That is unsurprising, if you are from a different place. The stars' positions change plenty enough throughout the year, and even more so if you cross over the equator into a different hemisphere; being from a different world or a variation of one would make even greater difference. Oh! There is also light pollution: the stars here are not so different from where I am from, but there are some that are not visible because it is too bright down here on the ground.
[is also almost invisible except for some light from the windows, and his eyes. SAFEST DRAGON.]
It is not so bad here since we are in farmland, but the closer you come to the main camp the more difficult it is to see the dimmer stars; it is like being indoors and trying to look up at the sky, but all you see is darkness or a faint glow instead of individual stars, because the light on the ground is stronger than theirs, except the effect is caused by many lights from many windows and streetlamps. There are some cities, I have read, where you cannot see any stars whatsoever.
Have you seen the electric lights in the cabins and buildings here? One bulb can make a room as well lit as if it were noon; now take that one bulb, and imagine thousands upon thousands of them, all clustered together.
The thousands upon thousands of people living in the city, of course. There are something like a million persons living in London in my time, and while we do not have electricity one can still see the glow from a fair distance away; the cities of this time are a dozen times larger some of them, and all with electric bulbs.
Oh, no, the number of people has increased exponentially over the centuries with the development of things like machinery and electricity that make it easier to feed and house a great many people; the city of London, which I said was a million people, is now seven million people or more, but it took two hundred years before there were that many.
Why, that is hardly any at all, next to a city like London or Dover. Oh, oh but I am not calling it small, that is an average size for a village, and I have been to ones with fewer people than two hundred. But if you are from a place with that many, a city would be something to imagine.
That is unsurprising, if you are from a different place. The stars' positions change plenty enough throughout the year, and even more so if you cross over the equator into a different hemisphere; being from a different world or a variation of one would make even greater difference. Oh! There is also light pollution: the stars here are not so different from where I am from, but there are some that are not visible because it is too bright down here on the ground.
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...Too bright?
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It is not so bad here since we are in farmland, but the closer you come to the main camp the more difficult it is to see the dimmer stars; it is like being indoors and trying to look up at the sky, but all you see is darkness or a faint glow instead of individual stars, because the light on the ground is stronger than theirs, except the effect is caused by many lights from many windows and streetlamps. There are some cities, I have read, where you cannot see any stars whatsoever.
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Any of them? But there are so many! Lamps can't possibly be brighter than the entire sky.
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Have there always been that many people?
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