Who owns the night: warm-up · Grade 12

The passage and its 4 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• Ask who owns the ocean and you will get a complicated answer involving treaties, territorial waters and fishing rights. Ask who owns the night sky and most people will laugh. No one owns it, surely. It is simply there, as it has been for every generation of humans who ever lifted their eyes. But "simply there" is no longer quite true, and the joke conceals a decision we are making without noticing that we are making it.
• Two changes are reshaping the sky. The first is light. Streetlights, signs and buildings spill so much glow upward that, by one widely cited estimate, roughly a third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way from home. The second is traffic. Thousands of satellites now circle the planet, with tens of thousands more proposed, and each one reflects sunlight as it passes. Astronomers increasingly find bright streaks scored across long-exposure images, like scratches on a lens.
• None of this is villainy. Lights make streets safer; satellites carry internet signals to remote schools and help forecast storms. A fair argument must grant these benefits fully. The question is not whether we should use the sky, but whether anyone should use it up.
• For most of human history, the night sky was a shared library. Polynesian navigators read it to cross thousands of miles of open Pacific. Aboriginal Australians traced an emu in the dark dust lanes of the Milky Way. Farmers timed planting by the rising of particular stars. A child anywhere could look up and see roughly what an ancient astronomer saw. That inheritance belongs to no company and no nation. It belongs, if to anyone, to the future.
• We already accept that some shared things must be protected because no single user feels responsible for them: clean air, fisheries, quiet in a hospital ward. The sky deserves to join that list. Shielded streetlights that point downward cost little and waste less energy. Satellites can be designed to reflect less light, and launch licenses could require it. These are not radical demands. They are the ordinary manners of a crowded planet.
• The darkness above us was here long before the first eyes looked up, and it has faded in a single century. We should decide, deliberately, how much of it to keep.
• 1. What is the writer's central claim, and what practical steps does the writer propose?
• 2. Why does the writer begin by comparing the night sky to the ocean?
• 3. In paragraph 3, the writer distinguishes 'use the sky' from 'use it up.' Explain the difference and why the wording is effective.
• 4. Identify an assumption the author makes and discuss whether it holds.