Jim Trageser
Commentary
This commentary appeared originally in
the North County Times on
© Jim Trageser, 2002; used with permission of the author.
Now that a new planetoid outside of Pluto has been discovered from
It was about a decade ago in
Hartley ran on a platform of getting rid of the yellow street lights and replacing them with white ones, arguing that it would reduce crime.
It's an argument that's been picked up by politicians throughout the county ---- few of whom, it seems, have anything of substance to offer voters.
When reporters, and the Cal Tech astronomers who operate Palomar, looked into whether the white lights really reduce crime, they made a discovery no less interesting than many of those found with the telescope: The yellow lights were just as effective at lowering crime rates.
The ambient light pollution from the yellow streetlights is easier for
computers to filter out of the images taken by Palomar's
massive 200-inch Hale Telescope, as well as the smaller but still important
observatory on
This is the reason
Frankly, it's a miracle that the Palomar observatory can continue to function at all.
The out-of-control growth that has clogged our freeways has also polluted the night sky with massive amounts of manmade light and airborne particles.
We are needlessly blinding our scientists because local politicians are more worried about getting re-elected than in doing the right thing. They stir up fear of crime, promise to do something about it, then do nothing except make it impossible for our scientists to do the serious work they're trying to do.
I'll grant that this is old news, but there's more than the chicanery of politicians or the esoterica of science at work here.
Recent discoveries of more asteroids with irregular orbits ---- asteroids that cross the Earth's orbit and could conceivably collide with Earth ---- ought to raise more than a few alarms, even among locals preoccupied with car burglaries. For if an asteroid with a diameter of a half a mile or more were to hit Earth, the consequences would be devastating. Ask the dinosaurs, if you can find one.
Of course, the dinosaurs, so far as we know, did not have space technology, or the ability to protect themselves from an asteroid or comet striking Earth.
But we do.
But to use that technology, whether it's nuclear devices blasting the asteroids to pieces or strapping massive rocket engines to the asteroid to push it aside, we have to see the asteroids coming before we can do anything about them. And we won't be able to do that if, through shortsighted pandering, we end up blinding our astronomers.
The truth is that Earth will eventually be hit by another massive asteroid or comet. The only question is when. And whether we'll be in a position to do something about it ahead of time.