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Chronic semi-permanent light at night (street lights, signage, lights from businesses like hotels, porch lights, and notably NOT car lights or other transitory light) is generally unpleasant right? I feel like at best it's an annoyance, and at worst, it's something messing with biologicial cycles.

Are there any interesting innovations out there addressing this? Like motion strengthened* street lights? I would be tickled pink to have a Navi-esque drone lighting up my way when I need it rather than having everything lit all the time.

*edited from "activated"

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A hotel nearby replaced all their exterior lighting (several hundred CFLs) with omni-directional LED clusters ~ 6000K. They make the place look like a prison courtyard, and they are painful to walk near after dark (too bright, too harsh).

I would think, that as a species we'd all recognize the color temperature of a nice campfire to be comforting and likeable, but I'm honestly surprised some people like these 6000K+ LEDs.

I've noticed similar unpleasant changes. I would guess cost is the driver as opposed to aesthetic or physiological preference, but I bet/hope new innovations will make the healthier and prettier solutions financially viable.

Those 6K LEDs are super cheap, which is really unfortunate, because they are terrible for both animals and humans.

I think a lot of it is down to people being clueless about what colour temperatures mean and what should be used in what location. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people assume "higher is better".

You also need to consider outdoor lighting such as sodium vapor lamps have much lower colour temperatures of around 1700K, where as off-the-shelf LED bulbs only go as low as 2500K.

> You also need to consider outdoor lighting such as sodium vapor lamps have much lower colour temperatures of around 1700K, where as off-the-shelf LED bulbs only go as low as 2500K.

I adore sodium vapor lamps. I realize they aren't as "bright" at night, and some people prefer that (largely for safety), but the old lights aren't just romantic - they're less offensive to our senses. They aren't nearly as distracting or, quite frankly, ugly. I feel like modern LED lights are ruining entire cities with their blue glow.

I love sodium vapor lights. I find it to be a very pleasing monochromatic glow that makes me excited be walking around town after dark. I think I especially came to be aware of them as in college my campus had them, and it made for some fantastic night photography around the school.

My dream would be to have some type of consumer version of them, I would love to put them in my exterior lights, but that doesn't really seem to be a thing....

You can totally get sodium vapor lamps on amazon. They are popular as grow lamps. A quick search bough up listings for both high and low pressure sodium lamps, and ballasts

I really don't like LED lights. Even compared to fluorescents, which are pretty horrible. They replaced all the fluorescent lights at my work a while back with LED's and for the first month all my coworker's were complaining about sore eyes and headaches, they hurt my eyes, they're hard to look at, they even mess with calibrating the lasers on our machines. It's been more difficult since the bulbs were changed. Sometimes the laser doesn't read the calibration lens properly. This didn't happen before.

Probably shitty LED bulbs with poor drive circuitry. Eye strain is usually caused by flicker, which often comes from bulbs that use PWM (cheap dimmable bulbs) or don’t have large enough capacitors (or any at all and just rely on a diode and resistor to manage voltage, so you end up suffering from 50/60hz flicker, frequently half wave rectified making it even worse).

City streets look nicer under higher temperature light. This can be easily experienced by walking from a sodium lamp street to a 4000K LED one to a 6000K one, since even today very few cities are completely converted to LEDs.

There are reasons to use low temperature lamps, but aesthetics is not one of them.

Have you tried f.lux (or equivalent built in blue light filter on your devices)?

I remember one evening where friends didn't get the point of f.lux, until we switched it off as a demonstration, and they went "aargh, put it back! Put it back!"

Not having it on my phone actually led me to buying $1 orange goggles, and eventually a newer phone with a real blue light filter.

Also, do you find sunsets aesthetic? Twilight is the natural blue light filter.

Low-pressure sodium lights are almost single-wavelength amber. They have a negative color rendering index, while incandescents and sunlight are 100, and most white LEDs are around 70. LEDs can be had in the high 90s at a cost to efficiency.

LED and CFL screw-in bulbs for household lighting come in a variety of color temperatures, but people usually go for 2700K-3000K. It does seem to me that people prefer warmer light for many applications.

My preference for always-on outdoor lighting is none, followed by dim, warm, and shrouded.

Motion activated lights would be far more distracting. It's easy to become accustomed to a constant lighting, but if lights were going on and off every 1-2 hours through the night, it would be unnerving for anyone triggering them or positioned to see the light.

The innovation is living in the countryside on your own land or vacationing in those areas. Being away from people and their lights is a privilege, especially when lights improve safety.

I don't think the bright lighting which is rampant in cities improves safety in general, (most) people are perfectly able to see in the dark, and city lights merely make it (because of interfering with the adaptation of the eyes) impossible to see in the spots left without lighting.

True to your first point, but a compromise like having lights be dim and having them increase to full brightness for approaching traffic may help.

Selective darkness is certainly a luxury, but there's no reason we can't innovate away our currently clumsy solutions.

Reading through this sub-thread I was struck by the image of an artificial, permanent "full moon": the closest thing we could get to natural light at night.

But I reckon having it be full moon all the time would cause problems of its own. I have difficulty sleeping when the moon is full, I'm full of energy.

I read this is because of an energy boost (moon and mania share the same root) for hunting, that humans used to hunt in the moonlight.

I think you mean "lunar" and "lunacy."

> Chronic semi-permanent light at night (street lights, signage, lights from businesses like hotels, porch lights, and notably NOT car lights or other transitory light) is generally unpleasant right?

Maybe it's cultural but I generally like those sort of lights at night. If it bothers me at home, I just close the curtains.

I'm not sure if the preference is cultural or more variable from person to person. I don't like always-on outdoor lighting; if I want light, I'll bring some.

I have to assume I'm in the minority though, as nowhere I've lived has moved to reduce street lighting. I know a couple places that have; the town my mother lives in has banned most always-on outdoor lighting, and another relative's town has removed street lights from some neighborhoods. I think both towns have considerably above-average rates of environmental activism.

Nobody ever got fired for adding another street light. (Or adding another traffic light, for that matter)

Maybe a difference here is that I live on the 28th floor of a building in one of most densely populated city on earth (Shenzhen). There's always people walking outside so "smart" lights would always be on anyways. I do enjoy darkness when I am in more remote areas.

I'm not necessarily advocating automatically-triggered lighting, though that may be the solution for some places. Always-on lighting may make sense for a space with constant foot traffic all night, depending on how heavy the traffic is. I do think people should view illuminating spaces nobody is using as a problem to be solved.

If, however it's just a few people an hour, perhaps they should bring flashlights.

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