remaining native hardwood trees of the U.S. Midwest. Sadly I did not get to use my preferred hed, The Fast and the Furious: Midwest Drift

have you ever been somewhere so dark you could step outside & immediately spot the Milky Way? i traveled to the Upper Peninsula to learn about efforts to balance industrialization & economic growth with the preservation of starry skies: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/s...

I wrote this week's Screenland column about the houses collapsing in the Outer Banks, an unusually visible example of a problem--the potentially rapid collapse of assets in a quickly changing world--that's much bigger www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/m...

use chatbots all you like, but I'll be over here channeling the astral magic from a planetary conjunction into a metallic golem that can answer any question

"Nearly midway in scale between the atom and the star there is another structure no less marvelous--the human body. Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. About 10^27 atoms build his body; about 10^28 human bodies constitute enough material to build a star." -Eddington, 1927

"The narrative of technological inevitability relies on a society-wide conflation of efficiency with value, a profound denial of and disinterest in human agency, and [...] the shallowest possible grasp of history." @lizziewade.bsky.social on AI: theantiquarian.email/archive/is-a... 🧪

I'm kind of mad that growing up they would bring up how Abraham Joshua Heschel's activism put him on the Right Side of History but nobody told me he could write the most amazing trippy sentences! "Time is eternity broken in space, like a ray of light refracted in the water." What????

This is so cool. Siblings of the Pleiades strewn over the entire sky. Within some of the oldest written languages in the world, from Sumerian to Eblaite to Akkadadian and Hebrew, the name for Pleiades has etymological links to the word "family," and now that family is much bigger.

This is particularly sad as Lowell has long been a centre for Solar System planetary astronomy, a rare field internationally 🔭

Google says it will start experimenting with data center satellite constellations to solve the problem of more efficiently farming sunlight into "compute" for AI. What I couldn't quite glean from the preprint was the size of the things they were thinking, but they do compare it to Starlink a lot.

Book or paper reference request: I'm looking for histories of technology and electrification in the Gilded Age and the political and environmental context. In the vein of Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes, David Nye's Electrifying America, or Jeremy Zallen's American Lucifers, but in addition.

An important and deeply reported story from @joshdinner.bsky.social about the hollowing out of NASA, particularly its science centers, where some current employees now refer to "climate" only as "the c-word." www.space.com/space-explor...

a good use case of the severance procedure for writers would be to spend 75% of time in a "composition" persona and 25% in a "revising" persona, instead of the more natural breakdown of 100% in "expectation of present and future shame" persona

As #UHA2025LA kicks off, I’m happy to share here my most recent piece on the Metropole, on an understudied topic in #urbanhistory #envhist —how different lighting tech’s have affected birds & humans over the centuries & what we can do about it. It’s a dual exposé & call to action Check it out here:

This book is delightful! Funny and practical life lessons for adults & kids, from the point of view of sea creatures.

"So, are mirrored satellites a practical means to produce affordable solar power at night? Probably not. Could they produce devastating light pollution? Absolutely." 10/10 no notes theconversation.com/a-us-startup...

Wrote about some unusual but simple star compass concepts from the navigation writer Tristan Gooley upcoming book The Hidden Seasons. As alienated as we are from nature, it's cool to me that there are still so many ways to align oneself under starlight: the cosmic equivalent of touching grass.

Reading some about medieval astrology and I'm thinking LLMs are horoscopes for tech bros: when the answer is right, it's not from the claimed technical mechanism, whether calculations of planetary motion or machine intelligence. It's from deep intuition into the structure of desired answers.

Having just closed The Story of CO2 I'm dazzled by how profoundly Copernican it is. You could say this of the "deep time" genre generally, but to me what Pete offers here is perspective; a disorienting re-centering of the familiar world to the reference frames of thermodynamics and the carbon cycle.

"It’s a study in the perils of relying on the ultrarich to fund science: when the guy with the billions is ready to move on, the whole project is off." Remember Breakthrough Starshot, which was supposed to send a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri? By @sarahscoles.bsky.social in SciAm 🧪🛰️

I'm so goddamn excited to read this book. @peterbrannen.bsky.social's first book THE ENDS OF THE WORLD is one of my favorite books on natural history, & I'm sure this new one is at least as good. @jaimealyse.bsky.social's review is (unsurprisingly) excellent. Go read it, and then get Peter's book!

In one week my book about carbon comes out, and here's some nice things some nice people have said about it. If you feel moved to do so, the link below provides a means of purchase. Thank you, that is all. www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

Aussie folks! 🔭🧪 Please consider signing this petition being put forward to the Australian Govt. to legislate / regulate light pollution and dark sky preservation. Not only are we being robbed of the glorious night sky, other beings (see below) use the stars too! www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

Impressed that this is a national piece but it captures what feel like fundamentally NC and Chapel Hill vibes -- the little mentions of ambient nature, the "esse quam videri"-ish interest in earnestness and authenticity, a patrician but public-minded fussiness, the worldbuilding around basketball.

Okay so White House now saying spaceports+ rocket launches+ reentries don't need environmental review, while FCC is saying that spacecraft in space don't either, so yeah I guess officially all physical stages of space stuff just occur...nowhere? In a hidden "frontier" dimension? Terra nullius?