Joshua Sokol

As #UHA2025LA kicks off, I’m happy to share here my most recent piece on the Metropole, on an understudied topic in #urbanhistory #envhist —how different lighting tech’s have affected birds & humans over the centuries & what we can do about it.

It’s a dual exposé & call to action Check it out here:

This book is delightful! Funny and practical life lessons for adults & kids, from the point of view of sea creatures.

A US startup plans to deliver ‘sunlight on demand’ after dark. Can it work – and would we want it to? Satellites beaming sunlight down to Earth sound like science fiction – and they have astronomers very worried.

"So, are mirrored satellites a practical means to produce affordable solar power at night? Probably not. Could they produce devastating light pollution? Absolutely."

10/10 no notes

theconversation.com/a-us-startup...

If Your North Star Is Lost, New Techniques Can Point You South

Wrote about some unusual but simple star compass concepts from the navigation writer Tristan Gooley upcoming book The Hidden Seasons. As alienated as we are from nature, it's cool to me that there are still so many ways to align oneself under starlight: the cosmic equivalent of touching grass.

To follow this analogy one more step, we are now at the same place an early-career Johannes Kepler was: believing many astrologers to be con men but still hopeful that the underlying practice might work with better math and data. We'll see if this case shakes out the same way or not.

In both, telling apart the artistry of the practitioner from the power (or impotence) of the claimed practice itself is pretty hard. Also this how a lot of magic tricks work, too. The claimed mechanism of a trick has to feel plausible but what is claimed is usually a misdirect.

Reading some about medieval astrology and I'm thinking LLMs are horoscopes for tech bros: when the answer is right, it's not from the claimed technical mechanism, whether calculations of planetary motion or machine intelligence. It's from deep intuition into the structure of desired answers.

Otherwise I really enjoyed, and admire, when he wanders away from geology (his starting superpower) into other domains, putting this book in a rare circle of nominal pieces of science writing that are equivalent to the positionless 7-foot NBA "unicorns" who can step out of the paint and drain 3s.

Philosophical pronouncements aside, the CO2 book is also just fun thanks to Pete's casual, fearless command of explanatory writing. Somehow sections that could have easily turned out boring -- waves of glaciation! reactions in photosynthesis! lots and lots of geologic periods! -- are spellbinding.

It's a corrective, this bit I'm calling Copernican. In which things we have assumed are special turn out to be mediocre and predictable in their true context, embedded as they are in common processes, while actual specialness and wisdom are revealed to be not birthrights, but a challenge, an effort.

His first book did this too in arguing that for us to talk about being in a "sixth extinction" we would benefit from actually engaging with the stories of the first five. And of course it also highlighted the worrying involvement of CO2 in those episodes. Which is to say again: it gave perspective.

Having just closed The Story of CO2 I'm dazzled by how profoundly Copernican it is. You could say this of the "deep time" genre generally, but to me what Pete offers here is perspective; a disorienting re-centering of the familiar world to the reference frames of thermodynamics and the carbon cycle.

A $100-Million Mission to Another Star Just Disappeared An abandoned plan to visit another star highlights the perils of billionaire-funded science

"It’s a study in the perils of relying on the ultrarich to fund science: when the guy with the billions is ready to move on, the whole project is off."

Remember Breakthrough Starshot, which was supposed to send a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri?

By @sarahscoles.bsky.social in SciAm

🧪🛰️

I'm so goddamn excited to read this book. @peterbrannen.bsky.social's first book THE ENDS OF THE WORLD is one of my favorite books on natural history, & I'm sure this new one is at least as good. @jaimealyse.bsky.social's review is (unsurprisingly) excellent. Go read it, and then get Peter's book!

In one week my book about carbon comes out, and here's some nice things some nice people have said about it. If you feel moved to do so, the link below provides a means of purchase. Thank you, that is all. www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

Aussie folks! 🔭🧪

Please consider signing this petition being put forward to the Australian Govt. to legislate / regulate light pollution and dark sky preservation.

Not only are we being robbed of the glorious night sky, other beings (see below) use the stars too!

www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

Thanks! I interviewed her last year at some point (and she was awesome) but I should totally ask her about this, which occurred to me only recently during revisions, more specifically.

Another I've idly wondered about: when John Cassian brings stellar timekeeping techniques in 4th century CE from Egyptian monasteries to Europe, do those techniques have any continuity with the more indigenous Egyptian decan concepts of nighttime timekeeping with star clocks from much earlier?

So cool! The "substitute king rite"... millennia later. For a pop sci book I'm working on I'm so interested in references like this case where you can imagine elements of continuity, even if independent invention may be more likely. Like the Neugebauer paper about the Tamil eclipse predictions.

Bill Belichick Goes Back to School Can the legendary former Patriots coach transform U.N.C. football?

Impressed that this is a national piece but it captures what feel like fundamentally NC and Chapel Hill vibes -- the little mentions of ambient nature, the "esse quam videri"-ish interest in earnestness and authenticity, a patrician but public-minded fussiness, the worldbuilding around basketball.

Okay so White House now saying spaceports+ rocket launches+ reentries don't need environmental review, while FCC is saying that spacecraft in space don't either, so yeah I guess officially all physical stages of space stuff just occur...nowhere? In a hidden "frontier" dimension? Terra nullius?

Refreshing this space enviro news: Trump admin is "modernizing" rules to make clear that licensing new satellites (by the hundreds/thousands; with bus-sized dimensions) is not a "major federal action" that requires environmental review because any effects, they claim, are outside of US territory.

News: Trump’s FCC wants to widen the (already huge) loophole that companies like SpaceX use when they want to launch tens of thousands of satellites while dodging environmental review studies. I’m busy with book revisions, but would happily chat with interested journalist friends. Thoughts below.

“This is your environment. This is your history,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Biden holdover, said yesterday in a statement about the proposed overhaul of environmental review at the agency. “ I encourage you to comment.”

But this still seems significant to the global night sky, for what that’s worth, because it involves cutting one of the very few legal brakes in the system with the possible power to modulate what happens up there.

To zoom out, this is a small part of a larger effort to shake off environmental study requirements across lots of different FCC projects; to zoom out more, the current FCC is also using its powers of investigations and licensing as a way to put pressure on media outlets.

They met to talk this over (very broadly) yesterday at their August meeting. Alternatively, at least as I understand it from that attached doc above, they could formalizing the old categorical categorical exclusion loophole that protects satellites from this kind of review. Either way, no review.

Until: the new FCC indeed wants to declare that environmental law doesn’t apply to megaconstellations. “We propose that satellite operations be excluded from NEPA because they are ‘extraterritorial activities’ with effects located entirely outside of the jurisdiction of the United States.”

Ultimately Dark-Sky lost against the Biden FCC on smaller arguments. The decision was written by a Trump appointee skeptical of regulations and the “administrative state.” SpaceX still doesn’t need environmental review. But that question about environmental law applying in space wasn’t answered.

Probably the most interesting legal question (at least to me who doesn’t know anything) hanging over this case was: does the US National Environmental Policy Act, the one that requires environmental reviews, apply when we’re talking about space?