Well, I’ll treat you to one more item about indigenous knowledge in New Zealand, this time when it clashes with modern science! It turns out that the Māori are beefing about there being too many satellites in the sky, and beefing for two reasons. First, this raises the possibility that the night sky might be changed, making it lighter, and that might make celestial navigation more difficult. Not that the Māori rely on that any more (actually, their Polynesian and SE Asian ancestors developed it), but their historical practice from hundreds of years ago might be made more difficult.
Second, the satellites are somehow said to interfere with a Māori ritual in which the steam from cooked food is allowed to float up toward the stars. (The ritual arose to give thanks for a good harvest.) It is not clear to me how satellites would interfere with that, so you’ll have to ask the Māori.
Click below to read the excerpt from Stuff, a New Zealand news site:
Here’s the beefing about the ceremony (I’ve added translations):
A Māori scientist has warned our skies could become clogged with up to 100,000 satellites in the next five years – threatening thousands of years of Māori knowledge in the process.
The pollution could get so bad that stars seen by Māori ancestors would no longer be visible to the naked eye.
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have already interfered with a tuku wairua [food/steam] ceremony during Matariki, when whānau [members of a family group] who have died are released to the stars; while satellite proliferation threatens traditional waka hourua navigation [celestial navigation using double-hulled canoes].
Scientist, and Indigenous astronomy expert Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting is part of Sustainable Space – a group seeking to save Earth’s lower orbit, under 2000km, from uncontrolled development.
Moko-Painting often shows up in similar items, for he’s quite a vociferous activist.
Moko-Painting said about 15,000 satellites have been sent into space since the 1950s – about 7000 of those are still functional, and about 10,000 are still in space.
“Between 2022 when these estimates were made, and 2030, it’s estimated that we’ll have between 60,000 to 100,000 satellites in orbit.”
He said the about-3000 Starlink satellites in orbit were “already causing issues”.
. . . He got involved in the issue after the first Matariki public holiday in 2022, when he joined his wife’s whānau at Waahi Pā in Huntly for the hautapu (feeding the stars with an offering of kai [food].
“And just as we were doing our tuku wairua, just as we were sending on those who had passed on from that year, we had 21 Starlink satellites cutting through, right past the path of Matariki [the Pleiades star cluster.”
Apparently people thought that this was the stars’ response to the ceremony, and was propitious, but Moko-Painting—who admits that Starlink is important in communicating with rural communities—still has a beef:
“And those who knew would just say ‘no, that’s actually this man who loves the technology for launching satellites but makes them far too bright’ … and he does them in this line in an eye-catching kind of way, and that’s completely unregulated.”
I doubt that people will stop launching satellites because it somehow interferes with this ceremony. But wait! There’s more! As I said, there’s a possibility that too many satellites may interfere with celestial navigation, which only a few Māori still practice. But this is only a hypothesis, and hasn’t been shown, mainly because only a few stalwarts still use celestial navigation, and only as a way to keep alive that ancestral skill:
Even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a waka hourua, double-hulled waka used for voyaging, the night sky is 10% brighter than it used to be, Moko-Painting said. “So one could argue that 10% of what our tūpuna could see with their eyes while navigating is no longer visible to us.”
Master navigator Jack Thatcher has travelled tens of thousands of kilometres on waka hourua, as a guiding light that keeps his crews alive.
The Pacific covers a third of the planet. Thatcher’s journeys – using only stars, ocean swells and birds as guides – include a 3200km trip from Aotearoa to Rarotonga, which is only 67km wide.
. . . Having 100,000 satellites in orbit might be good for “pinpoint accuracy” all around the world, but those who rely on the stars for guidance won’t know which is a satellite and which isn’t.
“They’ll obliterate most of the patterns that we all depend on to help us find our way.”
He said the satellites were already being discussed in the voyaging community. Light pollution wasn’t the only problem – “eventually they’ll be rubbish”, Thatcher said.
“We’re entering that zone of global extinction, because we’ve polluted our planet, now we want to pollute our heavens.”
While the technology might be used instead to navigate the oceans, “that’s not the point”, he said.
“Indigenous knowledge is something that is a self-determination thing.”
It’s not clear to me, though, that if the night sky is 10% brighter than before, this would somehow efface or even impede celestial navigation. They give no evidence, but some want to kvetch about it anyway, because it apparently erases the achievements of the Māori’s ancestors (not the Māori themselves):
Māori know who they are because of their ancestors’ achievements. “And now you’re going to take that all away from us.”
The first waka [canoe] in this country used navigation knowledge that ancestors accrued over millennia, Thatcher said – travelling from Southeast Asia to Aotearoa almost 6000 years later.
Essentially, he said, if you can no longer navigate the oceans through the stars “it becomes book knowledge only”.
“Indigenous identity helps people to be who they are and enables them to be proud of who they are, because of their ancestral knowledge that they still hold on to.”
The whole idea of keeping indigenous knowledge alive was that “we’re not dependent on any technology”.
So Moko-Painting has joined a group of scientists calling for holding back on launching satellites. The article ends abruptly:
SpaceX, which operates Starlink, did not reply to queries at time of publication.
The problem with all this is that these two problems haven’t been demonstrated. The navigation impediment is a theoretical possibility and won’t be known until people like Thatcher try it. Since they can still do it successfully, even with all those satellites up there, I think this is not a serious concern. As for the satellites interfering with the smoke rising to the stars, that is pure superstition and doesn’t command concern from any rational person.
One:
From the article (bold added):
“The whole idea of keeping indigenous knowledge alive was that “we’re not dependent on any technology”.
I’ll leave that as a Moment of Zen
Two : Dialectic marries a truth to a lie. Here, it is true that a need for SOME sort of regulation of low Earth orbit would be advisable. The lie is that humanity needs to sever its dependence on technology.
Human flourishing depends strongly upon technology. Yes, that is arresting. No, that does not mean humans cannot adapt to uncertainty.
I’m thinking David Deutsch here for some reason.
[ technical note : (Can’t write digit with period after it like “1.” so I wrote “One.” ]
I think the Deutsch would say that human flourishing depends on our ability to solve problems related to our continuing advancement. I remember him saying that all interesting problems are soluble. We will find a way when it’s important to do so.
I also think that in his view, things like Maori religion do not advance science as they do not provide good explanations for nature but rather are unfalsifiable.
Sounds right.
typo:
“I think the Deutsch would say…”
should have been written as
“I think that Deutsch would say…”.
Much different meaning.
The first sentence of the article. A Maori scientist? That has to be the best example of an oxymoron I have seen in a while.
Satellites are not bright enough to have any effect on the overall night sky brightness. The more valid complaint would be light pollution in general, which in most inhabited areas certainly is enough to make stars harder or impossible to see. It’s sad to talk to kids brought up in cities, who have never seen the constellation of Orion, never seen Mars in the sky and noticed its red colour, never seen the Milky Way. 🙁
So I do have sympathy for the overall tenor of the Maori complaint, though the specifics in this article make no sense.
That’s easy, satellites move while stars don’t. (Satellites in earth-synchronous orbit are too faint to see.)
No, since the satellites will move. And the Starlink satellites are too faint compare to the bright stars used for navigation.
This is, though, a real problem for astronomers, in that today’s observations are now regularly affected by satellite trails.
And we should indeed have regulation, in that we should not regard low-earth orbit as a free-for-all where anyone can do anything they like.
For example, currently there is nothing to stop someone launching deliberately-bright advertisements into low-Earth orbit, which really could obliterate people’s enjoyment of the night sky.
Whoops! I forgot to mention that because satellites move and stars move only very very slowly, it’s easy to leave out satellites when doing celestial navigation.
I too was baffled by the claim of a 10% increase in brightness “even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean”
It possibly derives in a confused way from this research:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf4952
where a 10% increase due to artificial lighting, presumably over urban areas, is described. This is certainly noticeable in my suburb in Auckland, although even here I have no trouble distinguishing artificial satellites from stars. The idea that Starlink satellites have an appreciable effect on overall brightness in remote areas is ludicrous, although as you point out this is far from the only concern about the increasing number of artificial satellites.
The mention of ads reminds me of the bit in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” where engineers trigger 128 stars to go supernova just so that they spell out the message “Coke Adds Life” in the day and night sky.
This is a racist attitude.
If I complained to the city that the subdivision they allowed to be built behind us made the night sky too bright for me to show my grandchildren where the major stars are and how to find them, the city would think I’m a crank, (like people who move to a small town to escape the city and then complain about the traffic.) But this is at least actual scientific knowledge they teach in schools.
Yet when someone invokes his racial heritage of superstition and ancestor worship to complain about the same thing, it makes the news and we are supposed to take it seriously.
I think this is partly what is meant by
demoralization
… it’s a nebulous idea, though.
I think so, yes. You’ve identified, I think, why Mr. Moko-Painting raises this. There’s a plan, not just the kookiness of mystical crystals and high-colonic detox. Mr. M-P doesn’t have to believe woo. He just has to use it. To demoralize.
A British regimental commander trying to pacify Afghanistan in the 19th century was showing off his new pocket watch to impress a local chieftain. All the officers and senior NCOs had these watches, he said. The chieftain replied, “Yes. You have the watches. But we have the time.”
… and it is only going to get Messier.
😄
[ squinted-eyes & laughing emoji ]
Very nice, I just love obscure puns.
Wow. This is on another level even for WEIT’s eagle eye. Where do you find these horrible things?
My main consternation is where does parody begin and end?
Surely this article is some kind of Sokol/Bogossian like troll. They can’t really be serious now can they?
Can they?
D.A.
NYC
ps: the funnier bit is the “thousand year” Maori stuff for a people only sheered off from their genetic fathers about 700 years ago.
And having to “translate” from a dead language almost nobody understands or speaks. That, like the “tragedy” of all indigenous language “deaths”, is a language not valuable enough for parents to teach their own children!
FFS. What a self beclowned country I used to love and live in!
Kiwis send them to me! Otherwise I’d never find any of these!
I guess the Maori only travel on the sea at night in a waka hourua when it’s a new Moon.
Did Moko-Painting claim that the satellites interfered with his ancestors’ spirits finding their way into the heavens on steam during a religious ceremony? You’d think spirits would be smart enough to move out of the way. And how does Moko-Painting know that during a ceremony meant to give an offering of food to the stars (do they really think the stars eat?) that exactly 21 Starlink satellites interfered? Were they monitoring the sky with a telescope, the only means by which they could actually observe satellites?
Good point! I never thought about what stars might eat.
You can see low-orbit satellites and orbiting vehicles like the space station with the naked eye if you know where to look during the time they are high enough to catch the sun at least briefly and while they are low enough to be visible. We were treated to the train of Starlink satellites during a wedding reception in a rural back yard a couple of years ago. One of the bride’s friends had read previously about the then-impending launch and implored everyone to look up to the south (I think it was) at 10:52 p.m. (or whatever) and sure enough, there they were. Quite conspicuous. The long train of them tracking across the sky before they dispersed looked like an alien invasion. Very cool, Mr. Musk.
Exactly like the video clip (second panel) here:
https://petapixel.com/2019/05/25/heres-a-spacex-starlink-satellite-train-caught-on-camera-in-the-night-sky/
I stand corrected. But how does the Māori guy know the spirits couldn’t just wait for the satellites to pass? Or couldn’t just weave their way through? Are Māori spirits still bound to physical laws? Can’t they just pass incorporeally through matter?
It’s all made up anyway, so why not just believe your ancestors’ spirits are smart enough to figure out how to maneuver around satellites.
Good luck trying to dissuade Musk from going full steam ahead. I’m sure he won’t even notice! Honestly, I am sorry they are experiencing a rapidly changing world such that their old ways are gradually being lost. But there is literally nothing that can be done, as far as I am aware, and their old ways are no more sacred than anyone else’s
ha, ha!
Maori claims about the navigational skills of their seafaring ancestors cannot be verified, because they left no records. We don’t know how many were lost at sea or anything else. There are only unreliable stories, supposed oral history, like the silly claim that Maori discovered Antarctica.
I’m glad to be retired from a woke NZ university, where I was a Senior Lecturer in History.
Re Starlink threatening thousands of years of Māori knowledge, much more importantly it threatens all future terrestrial astronomical knowledge. But the “Māori scientist” clearly doesn’t consider that his problem. Hmmrph.
(BTW IMO, the Mauna Kea anti-telescope protesters actually have a point, regarding sovereignty, unlike this frivolous complaint.)
I’d just reply with.
“Sorry, your religious reason conflicts with our secular and culturally impartial policies. We fully agree with the concerns of space junk though as it is a real concern.”
How was the view of the sky affected during the massive burning of the forests on New Zealand by the Maori that reduced the extent of forested land from ~80% down to ~15% and caused enough smoke that carbon layers are detected in Antarctic core samples 7,000 km away from NZ that were caused by those fires? How did they differentiate the smoke from those man-made fires from the spiritual steam from the cooking of food for their ancestors? If these people were so in tune with nature, why’d they kill off the moas and other species and import rats? But I digress.
A 10% reduction visible stars doesn’t seem like it would affect navigation for the following reason: I assume that the Māori would not navigate using the dimmest stars, but rather they would use the brightest stars at defined positions, for example the ones in the Southern Cross, which range in brightness from 0.77 to 3.58. There would be no point to try to navigate by magnitude 7 stars as even a minor atmospheric change or evening mist could make them invisible.
There are about 5000 visible stars, and there are about 500 (10%) that are magnitude 4 or brighter, so you’d need to have enough light to obscure 90% of the stars before you’d make the dimmest stars of the Southern Cross not seen.
Note: My AI tool tells me that it would take 1,410 Starlink satellites to obscure 10% of the visible stars on a moonless night, and about 12,690 to cause a 90% reduction (i.e., making a magnitude 4 star invisible to the eye because of light pollution). Plus satellites move, as addressed by others. This means that there would need to be a heck of a lot more than that to keep that many visible in the same patch of sky constantly. To Coel’s point, satellites don’t affect night sky star visibility.
21 satellites is a very small amount of light pollution.
For comparison, a full moon causes an 85% reduction in number of visible stars, which is another reason the Māori would only use the brightest 10% (or fewer) to use as navigation guideposts.
But I guess “other ways of knowing” and all that indigenous religion rubbish is a good way to get free money from their government, so he’s incentivized to say this type of thing.
Sorry for the long post. This kind of thing drives me nuts.
Well, then…if they’re so enamored with “ancient ways,” just ban them from modern medical practices when they fall ill.