In 2016, when the team updated their atlas, they found that the problem was even worse. By then, around 83 percent of people—and more than 99 percent of Americans and Europeans—were living under light-polluted skies. Every year, the proportion of the planet covered by artificial light gets 2 percent bigger and 2 percent brighter. A luminous fog now smothers a quarter of Earth’s surface and is thick enough in many places to blot out the stars. Over a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way.
