the question as to what sources of light in the sky are valuable and what are pollution is turned on it's head by the fallacy of naturalism. the light that comes to us from stars is in many cases billions or trillions of years old. it provides us with absolutely no useful information about the current existence of the universe, as those stars are long dead, and whatever exists in the space those stars were once in has no connection to what is there now, in whatever dubious way you're defining space at all. you could never go to those stars. the light they throw into our atmosphere has no utility to anyone or anything and should in truth be rightfully thought of as pollution; if we could clean all the starlight out of the sky, it would allow us to see our direct neighbourhood more clearly. all that the light from these long dead galaxies is really doing is blocking the closest planets out.

but it's not like the mirror eats the light or something. it's not a black hole. that light is still there. you can put a telescope on the moon, or in orbit, you just can't look into the sky from your bedroom. but that's an utterly middle class concern. who gives a fuck.

i might take a position that astronomy isn't going to be very valuable to humans in the near future, until we colonize the area around us. we should be focusing on blocking out the distant past from the night sky and honing in on the areas directly around us, for now. there's not much that we can learn right now, and we have enough data to sort through to last us for centuries anyways.

the applications of the mirrors are more valuable than bourgeois concerns about light pollution, which are in truth backwards anyways. the stars are the ones polluting the sky; let's clean it up by getting rid of the stars.