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AS A teenager, I read Dennis Overbye鈥檚 history of cosmology, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos. I was fascinated by the stories of now-dead men clashing, sometimes angrily, over measurements of what we would come to call the Hubble-Lema卯tre constant, which measures the rate of expansion of space-time.

Georges Lema卯tre first connected this idea with astronomical observations in 1927, and Edwin Hubble published the idea in English 鈥� along with substantive data to support it 鈥� in 1929. To achieve this, Hubble used the 2.5-metre Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, which was state-of-the-art equipment at the time. Mount Wilson is in California鈥檚 San Gabriel mountains, which are just north-east of where I grew up, east of downtown Los Angeles.

A few weeks ago, I wept while reading from the observatory鈥檚 chairman Sam Hale about a fire that was approaching the facility where Hubble changed how we saw the universe. Hale didn鈥檛 know if the observatory would still exist the next day, as the Bobcat Fire raged through the Angeles National Forest. I had to go to bed knowing I would find out in the morning if the facility and the many LA county TV and radio communications towers nearby had survived.

For the next two weeks, I went through that cycle repeatedly 鈥� bad late-night news about an approaching fire would arrive and an urgent search for webcam footage would ensue. Each time, as I watched the flames nearly lick the observatory, I thought about fire as a natural phenomenon in the universe. Fire is hot gas and sometimes plasma, one of the natural states of matter. Our sun is a large ball of gas and plasma produced by continuous nuclear explosions. The flames of our sun are magnificent and beautiful, so different from the ones that have ravaged California.

At the time of writing, the observatory has made it through the fire, which is now around 60 per cent contained. Yet Bobcat came within 6 metres of its structures. Towards the end of this saga, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial proposing that the observatory is probably going to burn down someday, given the perennial fires that have been worsened by California鈥檚 new normal under climate change. Meanwhile, my mother tells me that the air around LA may not clear up for another month, making it harder for people to breathe and to get a clear view of the night sky.

Until last month, I hadn鈥檛 thought too much about the extent to which fire was going to become a long-term disruption to astronomy. Yet the western US has been covered in fire or smoke for what feels like months now. The climate catastrophe has hurt so many people, and in 2020, it has finally hit astronomy too. Hooker hasn鈥檛 been the world鈥檚 largest telescope since 1949, but it is still a popular destination for non-scientists who love to stargaze, and budding students of astronomy can still make good use of an instrument that size.

鈥淭his year, it sunk in that there is nothing stopping Amazon and SpaceX from blighting low Earth orbit with satellites鈥�

Climate change isn鈥檛 the only human activity that threatens astronomy. This year, it sunk in that there is nothing stopping SpaceX and Amazon from blighting low Earth orbit with their new satellite constellations, forever altering our capacity to see the universe from our planet鈥檚 surface. Facilities like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, where I am a member of the dark matter working group, must now plan to have all of their future images of distant galaxies and other objects disrupted by thousands of satellites that make image analysis much harder.

The day I read Hale鈥檚 letter was the same day it became public that Venus may have life. As I read press coverage of the announcement and wondered whether we would rush to send spacecraft there, I thought about the push to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii despite the objection of many Native Hawaiians, and also NASA鈥檚 recent announcement about plans to mine the moon. We seem to leap from one planet-scaping moment to the next, some that we think we want to happen and others that we are aggrieved by. All of them are products of human hubris.

I don鈥檛 believe in the supernatural, which means I understand that whether the winds blow in a way that helps the fire burn the observatory is somewhat random and in the moment. Fire is a natural and even important occurrence, one that Native Americans knew how to manage far better than the settler colonisers who took over their land. Like colonialism, the fact that the climate is getting warmer and the conditions for fire were so heightened isn鈥檛 an accident. It is a choice that a small group of humans has made on behalf of everyone else over and over again, and it threatens us all.