A new address for the article in NG is:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/20...inkenborg-text
Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Photograph by Jim Richardson
If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun's light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don't think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it's the only way to explain what we've done to the night: We've engineered it to receive us by filling it with light...