In the late 1 990s a Russian/European space consortium
announced plans to build and launch into orbit satellites that
would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme called for
a chain of many satellites to be placed in sun-synchronized
orbits at an altitude of 1 700 kilometers, each one equipped
with fold-out parabolic reflectors of paper-thin material. Once
fully extended to 200 meters in diameter, each mirror satellite
would have the capacity to illuminate a ten-square-mile area
on earth with a brightness nearly 1 00 times greater than moonl
ight. The initial impetus for the project was to provide
illumination for industrial and natural resource exploitation in
remote geographical areas with long polar nights in Siberia
and western Russia, allowing outdoor work to proceed round
the clock. But the company subsequently expanded its plans to
include the possibility of supplying nighttime lighting for
entire metropolitan areas. Reasoning that it could reduce
energy costs for electric lighting, the company's slogan pitched
its services as "daylight all night long." Opposition to the
project arose immediately and from many directions.
Astronomers expressed dismay because of the consequences
for most earth-based space observation. Scientists and environmentalists
declared it would have detrimental physiological
consequences for both animals and humans, in that the
absence of regular alternations between night and day would
disrupt various metabolic patterns, including sleep. There
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were also protests from cultural and humanitarian groups, who
argued that the night sky is a commons to which all of humanity
is entitled to have access, and that the ability to experience
the darkness of night and observe the stars is a basic human
right that no corporation can nullify. However, if this is in any
sense a right or privilege, it is already being violated for over
half of the world's population in cities that are enveloped
continuously in a penumbra of smog and h igh-intensity illumination.
Defenders of the project, though, asserted that such
technology would help lower nochunal use of electricity, and
that a loss of the night sky and its darkness is a small price to
pay for reducing global energy consumption. In any case, this
ultimately unworkable enterprise is one particular instance of
a contemporary imaginary in which a state of permanent illumination
is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global
exchange and circulation. In its entrepreneurial excess, the
project is a hyperbolic expression of an institutional intolerance
of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumental ized and
unending condition of visibility.