Then, in the first part of the nineteenth century, peculiar things started happening in the nocturnal hemisphere. On a warm autumn evening in 1826, crowds gathered to witness the lighting of the very first public gas lanterns, along Unter den Linden, the boulevard at the heart of Berlin. This marked the beginning of an Age of Luminosity where night itself was relentlessly pushed back. Since then, humankind has developed and perfected ever better—i.e. brighter—techniques of illumination that in turn spread like wildfire, embers flying from town to town and city to city as more and more population centers came ablaze with over-illumination, greatly disrupting nocturnal ecosystems and night skies in the process.

Some two centuries after the first public gas lanterns were lit in Berlin, city workers in the Tiergarten park, through which Unter den Linden cuts, are kept busy each spring by flocks of nesting sparrows that raid the derelict remains of the same lanterns that first made humankind embark on its pursuit of transforming night into day. Presently, as evening turns to twilight, some 350 million street lights worldwide flicker to life, sending glimmering beams of light upwards from the planet’s surface and out into space.

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