At nightfall, after the day's final scenes of flamingo sunbeams fade to black, he peers up at the sky to watch space rocks swimming along our solar system's gravitational tides.

Last year, Santana-Ros, a planetary scientist at the University of Alicante in Spain, sprang into action when astronomers realized an asteroid named 2022 WJ1 was headed straight for the border of Canada and the US.

Meanwhile, scientists are trying to learn how to shelter endangered animals left without homes because deforestation has ruined wildlife habitats, as well as how to deal with cyclones tearing apart coastal villages.

Along with her advisors, Caroline Haslebacher, a doctoral student at the University of Bern in Switzerland and lead author of the recent study, realized no one had really looked into how climate change will affect astronomical observations, though Santana-Ros' experience is evidence that damage is already being done.

The team modeled what would happen to those eight telescope subjects as the globe heats up, eventually suggesting we'll see an increase in what's known as specific humidity and precipitable water vapor in the coming years.

At that point, the only link we'd have left to the stars would be our space-borne machines: the Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble – chunks of metal floating above a ravaged Earth, witnesses to humanity's exit from the natural world.