In my childhood years, I got to experience something I’ve cherished ever since: starry nights.
I was lucky to spend time during the summers on my Aunt Eula’s and Uncle Ernest’s tenant farm in Northeast Texas. With no TV or electronics, we made our own entertainment in the evenings, including “turning on” nature’s Big Show. This meant rolling an old bed outdoors as darkness fell, so we could lie back, look up and marvel at the endless expanse of constellations, comets, the Milky Way, planets and other wonders of the cosmos. Today, though, 80% of Americans never see the starry night, for the artificial glare of city lights blots out nature’s spectacular display.
But wait — billionaires to the rescue! Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and other high-tech demigods who’re spending trillions to foist a brave new world of artificial intelligence on us, claim that their scheme will actually relight the night sky!
For real? Of course not.
It turns out that they can’t get enough cheap land and energy on Earth to supply the phantasmagoric sprawl of data centers their AI hustle will demand. So, they’re going to put massive clusters of these systems into orbit, tethered to miles of solar mirrors stretching across our sky. While that means nature’s stars-and-stuff will be even more obscured, they say that instead of watching the cosmos, we Earthlings can enjoy the artificial twinkle of their corporate data centers.
This is Jim Hightower saying … Lest you think that, surely they wouldn’t do this, note that those arrogant billionaire Lords of the Night are already investing humongous sums of money in space data centers. As the CEO of one called “Starcloud” bluntly says: “It’s not a debate. It’s going to happen.”
To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.
