Comment by bondolo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bondolo | Hacker News Reader

I have cared about the problem of light pollution since hearing about it as a teen almost 40 years ago. Despite being a regular advocate for dark skies in casual conversation, politics such as LED street lamp replacement, business decisions such as replacing low pressures sodium vapour floods in the company parking lot I have come to the conclusion that most people just don't care or don't get why it matters. I've heard responses like "so close your curtains" or "it is safer with more light" or "the lights aren't that bright".

You can see the distinctive cool white LED "O" of Apple Park from 20 miles away in a plane. Why? Just vanity? The huge amount of light bleed serves no functional purpose. Lights, lights everywhere lights. Lighting up nothing. You can buy an intensely bright fixture at Home Depot and just mount it up making any location bright as day, but 24 hours a day. LEDs may have actually made things worse because of their low cost per lumen and long operating lives that encourages more and brighter lighting.

I am out of step in wanting a world with less human noise and light. If I complain about how noisy I find the bay area and how I would love to punch the Harley rider who lives a block away in the throat the most common answer I get is 'Wow, India and China are way louder' like that should make me feel better or unjustified in my complaint. In truth all it does is make me want to avoid visiting those places.

White LEDs (including at least anything with correlated color temperature > 2500K) should never be used outdoors at night for any purpose other than momentary artistic displays. (And indoors should be mostly reserved for daytime use.)

They are awful for street lamps, porch lamps, car headlamps, flashlights, bike lights, camp lanterns, ...

People don’t seem to understand that adding massive glare in your peripheral vision and clobbering your night vision makes it harder to see everything, and makes everything less safe. (Not to mention screws up your sleep, prevents you from seeing the stars, is terribly damaging to nearby animals, ...) Street lighting (including from car headlamps) is safest and most effective when it is dim but even (human eyes are amazing at adapting to low overall light levels, given sufficient time) and not very blue, rather than bright and extremely patchy.

If people want to use LEDs, they should be dim, orange, diffuse, as low to the ground as practical, and directed primarily downward. The purported advantage LEDs have in longer lifespan and lower power use can conceivably make them better for street lamps if the lamps are made dimmer, more numerous, spaced closer together, brought lower down, and shielded better from the top and side. But if they are going to be put higher up, made intensely blue and extremely bright, then they end up not having any energy saving and making conditions worse for everyone, including drivers, pedestrians, people whose windows look out on the street, ...

The lighting vendors selling these over-blue over-bright lamps to cities and the public are doing the world a gross disservice.

The sheer eye-searing glare of LED headlamps on cars is becoming an active safety hazard at this point.

Even bicycle headlights are now getting so bright that I find them to be painful [1]. Unlike cars, their placement isn't regulated at all, and many cyclists seem to think that pointing them slightly upwards is a good thing. Or worse, they'll wear helmet headlights which are pretty much at eye level.

[1] I'm a bit more sensitive to light than most people, I get migraines and have low grade photophobia 24/7.

I believe the U.N? had to update their guidance for this reason. Iirc, the max allowed brightness was either calculated incorrectly, or was just set too high.

When I walk around my town at midnight, I often stand and notice how the lights just reveal empty space everywhere. Nobody is around. Nobody is even using the all that light! Driving at night would be dangerous without light of course, but that's why they have headlights. Those lights are burning all night long and they're not even doing anything.

People seem to abhor silence and emptiness. They hate it, or maybe they're afraid of it. They always want to fill it with something.

I love to walk around in the middle of the night because the car traffic around here virtually stops and silence and some degree of darkness returns. The busyness goes away. I'm always amazed that I rarely see anyone else out at night. Don't others crave emptiness too?

> You can see the distinctive cool white LED "O" of Apple Park from 20 miles away in a plane. Why? Just vanity?

And also to disorient nocturnal migrating insects (with flow on effects down the eco system) while they signal to elites overhead how eco conscious they are by using recyclable packaging in the complimentary in-flight magazine.

> Why? Just vanity?

Pretty much this. Humans tend to want to feel important and recognized, and what better way to feel big than to outdo the stars in the sky? When there's no more stars to outdo, all we can do is compete with each other.

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