As civilization grows, it will grow into space. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear about what that means for an dramatically higher number of manmade objects surrounding earth, with some truly absurd visualizations circulating.

In order to try and help us all wrap our arms around that conversation, I came up with the idea of the Taylor Occlusion Index, or the TOI. The TOI is the total present amount of sky occlusion by manmade objects in earth orbit. The unit is Moons. As of writing, we are at a TOI of .046; meaning, if you moved all of the satellites directly above your head and packed them with zero gaps, the size would appear to be 4.6% of the size of the moon. I think it is important for us to increase this number as a civilized people. We can go very high; 10 Moons or more.

So, with some very heavy help of Claude, I made a live dashboard which updates this number every month. Check it out: 

I hope that over the course of my life this will grow significantly.