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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

I wish the whole world would do this stuff. Light pollution sucks. It's understandable from street lights but other sources aren't as excusable.

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Even outdoor lighting is not without problems, especially two recent trends are worrying:

- shift from low-pressure sodium lamps (which emit 95%+ of light in the narrow peak, so are a bit easier to filter out in astronomy application, and also don't trigger blue-light neural response in humans, and animals alike) to LEDs (which pollute across the visible spectrum, with plenty of blue light component);

- as light efficiency increases, people often choose to utilize it to increase lighting intensity within same electric power budget, rather than keep same output in lumens, and save some power.

My village recently switched to LED street lamps, and I hate them. The light pollution has definitely become worse here over the last ten years. The village lights switch off around 1am, but that doesn't seem to make a jot of difference to my astrophotography, because the town 4 miles to the South and the city 10 miles to the North keep theirs switched on.

I really missed the sodium lamps after my university "upgraded" to LED. There was something peaceful about the monochrome, and their gentle whine when they got too old.

At first I loved LED street lights because I could see so much better by them (and I presume that they have an increased deterrent effect on crime though I have not checked this).

These days I think disrupting wildlife is more important than human safety and I wish we could get rid of nearly all street lighting.

I wonder if the ubiquitousness of people carrying flashlights in the form of smartphones could be leveraged into doing away with street lights as an expected practice. I don't think I would actually support that, but I think that kind of shift in culture is a possibility right now.

It can, but one would need a bit of a ettiquette to not point it into other people's faces. Pretty sure some people would use headlamps if it was necessary for everyone to bring their light source and that is plenty annoying.

Much of the time using a flashlight is superfluous, or even counter-productive, if it's not pitch black, unless you have very poor night vision. Your eyes will never adjust to the dark and you will end up seeing less.

But wouldn't animals be able to adapt to a single, predictable light source that illuminates a certain area more easily than to an arbitrary number of individual light sources in an arbitrary number of configurations/angles moving around?

That said, maybe one could equip street lights with a sensor so they don't need to run at all times?

Over a few millenia, certainly.

Really? You think protecting wildlife is more important than human life? Also, less light might increase the frequency of road kills.

Yes, yes I do. We're doing incalculable damage to animal life (e.g., disrupting birds and insects which are essential pollinators for plants). This is but one facet of the crisis that our species has inflicted upon the planet.

The real problem is that the disruption to animal life will eventually affect human lives too, so you don't really have to choose.

That's not what makes the problem "real" at all, even though you're technically right.

But why is that a problem? I do not disagree with you about the crisis (at all!), but the only reason we care is because we're human beings - because we defined this to immoral and also because it endangers human (and other) beings lives. IMO, I find it makes very little logical (and frankly also moral) sense to say as a human being that wildlife conservation is more important than the lives of other human beings.

I know you're not saying quite the same, but this reminds me a bit of an "unpopular opinion" I came across once, which stated that people must die because there are too many people living on earth...

(edit: formatting)

In this scenario, the choice seems obvious. Humans can make informed decisions regarding their safety and apply measures to mitigate dangers, while wildlife affected by those lights can't.

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