Talk:Artificial structures visible from space

Article
There are dozens of identical Google hits on "objects visible from space", but nothing that really clarifies the issue.

What our readers want to know is whether they might see anything manmade from a spaceship or from the moon - without binoculars or camera.

The answer is that they can see city lights at night, of course, from earth orbit, but I'm not sure about seeing these from the Moon.

During the daytime, many web pages say that you can see highways, dams, and cities. How about oil spills? --Uncle Ed (talk) 17:34, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

There is also the 'trick question' answer - the landing stages of the Apollo landers and various other moon probes could be taken as 'man-made structures visible from the moon'. Should the article mention this as a possible trick question? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.88.190.199 (talk) 12:44, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Move request taken down
I've removed the move request that was on this talk page, because it wasn't properly formed, and it seems that we need to see what the outcome of the deletion discussion will be. If a decision is made there to keep the article but change its title, then that can be done without going through requested moves. In fact, there's very little reason to put the suggested move through that process. You can just move the page. -GTBacchus(talk) 17:40, 12 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I moved the article from Objects visible from space to Man-made structures visible from space for two reasons:

When I created the article, I concerned only with man-made objects like the Great Wall of China. Also, "objects" is too broad, it could refer to anything like even astronomical objects. --Uncle Ed (talk) 17:38, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Perspective
One photograph of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is arguably too much - are people likely directed to the page by a link about the Great Wall of China really after a photograph of pollution? It certainly isn't a man-made structure. Two photographs are certainly too much. At least one of these pictures needs removing, and replacing with one or two examples of structures or settlements visible from orbit. To have it so heavily focused on the oil spill is topical, rather than encyclopedic. Jdhowens90 (talk) 14:48, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, I disagree, it is not a case of undue weight. Virtually every description of the spill for the first few days, said something along the lines of "It is visible from outer space." Go ahead, Google it. Bearian (talk) 21:22, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, I agree. Apart from the previously mentioned reasons, what do two photographs of the same thing convey that only one doesn't? Go ahead, use some Common Sense. Also, this visible phenomenon is relatively temporary, certainly in comparison to the Great Wall. OmikronWeapon

Popular culture and urban legends
I moved the third paragraph down, because I think the standard on the pop culture angle is to place it after all the serious stuff. I also took out the urban legends cat, because this topic of this article is not the yeti or alligators in a city sewer. --Uncle Ed (talk) 17:12, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:List of man-made disasters which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RM bot 01:45, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Distance conventions
In the opening section many different distances from earth are listed. In the first part of the section the distances are listed with Kilometers first followed by Miles in parenthesis. However, later in that opening section this is flipped with Miles listed first followed by Kilometers in parenthesis. Could there be some convention that is stuck to rather than flip flopping back and forth? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.163.170.33 (talk) 11:48, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

Dutch polders
Shouldn't the polders in the Netherlands be included between the man made structures visible from space?
 * I second that--93.56.59.62 (talk) 17:57, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree as well --RhoOphuichi (talk) 00:21, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Artificial borders
While maybe "The naked eye can tell the difference between cities and countryside from space", the border between them is often hard to discern. For a clearly artificial border region of differing land use there's the boundary of New Zealand's Egmont National Park. (Bonus points: spot the urban regions.)

Great Wall of China
It is unclear here if the word "factoid" is to mean a "random fact" or "a myth commonly associated as fact". It is NOT true that one can see the Great Wall of China from space and this section should be edited to better reflect this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.123.253.142 (talk) 18:54, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

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Rename to Artificial structures...?
In the interests of more gender-neutral language, I propose moving this article to Artificial structures visible from space. The current name would remain as a redirect. For those interested: What do people think? M.boli (talk) 15:46, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I think artificial would qualify as common usage. An objection voiced in wikipedia discussion to the locution human-made is that it isn't common usage. But I think artificial qualifies.
 * The term is aging out of the language. Checking Google n-grams, linguistic popularity of man-made peaked in 1974. By 2008 (the most recent data) usage fell by 35%.
 * Man-made (with and w/o hyphen combined) dropped to 2.31e-6 from 3.53e-6. (n-gram man-made)
 * Human-made (with and w/o hyphen) has surged since the 1970's, but it is still at 0.25e-6. (n-gram search on human-made)


 * That is an excellent idea. The culture has already changed with respect to this issue. For example, some other style guides, such as the APA Style Manual, have already changed their policies. Wikipedia has a woman problem - why not do the little things we can to help fix it? -- Chelmian (talk) 23:30, 28 January 2019 (UTC)