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An Enlightened Look at an Over-Lighted World
Saige writes "Every night, as darkness descends, countless street lamps and lights turn on to keep the darkness at bay, bathing countless square feet of the planet in light that sometimes rivals daytime. But has anyone stopped to consider what effect all this light may have on people and animals that have evolved to fit an environment where a significant part of the 24 hour day is spent in lightless conditions? Some scientists have, and they are claiming that all this light is causing numerous problems."
"...a growing body of research suggests that excessive exposure to [artificial] night light can ... even trigger deadly hormonal imbalances in humans."
riiiiight.... That's why everyone that lives in Alaska, north of the arctic circle, dies when they reach puberty. Man, what would life be like without those deadly hormonal imbalances due to excessive light during the summer in Alaska?
Seriously though, I think the bigger problem is from the lack of light! If you go to those same regions (north of the arctic circle), you'll find abnormally high suicide rates during the winter due to depression from the excessive darkness.
Ok, I agree that this is an incredible waste of energy. Lets keep our motives honest though! If we're trying to save money & our environment, then it's a great idea - but don't tell me that excessive light is killing people.
Building houses right on the animals homes is probably a lot worse for them than shining lights during the twilight hours. At midnight in my town we don't have coyotes and mountain lions roaming our streets; they stay out in what wilderness is left. And somehow I think my little wooden box has more to do with it than the light it emits.
First off, the study they use are women working on the night shift. That says more about people working on a night shift, than light exposure, and even if the increase in cancer rates has to do with light, it doesn't apply to most people because, we go home at night and TURN OFF THE LIGHTS. All this ranting about light in public places, well, that's fine and dandy if you're sleeping under a freaking street light near the stadium downtown, but, uh, last I checked, most people go home and sleep in the dark. At night.
This article would apply to the retarded person who works the night shift under artificial light, and then goes home to sleep during the day and neglects to pull the shades down, however.
Yes the night sky is very pretty without the interference of lights. However, in my ordinary day to day existence, driving to work, trying to make a living, I can only imagine the horrible place night would be without artificial light. For one obvious example, driving a car would be impossible without headlights. Second, if you took away artificial light, people would be forced to adapt the work day to the hours of sunlight. Despite daylight savings time, in more northern areas like Washington, it's dark at 9 and dark at 5. So without artificial light, work would have to start at 10 and end at 4. Ain't gonna happen.
So yeah, I agree with you, the night sky sure is pretty, but that ain't worth turning the whole society over. And I do think you'd be able to find a handful of people to go along with a "no light zone" but these are likely going to be the same people who want the cities burned, enjoy weaving pants out of hemp, think a space ship will take them to the next plane, and want men eradicated from the human race etc.
Ah, a perfect opportunity to post a link to my favorite NASA photo! It is a composite image called the Earth at Night. It shows the intensity of man-made light on earth. The brighness level is a facinating combination of population density and economic development.
An interesting feature is the the Nile river on the top right corner of Africa. Each bank of the river is densly populated, beyond that is uninhabitable desert. That makes it an insanely narrow bright white line in the middle of the pitch black desert.
Another interesting feature is North/South Korea. They are just to the left of super-bright Japan. South Korea is a bright square just below North Korea. North Korea is a pitch-black area. The dividing line of bright to dark is like a knife-edge. North Korea is so dark it looks like empty ocean, making South Korea look almost like an island.
North Korea and South Korea have roughly equal population density. The entire difference is due to development. South Korea is quite prosperous while North Korea is suffering famines while they allocate a crushing 30% of their gross national product to supporting the third largest army in the world (China has the largest, USA is second). North Korea says they want to "Liberate".
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
There's nothing 'insightful' about this post, it's simply an ideological diatribe maligning the work of real scientists without offering any kind of factual rebuttal. Several scientists and physicians (including a neuroendocrinologist) made many very specific claims about the effects of light pollution on humans, insects, and plankton. Your rebuttal is 'Yeah... Riiiiight.' I didn't read a single valid counterpoint to any of the claims presented in this article.
You probably don't care about the plankton, insects, and other environmental effects presented, so let's get straight to the human outcomes listed: increased cancer rates among humans; dangerous breathing disorders during sleep; decreased attention during critical events such as driving, etc. Real scientists and clinicians made factual statements about problems they're seeing due to light pollution, and you simply toss it off as 'sensationalism'. Not a factual word about why they're wrong other than the implied 'it can't be'. That is the argument of a ideologue.
You'll notice that the scientists interviewed didn't make policy recommendations, only the city planners interviewed did. You might also notice that none of the city planners recommended shutting off the lights, only a move toward a different kind of city lighting. And, to top it off, they're recommendations save money due to increased energy efficiency. Gee, that's 'sensationalism' for ya.
From a factual standpoint, your argument simply doesn't stand muster. It's pseudoscientific babble based not on scientific study and open debate, but on derision of the scientists for their conclusions; regardless of the data they collected. Your skepticism is poorly placed given the argument you presented. JMO.
--Maynard
Where I live (Saskatchewan, CA) I have watched the transition from white mercury lighting to yellow sodium lighting. At first I was concerned about reduced lighting, security, etc. but in the last two years of living 2 doors down from the street light I have grown to like the sodium lighting better. I should also mention that last summer the city upgraded the lighting in my area by installing more street lights (1 per half block vs 1 per block).
I know find more then adequate lighting on the street without an excess in my backyard due to bleeding from bright white light sources. The new lights seem to have better shielding so as to light the street and not the neighborhood. Also the yellow lights do not provide as much of a distraction, fucus point, or blinding glare as the white lights when driving.
Over all considering factors such as: security lighting, convenience lighting, driving, and yard privacy I have to say that the yellow lower lumen sodium lighting wins out in my mind.
So far as farm yard lighting goes, I can understand wanting to light the yard up more as you have a much larger area to monitor for security purposes. Also we used the yard light on our farm as general lighting when trying to work in the late evening or at night. This is not the case for city street lights as typically each property owner has there own method of lighting their yard for their own purposes.
As a final point on yard lighting, if I am just navigating my yard a night as opposed to working in it I will shut off the outside lights as I can see better (read as: more of the yard but less detail) with the general illumination from other light sources outside my yard (city lights, moon, etc.) then I can by flooding part of my yard with a flood light.
Merlin.
I don't think heat pollution could be a real problem considering all the heat produced by man in a day pales in comparison to what the Sun shines on the earth. (Several orders of magnitude) I don't have the numbers to back my statement up, but I'm pretty sure heat generation is a local consideration, not a global environmental problem.
I would highly doubt it. The figures for the annual heat transport by the atmosphere and oceans is calculated to be in the petawatt range. Even if you could pull out a few hundred terawatts over a year of "waste", that's barely a fraction of a percent change. And a few hundred terawatts is not a negligable amount of power.
-Jellisky
Never? You can't imagine a city-planet like Asimov's Trantor or Star Wars' Coruscant?
Earth's population is still growing exponentially, remember; and assuming a strange future without transhumanism (and virtual space), our bodies will continue to expand outward and upward, including arable land (once we can manufacture food), the poles, and the ocean. Even outer space wouldn't be much of an outlet given that the birthrate would be much higher than the emmigration rate for quite some time.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Because of the way our society works, it would be extremely difficult to test people who have no exposure to light during the non-naturally-lit hours. Almost everyone in America uses artificial lighting. How did you find people to test your theories on?
There are a number of labs in the world that utilize temporal isolation environments to isolate their human subjects for long periods of time (three months has been the limit I think). All temporal cues are eliminated including sunlight, food, clocks, etc... for these subjects so they have no real idea for the time. In these cases, we find that humans run on a nominal 25 hour clock, meaning we tend to drift a little every 24 hour period.
I would guess that you did your studies on other animals, as it would be extremely difficult to regulate someone's lifestyle so that they only had daytime exposure to light.
Animal studies are also performed and they back up the human studies. And, yes, it is difficult in human temporal isolation studies, but quite possible.
do you find it hard to generalize your results to humans, who have specifically evolved tetra-chromatic vision to allow for better light-sight (remember, at one point in our evolutionary line, mammals were mostly nocturnal)?
Most humans are tri-chromic (red, green and blue cones subserving photopic color vision). However, there are a couple cases in the literature of non-human primate and human tetra-chromacy. But these cases appear aberrant, and I do not have references handy, but a simple search on Medline should bring them up. If you are interested in higher dimensionality of vision however, you should check out avians, reptiles and fish who see a much richer world than we could ever hope to perceive due to their much more complex retinal circuitry and spectral detection.
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True, but there are better uses for that power. My parents' water heater only turns on late at night, and then the hot water is stored for the next day. The power company controls this (for a big discount to my parents) to fill in the peak demands. They have in the past had the highest useable for the entire day be at 12:14am, when a lot of the load was this water heating!
That is just one example use for all that power. There are others. Start thinking.
I work in an avian visual cognition lab. :)
Cool. A fellow vision scientist.
we see a very rich world that they cannot as well - the world of figures and space. Humans are extremely good at mapping patterns out of specifics and matching them to previously seen objects and figures. We're very good at detecting relationships.
True, but this is cognition, and that requires cortex which humans have in abundance. I guess I was speaking from retinal and optical perspectives for which humans are relatively recent evolutionarily speaking.
Your post seemed to indicate that you have done such isolation of humans.
I've actually only done one such study for a gene isolation project back when I was doing sleep studies.
was just wondering how *your* lab specifically found that a number of subjects with overexposure to light had significant decline in function.
I am actually a retinal scientist now and my time spent running the sleep lab was a few years ago. However, when I was doing the sleep studies, we were not involved in temporal isolation studies. Rather, we were a clinical lab that specialized in helping folks with sleep disordered breathing, parasomnias, nocturnal epilepsies etc....
If human beings are finding negative consequences in the long term for overexposure to light and light-related activities, why do we continue to persue them?
Money.
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You're very correct that I was, myself, playing on the sensationalist side of things by saying that their thesis was 'death due to too much (any kind of) light.'
FYI, I did read the article completely before posting (Thank you for the RTFA comments).
I agree that my conclusion, that this article is bogus, wasn't well supported with the evidence I posted.
My conclusion came from the facts that:
My conclusion (which is generally accepted by the above comments) is that this article is a giant non-sequitur.
I wrote the parent post far too quickly & I didn't proof-read it to make sure my conclusion was supported by my evidence & that my own evidence was correctly presented. (note to self...)
Just about everyone supported my conclusion, but nobody understood how I arrived at it.
(Why don't more people wear headphones anyways?)
Because many (most?) people enjoy annoying others. The rest seem to positively live for it.
That is why, despite the snide remarks in this thread, idealist utopias usually involve avoiding or eliminating large portions of the population.