The night sky is changing faster than most people realize. Within a decade, there may be hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of satellites orbiting above us.
Have you looked up at the night sky and seen a row of satellites moving among the stars? It’s clear they’re not stars. They move more at man’s pace than God’s. They form constellations straighter, more rigid, than nature’s. They are a constant reminder that man has left no material realm unconquered. It’s a problem, and it’s growing into a monster that will hunt the hunter, Orion, shatter the feeding spoon, Ursa Major, and violate the beautiful queen, Cassiopeia.
By desecrating the skies with man-made satellites, we are forging the constellations that will guide us to our prideful demise. All the while, we are losing sight of the true stars, the ones that can guide us home.
Satellite mega-constellations are not just a technological or environmental issue, though they are very much those things. They are also a spiritual and cultural issue, and an existential threat to humanity.
I’ve been following, and disturbed by, the satellite situation for a few years now. I had, naively, hoped the problem would just go away, but it’s only getting worse.
Sometime in 2019 or 2020, I read news that the FCC had approved companies like StarLink and Amazon to launch a total of around 30,000 satellites into the sky. Disturbed by the nightmares produced in my mind by that news, I wrote It Is So No More (the poem at the end of this post).
The Problem is Getting Worse and Worse
I can see it now. As if there aren’t enough billboards littering the countryside, corporations will start forming satellites into screens. We’ll see constellations of StarLink and Amazon logos among Taurus and Leo. Talk about a horoscope.
Even if it in never goes farther than it has, we’ve already haplessly stolen the night sky’s purity. Already, when a child looks up on a dark, cloudless night, he cannot see unadulterated nature. He must see man-made satellites amidst the precious stars.
But all signs indicate it’s about to get much worse. In mid-January 2026, PC Magazine reported that “As SpaceX Works Toward 50K Starlink Satellites, China Eyes Deploying 200K”.
But it gets worse. As I was editing this article, more news came. At the end of January 2026, PC Magazine reported “SpaceX Eyes 1 Million Satellites for Orbital Data Center Push“. One million satellites! God help us.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see mega-constellations displaying the faces of political leaders, the flags of nations, or the logos of corporations, across the night sky in a few years. Whether it’s a corporate logo or a political figure, the result is the same: the sky becomes a canvas for human ego.
That doesn’t seem to be a concern of the journalists reporting on the satellite situation. It seems all they care about is the threat to national security.
This is far worse than a threat to national security. This is a threat to spiritual security. This is an existential threat.
Yes, one million satellites buzzing around our planet is a threat to our privacy, especially with the development of mind-reading technologies like this.
Yes, one million satellites hovering above our nation is a threat to our national security. In this Space.com piece, there is mention of “powerful lasers” and other space-based weapons.
Yes, one million satellites will undoubtedly contribute to the pollution of outer space. NASA admits that, “Due to the rate of speed and volume of debris in LEO [low Earth orbit], current and future space-based services, explorations, and operations pose a safety risk to people and property in space and on Earth.”
Yes, one million satellites orbiting Earth is a material threat, but the problem runs deeper.
The Roots That Feed This Disaster
The people spewing these satellites across the heavens cannot see the stars. It must be so. If they could feel that wonder one feels on a summer night somewhere far away from city lights, they would surely stop this nonsense of dominating every last inch of nature.
They can’t see the stars. They only see burning matter to be taken as a resource and sold for money. They only see complex phenomena, like consciousness and love and meaning, as systems of individual physical components and processes. They only see statistical realities. The world, to them, is a mechanism, and mechanisms must be dominated and exploited.
But I’d like to offer a different perspective, one shared by some of the greatest thinkers in human history, thinkers like Heraclitus, William Blake, and Iain McGilchrist. Their view is that the world is not just some dead mechanism. It’s more akin to an organism. To them, the world is alive, and living things must be cared for, not dominated or exploited.
The worldview that sees only dead matter moving in a series of mechanical processes is called scientific material reductionism. It has given us a lot: sanitation, refrigeration, the internet, protection against superstition, weather forecasting. I could go on all day. Because it has given us so much, it has become the dominant worldview in many of our Western institutions, in our educational systems, in our explanations of the world, and in our governments.
Science is great for explaining mechanisms. It offers precise and standardized measurements, which are invaluable for prediction and control, but it cannot account for meaning, value, or purpose. It is insufficient for understanding lived reality as a whole. There’s more to the world than what can be measured.
To science, love is not real, matter has no meaning, and suffering is just a bunch of neurons firing in the brain. Science doesn’t care about beauty or loyalty or courage. But in our lived experience, those things are tremendously important. It’s obvious in the art we create and in the stories we tell. It’s obvious when we look at the constellations and see great mythologies.
The stars guide us. Odysseus steered his raft by keeping his eyes fixed on the Pleiades. Europeans made transoceanic voyages thanks to stars like Polaris (the North Star). Magi from the East found God incarnate as Jesus Christ because they followed the Star of Bethlehem. The Egyptians could predict when the Nile would flood based on Sirius’s rising in relation to the sun. Stellar calendars governed agriculture that stabilized civilizations for millennia. And those are only material examples.
The stories carried in the constellations are invaluable guides in their own way. They show us what is noble and good. They teach us our purpose. From stories, we learn the meanings that science can’t grasp. We lift our eyes to the glowing firmament and encounter truths that nothing else in this world can show us. We owe the skies a terrible loyalty.
And we’re letting corporations destroy them for profit and power.
The people launching thousands of satellites into the sky each year are accomplishing their task. In their arrogance, they want to be our gods. They’re creating new stars, new guides. They’re deciding where we go. They’re telling us what the truth is. But we don’t have to buy into it, and without our support, they will fall.
The Stories They’re Telling
They know they need our support. That’s why they’re spreading propaganda.
The current pro-satellite propaganda falls into three main categories.
- Bridging the Digital Divide. These headlines and articles frame satellite expansion as a moral imperative for rural or underserved populations.
- National Security and Sovereignty. These focus on the necessity of satellites for defense, using high-stakes language.
- Solving Climate Change. These frame satellites as primary tools for climate accountability and disaster response.
Do you see their narrative? Satellites will save us from foreign attacks, bring wealth to the poor, and end global warming.
Amazing. And the power held by the few organizations in control of these satellites will never be abused. And the people who are so rural that they can’t have wired internet, well, maybe the satellites can deliver food to them too. And so what if we destroy the once-pristine night sky to save the world from climate change? So what if we “pose a safety risk to people and property in space and on Earth”? At least we can detect that landfills are releasing methane into the atmosphere. We couldn’t figure that out without satellites, apparently.
Seriously, though, homo sapiens have survived without internet or satellites for 300,000 years. Do we really need them all of a sudden?
Rural connectivity, wildfire monitoring, and geopolitical communication are all good things. But the question is not whether satellites offer benefits. It is whether the cost of planetary-scale sky pollution, surveillance infrastructure, and cultural desecration is justified.
The Costs
It’s funny, the most obvious and foreseeable costs of satellite mega-constellations are quite opposite the benefits proposed by the pro-satellite propagandists. Power and wealth imbalances will increase, making the poor poorer. Another tool for tyrannizing a nation will be set in place, ready for the next Hitler that comes along. And the world will become more polluted with greenhouse gases and other junk. Worst of all, though, the firmament will lose its purity and we will lose sight of the stars that have guided us for generations.
Rural Communities Will Remain Underserved
Let’s start with the idea that satellite networks will provide new economic opportunities to rural communities, where current internet infrastructure is lacking.
What they say is true. More remote communities will have access to high-speed internet. That is a noble goal, but is it worth the costs?
Satellites are expensive to launch, and the knowledge to do so is specialized and widely unavailable. This means that only wealthy corporations with highly educated workers will be able to build satellite networks, creating yet another medium that will be controlled and owned by a powerful few.
This opens opportunities for satellite providers to unjustly raise prices, especially in those rural communities that become dependent on them because wired infrastructure was unavailable or unmaintained.
At the same time, these rural communities often rely on systems and environments that will be directly harmed by satellite mega-constellations. With a million satellites in orbit, the night sky will be permanently changed. This will fundamentally alter and degrade the astro-tourism industry that small communities, like Cherry Springs State Park, in Potter County, Pennsylvania, rely on.
Cherry Springs is world-renowned for its exceptionally dark skies, making it a premier destination for stargazing and viewing the Milky Way, planets, and meteor showers. But with all the light pollution from satellite mega-constellations, Cherry Springs will be a very different place.
And astro-tourism is only one example. Astronomical research, indigenous cultural practices, and natural ecosystems, all heavily intertwined with the rural communities of which they partake, will undoubtedly be impacted by such changes in the night sky.
Yet the impact on rural communities is only the first symptom of a deeper problem. These mega-constellations trade local self-reliance for a system ripe for centralized authoritarian control.
Turnkey Tyranny
In 1984, George Orwell showed us how technology can be used for total state control. For the most part, we have optimistically ignored Orwell’s dystopian warning. We’ve allowed cameras into our bedrooms. We’ve built tools that can precisely digitize oral communication, making it searchable and indexable by governments and corporations. We pay for devices that can be unlocked by scanning, and recognizing, our faces. We allow anyone offering a digital service to track our location at any given time. Our technology couldn’t be more Orwellian.
It could, however, be even worse than what Orwell predicted. In 1984, there were places that couldn’t be seen. There were hidden patches of woods and dark corners of rooms. In the US, just a couple years ago, there were cellular “dead zones” where mobile devices couldn’t be reached, where one could disconnect entirely. But with satellite mega-constellations, far less is unreachable. The places on Earth to hide from a signal are fewer and fewer.
It’s not just cellular signals, either. New constellations are being equipped with “edge computing,” where AI on the satellite analyzes imagery in real-time. It doesn’t just take a picture. It can recognize gatherings of people or unusual movements.
Unlike older satellites that only passed over a spot once a day, mega-constellations offer persistent views. We aren’t being watched periodically; we are being watched constantly.
This opens the doors for greater surveillance, even to the point of thought-policing (now that mind-reading technologies, though in their infancy, exist and are improving); predictive prosecution (targeting suspects that the algorithms deem at high risk of future criminal activity before they’ve even committed a crime); and the abolition of free speech.
When the infrastructure is built, an oppressive leader or organization only needs to turn the key and all the power is theirs. As NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, said in a 2013 CBS News interview, “a new leader will be elected. They’ll flip the switch, say that, ‘because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power,’ and there’ll be nothing the people can do, at that point, to oppose it. And it’ll be turnkey tyranny.”
Satellite mega-constellations open the doors to thought-policing and centralization by establishing continuous ground coverage and using AI-driven data analysis, and putting that power in the hands of a select few. These mega-constellations are a terrifying leap in turnkey infrastructure, if they don’t destroy our lives and planet first.
Satellites are Toxic
While the pro-satellite propaganda pushes the narrative that satellites will help us fight global-warming, the truth is that satellite mega-constellations will cause a great deal of harm.
The concluding paragraph from a research paper titled “Dirty Bits in Low-Earth Orbit: The Carbon Footprint of Launching Computers,” makes the point.
“In particular with a sustainability lens, computing in LEO is costly for the environment. An obvious contributor is the launch—which offsets positive aspects of space operations (e.g. increased solar panel efficiency due to missing atmosphere). However, an even larger contributor is re-entry, where both payload and 2nd stage burn, turning into NOx that is significantly more dangerous than CO2. This paper has shown that even with an improved launch technology, the orbital applications will not beat terrestrial ones.”
The pro-satellite propaganda says “SpaceX launches $948 million NASA satellite designed to shed new light on climate change,” but the science “has shown that even with an improved launch technology, the orbital applications will not beat terrestrial ones.”
In other words, laying all that wire for broadband internet to reach rural communities still has a lower carbon footprint than launching LEO satellites.
And carbon footprint is only one measure of toxicity.
Even setting aside spirituality, meaning, or politics, mega-constellations are environmentally destructive on a scale their advocates rarely disclose.
If all of that is not enough, there’s still the loss of one of our purest and greatest wonders, the night sky. And when we lose the night sky, we lose much more than constellations.
Losing Sight of Our Guiding Lights
By losing the night sky, we’ve lost the last untouched, uncommoditized piece of nature. The night sky is a shared resource. Nobody should own it, and nobody should be able to treat it as though they own it. But that’s exactly what is happening.
The night sky has been a reliable, nourishing, and powerful companion to humanity. Defiling its purity must be akin to martyring saints or massacring innocents. Yet it’s being taken over by a bunch of tech magnates in the name of progress or shareholders or some other false god.
Maybe they don’t care about progress or shareholders. Maybe they’re creating their own constellations because they want to be gods, or because they believe they are gods.
Beyond being a guide, a provider, a storyboard, and a calendar, the night sky is also a fundamental part of religion. Constellations are named after gods. The Star of Bethlehem led the way to Christ, and wrote his birth into the mathematics of the universe.
In cultures across history, a red moon has meant much more than a total lunar eclipse that causes Rayleigh scattering. To the Incas, it meant a jaguar ate the moon, and would soon turn its attention toward Earth. To the Ancient Mesopotamians, it was an assault on the king. Native American tribes in California believed the moon was ill or wounded, and would chant healing songs toward it. In parts of Africa, to this day, it is a time for old feuds to be set aside. These are not rational beliefs. They’re religious.
Religions take up the night sky in celebration of something beyond. The people building satellite mega-constellations destroy the night sky in celebration of themselves.
It reminds me of something Carl Jung had to say about religion as a defense against totalitarian regimes (like the Nazi’s in the mid-twentieth century) in his book, The Undiscovered Self.
“In order to free the fiction of the sovereign State—in other words, the whims of those who manipulate it—from every wholesome restriction, all socio-political movements tending in this direction invariably try to cut the ground from under the religions. For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him. But religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience.”
In other words, totalitarian states cannot be the supreme rulers if their citizens adhere to a religion because religion means believing in something beyond statistics and reason, and if there is something beyond statistics and reason, then the state can’t dictate it. And if the citizens submit to religion, then the state is not the supreme ruler (unless, as Jung later notes, the religions “compromise with the State”).
What better way to destroy man’s belief in something beyond than to cut off access to the stars and moon and constellations? Destroy his ability to look up at the night sky and wonder.
Jung goes on to explain what happens when man’s religion is stripped away.
“The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world…The State has taken the place of God…Free opinion is stifled and moral decision ruthlessly suppressed, on the plea that the end justifies the means, even the vilest. The policy of the State is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and beside it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic, who, as we know from history, is threatened with all manner of unpleasant things. Only the party boss, who holds the political power in his hands, can interpret the State doctrine authentically, and he does so just as suits him.”
That is a sorry state. Some may say it is Hell on Earth. And it all starts when a few powerful people “try to cut the ground from under the religions.”
If the corporations building these mega-constellations replace the stars that guide us with their own, if they usurp the night sky as a source of religious truth, we’re well on our way to that awful state.
What Can We Do?
I hope I’ve made it clear that: satellite mega-constellations are capable, on multiple levels, of becoming invaluable tools for oppressive tyrants to build a totalitarian state; they’re capable of further ruining our economies, our planet, and our lives; and their defilement of the night sky is absolutely tragic.
Now, I want to offer some hope. We have the ability to stand up against these corporations. Maybe if enough of us unite against them, we can win. They need us. Corporations (at least in a free market) don’t survive if nobody buys what they’re selling. There is power in boycotting.
For now, I will be doing four things, and I invite you to join me.
- Configuring the settings on my phone so that it uses satellite services as little as possible. Unfortunately, there isn’t much granularity when it comes to satellite settings on iPhone and Android, and some of the satellite-related features can’t be turned off at all. But we can do our best.
- Committing to refusing all services that use mega-constellations. This includes the obvious services, like Starlink satellite-based internet, but also things like in-flight Wi-Fi on United Airlines and Jet Blue, which use Starlink, and avoiding using mobile devices in areas where there is no cellular service (because cellular carriers have made deals with satellite companies to provide service when a device is out of cellular tower range).
- Committing to refusing investments involving satellite and satellite-related companies. Companies like SpaceX depend heavily on investments and investor sentiment. Spreading the news and refusing to invest in these companies may be our best chance at keeping a clean sky.
- Getting involved with organizations, like Dark Sky International, that are actively fighting for our night sky.
If enough of us take those small steps, maybe we can change the course of history. Maybe we can leave a clear view of the night sky to future generations.
And even if we can’t sway the corporations, at least we can live knowing we didn’t pay, or encourage, them to launch all of these damned satellites.
If you want to do even more, there’s plenty more that can be done. Write letters to government officials, speak during public comment periods for FCC decisions, join and support local astronomy groups, pressure airlines, and support terrestrial broadband initiatives. These are all parts of the fight.
If we allow the night sky to be rewritten by profit and power, we lose something irreplaceable, something no technology can restore. We must act while there is still time.
It Is So No More
Look at the pictures, young one.
Oh, the way Orion danced across the sky.
He danced as slow as icebox honey flows
—In perfect rhythm, though.
We watched him every winter night.
He danced and glowed. Each lustrous node
Was notched with reverie and delight.
Oh, the way he danced so free (and leisurely),
Unbound, at liberty, untied!
Look at the pictures, young one.
Oh, the sight, Orion danced away the night.
It is so no more.
His light has been obscured.
Man and Mammon waged their war.
They hid him in the sky
Behind thirty thousand satellites.
Stars that could be bought and sold
Were slung like nets upon his home.
Oh, he used to dance, child.
We watched him move so gracefully.
But now the night time sky is glowing
Bright with forgeries.
Orion’s hands and feet are bound,
His dance no longer seen.
He’s been uncrowned,
His radiance drowned,
Lost behind a spellbound screen.
