I don't agree that these are the only possible states. I think we can still have artificial light for an extra 8 hours, but we can be more responsible with with how we use it. At the moment it seems typical in many places to install lighting without much thought about how it effects others, or how that light finds its way into the sky.

At the micro scale, why does my neighbour have two flood lights in their back yard? They actually have the narrowest lot in the city; it's something like 21 feet across. In effect it's similar to having these lights in _my_ back yard. The neighbour past them also has a large, bright light installed and facing directly at my yard perhaps 30 feet away. Other neighbours nearby have similar lights which don't interfere with my yard so obviously, but certainly inhibit seeing the night sky. The result is that there's one corner of my yard where a telescope isn't flooded with light (even with a shroud), and I'm limited to looking into the sky past trees and buildings. I still enjoy it, but I could have so much more clarity and visible sky without those lights shining in my yard.

At the macro scale, the highways and urban areas around me make little effort to direct light down; it's extremely diffuse in all directions, illuminating the sky directly rather than indirectly. There are thousands of bright signs, street lights, and other sources of light which no one has made an effort to reflect their light downward. Studies show that doing so makes a substantial impact on light pollution, and it should by all means be the law to reduce this pollution like any other, but where I live it appears to be on no one's minds.

I'd also make the case that seeing the night sky is an important activity for human beings, similar to "touching grass" or going on a walk in the woods. It's a primordial thing, part of countless cultures' stories, a source of deep and long-lived questions about our origins (religious or otherwise), and practically an engine of human discovery via sheer inspiration. Do we really want to live without a connection to that? Is it good for our kids to grow up rarely if ever seeing the arms of the Milky Way, Pleiades' glowing gas and dust, or the same of the Orion Nebula?

These asterisms and other cosmic formations are stunning spectacles we're constantly deprived of. They reveal the wonder of the universe and spur our minds. If you live in a polluted city and rarely get to leave though, you're out of luck. How many young bright minds are never hooked by this sense of awe and wonder, and thus, never reach for the sciences? How many people of lower socioeconomic status will literally never witness something as fundamental as the clear night sky?

Similar to being on a mountain in winter at 7am as the sun rises, seeing the sun shine and glow along the ice and snow, seeing an expanse of glaciers, mountains, forest, and a huge open sky – these things are becoming privileges, but they were once integral experiences and part of our connection to the universe and the earth from which we're all made. If you have no religion, at least you could have that.

I don't think everyone needs to have these things to be whole or that they're subhuman for having missed out. I just think so many people would benefit greatly from it, both tangibly and intangibly. The more we disconnect from nature, the more it seems to harm us. The clear night sky is akin to looking into our past, the stellar nursery of where we were all created.

That may not be as practical or useful as 8 hours of artificial light, but I don't care much about more light when it only means another 8 hours of grinding at things I don't feel enriched by or connected with. There needs to be a balance in there somewhere.