Darkness, not technology, is now the rare luxury. Under a moonless sky far from artificial light, the Milky Way reaches a surface brightness that matches the threshold of human scotopic vision, the mode where rod cells dominate and color drains away yet faint structure appears as a pale band arching across the sky, rich enough in contrast that unaided eyes can pick out dust lanes and subtle gradients once they adapt for a sustained period.
The scandal is that this is not a fringe experience but a missing baseline. Studies of artificial sky brightness show that in many dense metropolitan zones the background luminance never approaches levels required for full dark adaptation, so photoreceptors remain in a constant mesopic compromise and the galactic disk drops below visibility; satellite radiometry and all-sky surveys now indicate that a large share of urban dwellers live under skies so bright that the Milky Way is mathematically present overhead yet functionally erased, reduced to data in observatory archives instead of a nightly, common sight for human eyes.
