Why it is so important to protect access to the dark night sky

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

THANKS to my book release, I have been giving a lot of talks about which means I get the opportunity to introduce people to the cosmological timeline and what we know about it.

On an early slide in these talks, I introduce an important before and after: there’s the universe before light starts travelling freely through and then there’s after. This shift happens at about 380,000 years after the big bang (or whatever came before), when, for the first time, the universe is transparent to light. Before this, the universe is full of what I jokingly call a plasma …