Three Speech Assignment

Everyday the [snorts] sun rises, every night it sets and the stars come out. For most of human history, that was the night that we knew. Today though, my generation has grown up in a world where many people rarely get to see the stars at all. Artificial light has transformed the natural night, covering the darkness and obscuring the

stars that once belonged to everybody. I'm extremely lucky. One night I was camping with my friends, these guys, miles away from any city, and we were able to see the Milky Way in its full majesty. We were able to see the stars without the artificial light drowning it out. The night sky was infinitely beautiful.

Standing there, I realized what we had traded away. We had traded diamonds for fool's gold. Today, we're going to look at what light pollution is and how it has changed the night sky, how excessive artificial light affects the environment, and what we can do to preserve the night sky that my generation has grown up without.

First, what exactly is light pollution? Light pollution is the excessive, misdirected, or unnecessary use of artificial light at night. Some of that light shines upwards into the night sky, increase the glow that we see above cities. The brighter the glow becomes, the harder it is to see the stars. Um in a city, many of the stars disappear

completely. But if you travel somewhere far away from artificial light, suddenly the sky is filled with them. Nothing about the universe has changed, but we have simply made the stars harder to see with our over usage of light. Light pollution has changed something that used to be a shared human experience and did make it disappear.