I quit business school because I realized two things: (1) you can’t major in doomsday prepping, and (2) I had already seen all the warning signs and didn’t need a course in Catastrophe Asset Management™. So, you can imagine my vindication when the government decided to grant a bunch of California techno-fabulists the right to launch humanity’s first orbital flashlight—a satellite mirror so blindingly bright, it might as well spell out THE END IS NIGH in Morse code across the Appalachian foothills every night! What’s the big idea? Reflected sunlight at 2 a.m., beamed from a satellite orbiting just overhead, summoned on demand—like summoning Cthulhu, but with more glare and less existential dread (arguably). They call it Eärendil-1, because of course they named it after a Tolkien elf. Why not? Name next year’s model Mordorbeam-3000 and be done with it! The ringwraiths will handle the product demos, and Gollum’s running QA! The promised benefit? Nighttime for whomst? Not solar panels, apparently—we’re going to vaporize any chance of starlight and sleep, all so some warehouse on the edge of the Mojave can squeeze out four more kilowatt-hours (and incinerate a couple moths who asked for none of this). The company’s pitch deck has an entire slide with a stock photo of a construction worker, beaming at the satellite like it’s the second coming. Get a grip, Todd! That’s not Jesus, it’s a space mirror and it wants to colonize your REM cycle. Here come the arguments: Sure, the people running this satellite say it’s just a test. What they don’t say is: every apocalypse starts as a test. (See: Jurassic Park, every user that downloaded Myspace, and the invention of PowerPoint.) They say it’ll only be up there for a while. That’s what my cousin Dave said about his boat, and we never saw it or him again. Astronomers? Those brave night-watchers of the cosmos? Already on their knees praying for mercy. You think getting photobombed by Elon’s satellites is bad—wait until the mirror comes online and the night sky looks like daytime in Vegas, except no one is winning. Environmentalists have begun digging subterranean bunkers to preserve the last nocturnal animal that isn’t blinded, startled, or stampeded by technolight. The moths are already unionizing. The owls sent a lengthy legal brief (typed in mouse blood—don’t ask). Picture it: soon, with just a click, any billionaire can descend upon the wilds of Minnesota and obliterate darkness, as if the Sun itself owed him a favor. Search-and-rescue? More like Seek-and-Destroy: hope you find your lost hiking party before the searchers are blinded into a crevasse by corporate ambition. Don’t expect us to rescue the stars, though. They’re quitting the galaxy in protest. If this isn’t evidence that we’re living in the footnotes of a dystopian textbook, I don’t know what is. The regulatory people nodded, probably distracted by their own existential crises or solar glare on the windows, and signed off on this fever dream. If anyone asks: I’ll be hiding in the last dark place on Earth (your uncle’s coal cellar), clutching a flashlight, and reading my own rejected comments aloud—"HAVE MERCY! THE NIGHT IS FOR SLEEP!" But go ahead: flip the cosmic light switch. Just remember: the apocalypse always wanted to be well-lit.