A blog written by Buglife Advocacy and Social Change Manager, David Smith
Deliberately lighting up the night sky with mirrors for solar energy would put all species that rely on the night at risk, destroying the nocturnal ecosystem built on darkness.
At Buglife, we often say that the night is not empty. It is habitat, shelter, a clock and a compass for countless species. Yet light pollution is steadily making true darkness harder to find, threatening wildlife that depends on the natural rhythm of day and night.
Now, proposals from a privately held space technology company in the United States risk taking that threat much further. The company plans to launch satellites fitted with large-scale mirrors to direct sunlight onto the Earth’s surface, regardless of whether it is day or night. Its stated aims are to provide lighting after dark and extend the effective hours of solar energy production.
The night is a map
When the last light fades, a hidden world begins its work. For moths, beetles, spiders and many other invertebrates, darkness is not absence, it is the condition that allows them to feed, shelter, reproduce and move safely through the world.
Walk outside on a warm evening and you might notice small silhouettes moving through hedges, grass and leaf litter. To us, the night can look like a backdrop. To nocturnal wildlife, it is a living set of cues shaped by darkness, moonlight, stars and the natural rhythm of day and night.
When the map gets blurred
Buglife is deeply concerned about the rapid rise of light pollution. Artificial lighting does more than make the night brighter, it can disrupt the cues that govern feeding, sheltering, movement and reproduction. Even subtle changes to darkness can ripple through ecosystems.
Over time, these pressures can contribute to population declines. Because invertebrates support birds, bats, amphibians, plants and whole food webs, the consequences reach far beyond the smallest creatures.
The risk doesn’t stop at lightbulbs
This is why proposals to deploy satellites designed to reflect sunlight onto Earth after dark are so concerning.
Depending on the plan, the aim could be to illuminate areas after dark or provide additional light for solar panels. Either way, the result is the same: changing the conditions of the night itself at a scale far beyond ground-based lighting.
This matters because the nocturnal environment is finely tuned. If species rely on darkness, moonlight and stars to navigate and behave, then artificially shifting those conditions risks rewriting the rules they depend on. Buglife strongly objects to these proposals and is disappointed that they are being progressed without adequate environmental scrutiny.
Wide-ranging impacts, not isolated side effects
Attempts to alter night conditions could have wide-ranging impacts across ecosystems. Light does not land like a harmless layer, it reorganises the environment by altering signals, disrupting rhythms and shifting natural behaviours.
Once populations decline, recovery is not guaranteed. We cannot treat the night as a resource to be exploited without fully accounting for the living systems that depend on it.
Protect the night, before it’s gone
Buglife believes the night should be protected, not further neglected through human exploitation. We work alongside organisations such as DarkSky International and the Royal Astronomical Society to defend the nocturnal environment from shared threats.
This is not only about aesthetics or astronomy. It is about biodiversity, and what happens when we interrupt the conditions that allow ecosystems to function after dark.
The question isn’t whether we can brighten the night. It’s whether we’re willing to protect the living world that has evolved to thrive in it.
The loss of the night is still poorly understood, but decisions being made now could reshape darkness for generations. If you care about wildlife, ecosystems and the future of biodiversity, help make this issue impossible to ignore.
Act now
Share this blog, speak up for natural darkness and support Buglife’s ‘Don’t Neglect The Night’ campaign. Policymakers around the world need to hear that the night is not empty space waiting to be used, it is a living ecosystem that must be protected.
To learn more about the impact of satellites on the night sky and the wider case for preserving natural darkness, visit the websites of our partners, including DarkSky International and the Royal Astronomical Society.
Main image: Credit – F Kamphues, ESOM. Kornmesser. This image shows satellites crossing the night sky over the Atacama Desert in Chile, over a period of just one hour. It is a stack of a time-lapse video taken on 15 October 2025 about two hours after sunset. A few streaks are caused by planes and can be easily identified by their blinking coloured lights, but most trails are due to satellites. In the foreground we see the dome of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world’s largest optical/infrared telescope, currently under construction atop Cerro Armazones. Behind it we see the lasers of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory, 22 km away from the ELT.