A Blindingly Bright, Unlucky, Underground Adventure in Las Vegas

Las Vegas is the city that never sleeps—unless it’s taking a power nap between poker games. It’s where dreams are made, fortunes are lost, and neon signs are so bright they could guide an alien spaceship to the nearest all-you-can-eat buffet.

Las Vegas is the Entertainment Capital of the World, a neon-drenched oasis of indulgence in the Nevada desert. But after the sun sets and the Strip’s dazzling light displays take center stage, Sin City takes on an even more peculiar glow – literally becoming the brightest place on planet Earth.

The iconic Las Vegas Strip packs an astonishing amount of illumination into its relatively small 7 km stretch of road. Some 30 gargantuan casino resorts and hotels line the boulevard, each more ostentatiously bedazzled than the last in a perpetual game of can-you-top-this luminous one-upmanship. From Las Vegas’s shimmering glass Eiffel Tower replica to the blazing volcanic eruptions at The Mirage, it’s a cavalcade of incandescent excess visible from space. 

The light emitted from the Strip is so extraordinarily bright that it outshines every other metropolitan area globally, including Hong Kong, which is considered the world’s brightest city. Vegas’s luminescent glow is so potent that people hiking nearby mountains have reported being able to read books at night just because of the ambient radiance.

Even astronauts have commented on the Strip’s visibility as one of the brightest clusters of illuminated civilization on the entire planet’s surface when viewed from orbit.