I'm from the Netherlands, one of the most light-polluted areas on the planet and had my first proper dark night only in my 30s.
It was in South Africa. We were driving with a roofed jeep on some plains in search of nocturnal wildlife. Then, the driver stopped and told us to get out. It was freezing and he prepared hot chocolate from the back of the car.
He killed his search light and it got so dark that we could not see our own hands. And then we looked up.
Holy shit. I'm not a melodramatic person but this was the first time in my life that I experienced living on a planet, connected to something far greater. I mean, I knew this to be the case, but I never experienced it. Because I normally live under the clouds and a yellow haze.
I experienced it once more in Colombia where I could see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
It's sad that an experience that should be a given has become so rare. I'm especially frustrated with all the lights that have no purpose. Nobody goes to admire the architecture of your church at 3AM at night. Nor do you have to decorate your backyard so excessively with obnoxious lights whilst you are sleeping.
For me this is an argument in support of higher density living and against suburban sprawl. If the distance between the urban artificial environment and an undeveloped “natural” environment beyond the city can be minimised, then there’ll be more opportunities for people to experience things like the above.
Maybe suburbs provide enough clarity of the night sky for most, I’m not sure. Still, the suburbs will never be the natural environment that undeveloped forests or parks could be.
I don’t remember the name but I read a book years ago that was set in a future where humans live in dense cities with everything in between returned to wilderness. I always thought it was a really compelling idea if it were possible.
I've recently spent some time moving around the rural areas around my city and been really bothered by just how flat agriculture has made so much of the land. Sure there are preserved parks and even areas with some form of forest mingled with residential properties.
But the sheer amount of "flattening" and deforestation I "saw" (as it is easy to not notice it if you consider agricultural land normal) built up to a really unpalatable and disturbing feeling.
It was the first time I felt like I had some rational belief that the human population really should be reduced. Without some wonderful energy source that can provide a worthwhile substitute for sunlight, food production is necessarily limited to the top 0.2-1.5m of land (right?). From aesthetic to environmental factors, it really seems like an awful thing to reduce so much of the fertile lands to just that.
This is actually something that’s nice about Japan. The geography somewhat forces this sort of land use with urban areas and agriculture limited to the flat regions between the mountains. It’s clearly not an intentional choice since Japanese development policies will trample over anything feasible, but the mountains effectively protect themselves for the most part.
I put your comment into chatGPT verbatim and it came back with The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson. Any chance that’s the one? I’d be interested in reading it.
I checked the summary and that’s definitely not it. It might have been a short story or essay? I read it in what was supposed to be something like an engineering ethics class I think, but the teacher was more interested in exploring green philosophies. I remember reading a lot of really interesting stories and essays and the ideas from this one stuck with me, but I’ve never been able to find the writing again. My memory is too hazy and I only retained the general idea.
Late to the party, and I dunno if you'll see this, but could it have been E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth? He makes the argument in that book for keeping at least 50% of the land (connected) wild for animal use.
It’s curious the talk of low light suburbs. Not sure how I feel about them. My instinct is that they’re an anti pattern because of the safety concerns and I’m sure many would have the same thought, but I’m sure there’s more nuance to them than that and the sources of actual safety or danger one has in a suburb.
I don't think this works well in terms of safety. If it's a low light area, it's beacon to your location. Only thing that would be worse is lights turning on headed in my direction!
Even if it was a simple car headed down the street, I'd be nothing but paranoid. Great stuff for horror movies though.
You'd still have to drive quite a way out of the cities in most places, suburbs or not. The sky glow is noticeable for miles in places with any humidity.
Dense cities tends to be much brighter than suburbs. I’ve lived on a street with bright LED streetlights and even with blinds down bedrooms was uncomfortably bright at night affecting quality of sleep. Now I live in a place resembling American suburbs and enjoy relatively darkness at night.
I had this same experience when I moved from metropolitan Texas to a high altitude location in the mountains of Colorado. I would take my dog for a walk at 2am and just get stuck staring upward.
The first couple of nights, I was amazed at what I could see, but then I was a bit annoyed about this one strip of clouds that was blocking part of my view across the entire sky. The next night I realized it wasn't a cloud :). "My God, it's full of stars."
Portugal is relatively close to NL, and it has some spectacular sky viewing which isn't too remote from villages or places to stay.
Motion sensors are cheap these days, but for some reason they're still so uncommon. To me, this would be one of the easiest wins. Even if 25% of the lights were tripped at any given time, that would still be a 75% reduction from those residential outdoor lights.
Every now and then someone posts a photograph of the milkyway galaxy with all its colors and glories during a new moon. It's really frustrating to see most of the top comments calling out that it only looks so pretty because of exposure.
In reality if you manage to get to one of the few places left on earth that are truly dark sky places and you catch it during a new moon, the spectacular lights are really not that far off
Unfortunately the vast majority of internet denizens today have never truly experienced a dark sky during a new moon. An experience that just 200 years ago almost every human has had
In dark sky spots in New Zealand, places where you commonly have photographers producing amazing colourful photos, this[0] is what you usually see with the naked eye.
The brightest I've personally seen the Milky Way was at the Atacama desert and it looked like [1].
> It's really frustrating to see most of the top comments calling out that it only looks so pretty because of exposure.
Why? That's actually true.
I've been to many truly dark sky sites. I get out to one at least once a year on average. I've photographed the Milky Way, galaxies, nebulae, you name it. Under dark skies, the milky way is an amazing site. But don't be mistaken: it's still gray in appearance to the naked eye.
Let's look at this in a few different ways:
1) The pupil of the human eye opens to about 7mm (if you're young) under truly dark skies. That is the limiting aperture that determines how many photons strike the retina. The human visual system is optimized to detect motion. The integration time for the image you see in your brain is maybe 1/30th of a second. When I photograph the Milky Way, I use a 14mm f/1.8 lens (that's a 14mm/1.8=7.8mm aperture) with about a 30 second exposure. Those two factors alone put the camera at a (7.8/7)^2 * 30/(1/30) = 1111x higher exposure level. The camera also has ISO levels for further gain.
2) The human eye has two types of receptors: cones and rods. Cones are used for color vision. Rods are used for low light vision. It takes more photons to stimulate a cone than it does a rod. So when you're looking at faint objects, you might not be able to discern their color. The reason people like me seek out dark skies is because the objects we're trying to see are at the limits of detectability and we'll take whatever advantage we can get. Even when viewing through my 4-inch telescope, most objects appear gray. And that's with a (106/7)^2 = 229x light gathering advantage over the naked eye.
3) Have you ever thought about why it's called the Milky Way? It comes from the name given to it by the ancient Greeks. It appeared to them as a streak of milk in the sky (and they didn't have modern light pollution issues). What color is milk?
I live in a civilized country but 45 minutes from the closest highway and far from any city, so I get to enjoy beautiful night skies. But satellites are already polluting it : (
Also, dumb question but: can't satellites be made to not emit any light and to not reflect it?
I remember that when the Starlink satellites first went up and people complained they were too visible, Starlink agreed to make future ones less so. I don't know why they didn't do that to begin with, maybe the metal is shiny by default and it's an extra cost to make it matte? Maybe it's about heat, since a matte object will absorb more from light? At any rate we're in dire need of some regulation around satellite visibility before we lose more of our night sky... oh, and flying drone billboards need to be banned before they catch on.
It's so ironic to have such incredible technology to peer deep into the cosmos, yet on a day-to-day basis we've never been more disconnected from the heavens.
"Nothing to see here, please go back to looking at your Instagram explore feed" \s
I know what you mean, I once spent a week in the Australian outback, in a desert which is considered one of the darkest place on earth.
The sky looked luminescent, I can't describe how insane it looked, it was almost totally purple and I could actually see things moving around, satellites, the space station, meteors, I could clearly make out planets, it was absolutely unbelievable.
I was sleeping in a "swag" and I could just lie there watching it for hours.
HOAs have their downsides, but I do really appreciate one of my CC&Rs: in my ~4 square mile city, we are not allowed to have exterior lights apart from ones to illuminate driveways and patios. Moreover, there are no street lights in the entire city.
It's an oasis of uncorrupted night in the unlikeliest of places: Los Angeles. You can see city lights from certain vantage points, but in most places it is pitch black. Living here feels like perpetual camping. It is wonderful, and it would be stressful for me to return to living in a place with perpetual illumination.
Yikes. Street lighting is one of the most important safety improvements, especially for people walking, as most pedestrian deaths due to drivers occur at night.
Of course, if we weren't so dependent on cars to do literally everything this wouldn't be the case, and we could safely get rid of a lot of street lighting.
Similarly, the installation of public lightening by Colbert in the XVIIIth in Paris, lowered criminality by an order of magnitude.
It also enabled women rights, since, with the ability to somewhat walk securely at night or in the early morning, comes the ability to go to the factory and work somewhere else than in the house.
We’ll need more and more of those studies as we switch off those lights to save energy. If it was possible to VC-fund them, that’s where I would put most if my money.
I appreciate how important it was in the past, but in the era of inexpensive and powerful LED flashlights, streetlights do seem rather redundant and wasteful.
I was under the impressions that street lights promote safety by reducing chances of person to person crime. It’s harder to hide in the shadows and get away without people seeing you with streetlights. So a handheld flashlight doesn’t solve that problem.
The problem is that extremely powerful lights, as many cities are tending to more and more, can actually create more blind spots and makes it harder for our eyes to adjust to those dark spots. If cities adopted more, weaker, warmer lights we'd likely see much less damage to the ecosystem AND increased safety
In typical night conditions, a single Nichia 219-series LED at full drive would temporarily flash-blind someone with just a quarter of a second of exposure.
I know some people think this is a silly question but the answer is, in my experience, yes. That's both in urban and exurban environments, in my experience.
Not usually, but sometimes cars drive too close to the edge of the road, and the road has no sidewalk.
And despite good advice (or simply due to a momentary circumstance), some people walk at night with dark clothing. You can turn a corner a hit a person very easily if they are in any half of your side of the street.
Street lights can also aggravate the problem of safety. Unfortunately most cities seem to believe that more lumens = more safety. But often times this creates more stark dark spots and makes it harder for our eyes to adjust to them
What would really improve safety the most is having more, warmer, weaker lights. One city in the UK ended up taking down their streetlights after some attacks and replacing them with christmas lights strewn across some city trees.
Not only did it look nicer, end up costing less, and was less damaging to the local ecosystem, but it also likely made the area much safer
Another approach is to have personal lighting. I regularly attend an event in one of the darker parts of Colorado where it's considered common courtesy to have a glowy something or other attached to you. There can be collisions even between pedestrians. Nobody gets hurt but it's awkward when it happens so you start to appreciate the extra cues.
I have a family member in Sedona, AZ. There are no street lights there except for a single state highway, and private always-on outdoor lighting is legally restricted to being low, dim, and shaded.
It's pleasant, and I find driving at night there easier because headlights provide more contrast when not everything is illuminated.
I'm just up the road in Flagstaff and the dark skies are absolutely one of my favorite parts of living here. Darkness is an underrated addition to quality of life.
Whereas I find nothing pleasant about my night-time drives through the suburbs of Bellevue. I spend the entire drive paranoid that someone's going to cross the street, and that I won't even see them until they are right in front of me.
Rain, darkness, tree cover, incredibly bright oncoming headlights, poor street lighting, and enough-of-a-walking-culture-that-people-might-be-walking-at-night is a great combination.
I came here to say the same as the sibling comment. Why not slow down? That is what happens in my city: residents drive slowly because they don't want to hit a neighbor.
It depends. If there's a full moon out, I often walk without a light. It's wonderful. Otherwise, I use a headlamp.
> Doesn't this cause issues?
No. I think the main effect is that people finish their walks, bike rides, and so forth before dark. Obviously that's impossible for much of the year for people who work 9 to 5, but given the demographics of this community—small business owners with flexible schedules and retirees—it works for most. In particular, there is one woman from a nearby street who walks past my office window every afternoon: in the winter she walks by at 3, and in the summers she walks by around 6 with her husband.
> getting lost
I don't think this is a realistic concern for those with smart phones. Moreover, the hilly topography and lack of cycles in the road network (barring one) make it very easy to remain oriented.
At night, if there is insufficient moonlight? Yes of course. Street lights only exist in urban areas, if you're walking anywhere else in the world at night, a flashlight seems like a logical choice.
If you have an HOA - you live in an urban area. So I'm not sure what your comment alludes to. If I live in such a place, I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.
> If I live in such a place, I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.
We don't have any sidewalks. People either take trails adjacent to roads or walk on the roads themselves. Everyone is aware that pedestrians and equestrians are first class citizens, so residents drive slowly. That's not true for some delivery drivers and domestic workers, but we find the risk-reward tradeoff reasonable enough to have left the lighting provision in our CC&Rs for the last eighty years. Sometimes, expectations are at odds with the realities of what is tolerable in terms of safety, good for local flora and fauna, and pleasurable for ourselves.
> I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.
There are any number of ways to provide illumination that also mitigates light pollution. This generally means placing metal hats on any external light sources (vertical or horizontal) that effectively pushes the light down and minimizes leakage. The worst offenders in my area are the globular light sources that emit light in all directions.
> Half the month, in really dark places, the moon is sufficient
Came here to say this. Unfortunately, most people in urban environments have no idea. I spent literally decades walking at night in an area with no streetlights. Your eyes adjust to the dark, and anyone who comes along with a flashlight really annoys you.
Edit: I should note, that in all my time doing this, the only time I ever ran into a problem was when a herd of deer came running at me in the darkness. I don’t think a flashlight would have helped.
That's fair. Our only really dangerous snake is a cottonmouth. Even our rattlers and copperheads are mostly nonlethal and nonaggressive.
I was limbing a tree in the pasture, looked down after dropping a limb and a copperhead was just sitting next to my foot. Wasn't ready to strike, just watching me like dudes come out with chainsaws and cut trees next to him on the daily.
It depends on the time of year, the temperature, the area, and the time of night. I used to wander about in the country as a kid by moonlight in certain areas/times/etc, but I knew it was basically safe. Other times it would’ve been literal suicide.
I don’t think any snake is genuinely “aggressive”, but most will bite if you step on them. It’s one of those funny things about moonlight; you can see, but you can’t see detail.
The rattlers around here could fuck you up, particularly if you can't get medical attention within a few hours because you're disabled on the ground alone at night. But fortunately, rattlers rattle (usually) so the snakes actually help people avoid this sort of accident.
Unfortunately, may people kill rattlesnakes when they become aware of them, which is usually after the snake started rattling. So there is now a selective pressure on rattlesnakes to stop rattling. Very misguided.
In my limited experience, streetlights encourage snakes. streetlights bring insects, insects bring birds, birds bring snakes. The snakes are not always under the light but in the trees around the area.
But even with streetlights, you are absolutely right, always bring a torch. Ive seen a snake get stepped on, but fortunately have never done it myself.
When you look at those darkness maps where I live is about as dark as the darkest places in the USA. For us the moon is the real light pollution. Accidentally look at the moon directly and your night vision is shot for a few minutes.
On a more serious note, it’s pretty common for UK roads to lack street lights. Particularly in more rural areas. The majority of my drive home from work is unlit.
I live in a small village with no streetlights, and lovely views of the stars. It is very dark here at night, was a real shock coming from the town, I used to walk around where I was previously, that was not well lit but the amount of ambient light was actually quite high. Very different here.
I find a flashlight and a small pocket knife are essential every day carry. It's a quality of life issue for me, I want to be able to examine something at any time of day, plus street lights are intermittent and I walk a lot. I live in Oakland, a major city, but still insist on turning on a flashlight when I cross the street. People don't pay enough attention.
I walk through my neighborhood at night, and some houses have streetside lights, but most do not. I always bring a flashlight but typically don't use it. I do teach my kids they have to be very careful of cars, because they are too short to be seen.
I'm fond of warm, yellow hues for indoor spaces. If I were forced to choose a color for outdoor lighting, I would go for the same. However, white vs. yellow has already played out in some areas: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-09-30-mn-40657-...
why completly ban the exterior lights when restricting the type, direction and power of the lights is enought to qualify for a region to be designated as a IDSR by the International Dark sky Association. For pratical exterior lighting tips approuved by the IDA this page is a good resource : https://en.cieletoilemontmegantic.org/citoyens
I think the LA area’s low street light density is partially because things are so spread out that it wouldn’t be worth it. You probably still have too much light to see things like the Milky Way.
And I gotta say anecdotally, one of my top-10 most stressful driving experiences was trying to navigate Gardena at night, because they not only have few streetlights, but seem to use ineffective reflective strips as well.
It's still LA, where driving is war between the insane, the jerk, and the insane jerk.
And earthquakes, forest fires, fresh water insecurity, neglect of the unhoused, and people who wouldn't get the South Park episode about the pretense of a personal brand.
If I were inclined to rob houses, I would find the challenge and risk of robbing houses here quite interesting. Apart from the fact that all roads in go through manned gates, this is the most republican city in SoCal. In translation: most of us have a lot of guns.
I recently got into astronomy with my kids and it has been particularly eye-opening how severe light pollution is.
It's very strange to be in a relatively dim city (Victoria, BC) and not being able to see things it seems like I should be able to see. I know their apparent size in the sky and that my scope can magnify them enough to physically see them, but not enough light is coming through to out-shine the atmosphere above me.
It's a bit unsettling to imagine how bad it is in large cities. There must be so many things in the sky that people can't see with the naked eye that I take for granted. And yet, there are so many things I can't see either.
The more I learn to appreciate the night sky, the more it saddens me. I'm both eager and a bit anxious to see a truly dark night sky; I'll both become more aware of how bad the pollution really is, yet I'll get to see space even better than before.
I had the same experience with the ocean. Visiting places rich with life, such as protected area which have had plenty of time to recover, reveals just how barren and burdened the ocean is right outside my home. Fewer plants and animals, less diversity, more sediments from industry/runoff/sewage treatment, etc. What a crazy thing to do to such crucial and beautiful things we depend on.
I moved near to a dark sky reserve and we now experience an amazing night sky. We have to be a bit more careful with our own lights but it's been very worth the effort.
Besides not being able to see stars in the night sky, what other loss is there? Artificial light seems a worthy tradeoff for being able to function for 8 additional hours a day.
I don't agree that these are the only possible states. I think we can still have artificial light for an extra 8 hours, but we can be more responsible with with how we use it. At the moment it seems typical in many places to install lighting without much thought about how it effects others, or how that light finds its way into the sky.
At the micro scale, why does my neighbour have two flood lights in their back yard? They actually have the narrowest lot in the city; it's something like 21 feet across. In effect it's similar to having these lights in _my_ back yard. The neighbour past them also has a large, bright light installed and facing directly at my yard perhaps 30 feet away. Other neighbours nearby have similar lights which don't interfere with my yard so obviously, but certainly inhibit seeing the night sky. The result is that there's one corner of my yard where a telescope isn't flooded with light (even with a shroud), and I'm limited to looking into the sky past trees and buildings. I still enjoy it, but I could have so much more clarity and visible sky without those lights shining in my yard.
At the macro scale, the highways and urban areas around me make little effort to direct light down; it's extremely diffuse in all directions, illuminating the sky directly rather than indirectly. There are thousands of bright signs, street lights, and other sources of light which no one has made an effort to reflect their light downward. Studies show that doing so makes a substantial impact on light pollution, and it should by all means be the law to reduce this pollution like any other, but where I live it appears to be on no one's minds.
I'd also make the case that seeing the night sky is an important activity for human beings, similar to "touching grass" or going on a walk in the woods. It's a primordial thing, part of countless cultures' stories, a source of deep and long-lived questions about our origins (religious or otherwise), and practically an engine of human discovery via sheer inspiration. Do we really want to live without a connection to that? Is it good for our kids to grow up rarely if ever seeing the arms of the Milky Way, Pleiades' glowing gas and dust, or the same of the Orion Nebula?
These asterisms and other cosmic formations are stunning spectacles we're constantly deprived of. They reveal the wonder of the universe and spur our minds. If you live in a polluted city and rarely get to leave though, you're out of luck. How many young bright minds are never hooked by this sense of awe and wonder, and thus, never reach for the sciences? How many people of lower socioeconomic status will literally never witness something as fundamental as the clear night sky?
Similar to being on a mountain in winter at 7am as the sun rises, seeing the sun shine and glow along the ice and snow, seeing an expanse of glaciers, mountains, forest, and a huge open sky – these things are becoming privileges, but they were once integral experiences and part of our connection to the universe and the earth from which we're all made. If you have no religion, at least you could have that.
I don't think everyone needs to have these things to be whole or that they're subhuman for having missed out. I just think so many people would benefit greatly from it, both tangibly and intangibly. The more we disconnect from nature, the more it seems to harm us. The clear night sky is akin to looking into our past, the stellar nursery of where we were all created.
That may not be as practical or useful as 8 hours of artificial light, but I don't care much about more light when it only means another 8 hours of grinding at things I don't feel enriched by or connected with. There needs to be a balance in there somewhere.
Light pollution is an interesting "gateway drug" to broader environmental awareness. With coordinated effort, the effects and benefits can be witnessed immediately. A broad power outage in NYC in 1977 resulted in the Milky Way being visible from the Bronx: https://www.space.com/16577-milky-way-galaxy-nyc-blackout.ht...
Light pollution seems like the least important from of pollution imo. We currently have cars all over the place spewing out extremely dangerous carcinogens in the air killing a large number of people. I just can't bring myself to care about seeing some stars when we are killing people and animals, poisoning the dirt, and warming the planet irreversibly.
Other forms of pollution are worse, but light pollution does harm animals. When baby turtles hatch they instinctively look for bright lights lower on the horizon and go towards it. Because naturally, that will be the moon reflecting off the ocean. Bright beachfront buildings are even brighter than the reflection of the moon leading them to wander away from the ocean
Moths and frogs are also attracted to lights. Migratory birds rely on seasonal cues such as changes in the amount of light. The OP article also mentions in the intro that it is reducing bat populations in areas.
No doubt there are some benefits to reducing light pollution, but I find it interesting how this topic gets HN in almost universal agreement that we need to ban street lighting and mandate people turn their home and office lights off, while suggesting that maybe we do something to slow the trend of mega SUVs or maybe mandating particulate filters on diesel vehicles is some kind of horrific authoritarian overreach.
Within the last five years, my street got much brighter, from one relatively dim streetlight in the middle of the block to multiple much brighter poles. I don't think we had a safety issue before, but many people prefer it this way, saying they feel safer. (Safer than what?)
I think we have to accept that we poison everywhere we live, and strive to concentrate ourselves in a small enough area that the planet can tolerate us. Of course, there's a chance we're poising ourselves as well, and the lack of outside darkness has some effect on us, but certainly on my block that's a minority concern.
The "feels safer" is an interesting argument. From what studies I could find the more light has the opposite impact on safety. IE: The more light at night the less safe you actually are/more crimes occur.
Motion sensing lights outside my house certainly did nothing to improve safety for me, for the barest extra convenience of not having to remember to turn the porch light on before leaving when expecting to come back after dark.
They were likely detrimental, especially when considering the extra paranoia when I'm sitting there stoned trying to watch a movie and the light keeps ticking on outside. I got fed up with it and unscrewed the bulbs enough to not turn on, and so far my landlord hasn't complained about me doing so.
The owner of my building has installed flood lights that are on all night and effectively remove any darkness from the outside. The main reason given was for safety, despite there never being a safety issue, and trying to convince them that the opposite is true has been difficult, to say the least.
this is typical of a lot of urban property in the USA. Yet as a child I remember many kinds of bugs, crawling and flying. Now there are literally none when I look for them, on several occasions. Bird population is low, too.
It could be that they experienced a lawsuit where not having sufficient lighting or having unlit areas where people can be expected to walk resulted in an injury, and they or the insurance company had to cough up some money.
When those kinds of lawsuits happen, everyone goes into cover your ass mode.
It's not law suit related because it's a really small building and we would know if another tenant had an issue of that scale. It could be insurance related, but I doubt it. The unfortunate reality is he's just an awful person. There are very easy and cheap ways to make it so the lights don't shine directly into people's windows he just doesn't care (we've asked).
Could you link them? That's an interesting conclusion. Is there any correlation drawn, or even speculation as to the cause for this? Perhaps criminals need some light as flashlights draw too much attention?
> "I think we have to accept that we poison everywhere we live, and strive to concentrate ourselves in a small enough area that the planet can tolerate us."
That may be true in a broader sense, but I think when it comes to outdoor lighting, it's a matter of changing the current prevailing policies that a lot of people don't like even if they're acting purely from selfish motives. I think the problem is that whenever you get a disagreement between someone who wants it dark so they can sleep and see the stars and someone who wants more light because they're afraid of crime or getting run over by a car at night, the latter almost always win.
There's some logic to that -- if someone's house gets robbed or you have a car accident the consequences are immediate and verifiable. If it happens a lot there'll be clear statistical trends. Whereas if someone can't sleep as well it's kind of a vague complaint that can be ignored, because the impact is spread out over the whole population and you can't really measure it. Everyone's lives are just a little bit worse and most people wouldn't even realize it or be able to recognize or articulate why. If you're a risk-averse mayor or president of the local HOA, of course you'd approve more lights, unless there's an organized effort to prioritize reducing light pollution.
They were being transitioned out during my university years. First year all the lights on campus were that cool, single frequency yellow, by senior year there was just one, stuck in a lonely corner of campus, buzzing it's familiar call. I think the single emission spectra was a big part of the appeal. The complete lack of color left things somewhat eerie, but in a distinctly nonthreatening way. Just an alien peace.
Those were the next best thing to darkness: a color tone that we mentally associated with nighttime. I don't know whether or not they neurologically messed with our circadian rhythm, but at least psychologically it was a cue that it was late and "dark outside."
I agree, and I think society is beginning to wake up to this as suburbanism falls out of fashion. We structurally cannot all live in idyllic rural settings and conveniently be near urban centers.
We also have to acknowledge that human population is highest it's ever been and there needs thus increasing reasons and motivations to damage and poison this planet and harm the lives of every other specie just trying to survive.
I currently live in the US. Back in India where I am originally from, we have house roof tops which are flat. Most of us would spend an hour or more on the roof top, after dinner, staring at the sky and talking. Sometimes we wave and talk to the neighbor from the roof top. This I would say is a routine thing in most households after dinner. I miss that dearly in the US.
I grew up in a rural area where most people opted out of the light that the electric company installed for every customer who got service. Whenever I visited a city it infuriated me to see tens of thousands of lights and my parents would explain the 'safety' issue and that it prevented thefts. Nine year old me could only think, "well if people are gonna steal, why not spend the money you use on that electricity to buy them homes and maybe they won't want to steal..."
> This Scottish Dark Sky Town Decided To Go Even DarkerÜ
> Moffat’s annual experiment in switching off artificial lighting has had unexpected results.
Below the article there are links to some other articles about similar places, for example "Fredericksburg is one of Texas’ newest Dark Sky Communities, which makes stargazing here out of this world." -- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-to-find-dark-ski...
They also have an.. unusual "Courses" section for online courses.
Are there any hard facts and clear causations why this is a bad thing? I've been hearing about it for years, but have yet to see evidence why it would be.
Correlation comes much much earlier in understanding effects, especially complex large scale long term ones like this. If we always wait for concrete undeniable proof, we will never avoid harmful choices, but only understand them after the fact.
And correlations are not orthogonal to causations. They can be spurious, but often they are not. Categorically dismissing correlations is as naive as categorically accepting them. The distinction you're making is more a type I error vs type II error. Which is a valid orientation but doesn't put you on the higher intellectual plane the tone of your comment is trying to claim.
I live in one of the darkest locations in the USA. We are nearly tied with some places out west in the desert. Still have not gotten over the night sky. You spend enough years out here seeing it every night, expecting it to eventually be something you take for granted, and then realize why so many ancient peoples were fascinated and in love with the stars.
Can I ask where you're at? I'm a certified teacher, and since it's math/physics I can easily transfer it to any other state. Really debating moving somewhere dark if I move back to America, just so I can have the sky.
". . . as their rhodopsin becomes superfluous, they may well create descendants who, in even middling darkness, are as blind as, it turns out, bats are not . . ."
To say that there is a link between continued usage and inheritance of a genetic characteristic is Lamarckism.
Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime.
Although I'm a white American, I attended high school in the Himalayan foothills of India. One time, when I was 17, we went on a camping trip and slept out under the stars, miles from the middle of nowhere, at an elevation of probably 9,000 feet. It was 1992. I remember lying in my sleeping bag on some hillside, looking up at the Milky Way, and then a meteor shower happened and I saw a dozen shooting stars. I only vaguely understood then what a mystical experience I was having.
I feel stuff like this makes us less and less aware of our journey and existence and curiosity, modern life with the electrification of light, whether our tablets or TVs, and our skies, we are being put more and more into a bubble where we just do rather than question. Covered by maya (illusion), imagine our ancestors sky gazing and being able to daily see the cosmos.
The International Dark-Sky Association is a really great resource if you're interested in taking more action, like using dark-sky friendly lighting in your home/business/hoa
It was in South Africa. We were driving with a roofed jeep on some plains in search of nocturnal wildlife. Then, the driver stopped and told us to get out. It was freezing and he prepared hot chocolate from the back of the car.
He killed his search light and it got so dark that we could not see our own hands. And then we looked up.
Holy shit. I'm not a melodramatic person but this was the first time in my life that I experienced living on a planet, connected to something far greater. I mean, I knew this to be the case, but I never experienced it. Because I normally live under the clouds and a yellow haze.
I experienced it once more in Colombia where I could see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
It's sad that an experience that should be a given has become so rare. I'm especially frustrated with all the lights that have no purpose. Nobody goes to admire the architecture of your church at 3AM at night. Nor do you have to decorate your backyard so excessively with obnoxious lights whilst you are sleeping.