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Having been to an actual dark site before, I can assure you that anything you experienced in a blue area is entirely unlike the experience of being at a genuine

Having been to an actual dark site before, I can assure you that anything you experienced in a blue area is entirely unlike the experience of being at a genuinely dark location. Crime isn't going to ruin everything if we turn off the lights for 2 hours per year. At the least we should replace lighting in cities with directional lights pointed downwards, and stop wasting half of our light to the skies. We should also turn a portion of them off late at night.

Tade0 6y ago
I've also been to genuinely dark places - that's why I said "something". It's the same, just more intense.
ianai 6y ago
There’s also having properly hued lights to minimize impact. We’re messing up all sorts of things like circadian rhythms and light pollution with overly aggressive lighting.
carapace 6y ago
Like most technology, artificial light is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you have things like aid programs to give poor folks LED lights so they can read at night (for e.g. kids' education) without burning fuel (typically wood or dung, leading to health problems and ecological degradation), creating "virtuous cycles". So that's good. On the other hand, light pollution is so bad that kids grow up never seeing the night sky, effectively they are inside a virtual world. Shall we become Krikkiters? ( https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/k/krikkit https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/k/krikkit ) When you look at a picture of the Earth at night from orbit and see the synthetic human mycelium of light spread over the land, it's kind of beautiful, but at the same time all those photons are waste, pollution. In infrared bands the waste is even more glaring. (That's not a pun, it's literal.) Also, humans have great night vision. There's a whole mode where the peripheral vision takes over from the foveal vision and you can see just fine. It's quite literally like "nightvision" in D&D: you can't see in the actual absence of light, but you can see in starlight. Also, in this mode you can see luminescent fungi and bugs and such clearly. There was an article in the old "Whole Earth Quarterly" (which I think is now online and maybe searchable somewhere, so maybe I can dig it up...) about folks experimenting with this. They made hats with a bit of clothes-hanger-wire attached and a dot of glow-in-the-dark paint, such that the dot of luminescence was in the air in front of their eyes and, um, several inches (?) away. The method was to go into a natural (dark but not deep-forest-pitch-black) area, put on the hat, let the eyes fixate on the dot (to prevent you trying to look around with your foveal cells) and then direct your attention to your peripheral field of view (basically everything from the foveal "sweet spot", which is actually quite small, IIRC the size of your fist on your outstretched arm, to the sides of your head. Humans can see nearly 180°. You can test this yourself. Put up your arm and do a thumbs' up gesture. Wiggle your thumb as you move your arm to the side while looking straight ahead (don't move your eyes or head.) You should be able to see the motion to nearly 90°.) Anyhow, the folks in that article were running around in the woods and fields at night with no flashlights. Literally running. I'll see if I can dig up the link later today. (Not to rant, but these new LED street lights and car head lights (and bike lights too) are blinding. They hurt my eyes!) - - - - Edit: Derp! It was "CoEvolution Quarterly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoEvolution_Quarterly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoEvolution_Quarterly Unfortunately the website is borken: http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'new' (T_NEW) in /nfs/c02/h04/mnt/28620/domains/wholeearth.com/html/includes/public-config.php on line 12 And the Wayback Machine? https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wholeearth.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wholeearth.com/ Fail with status: 503 Service Unavailable Hmm... Well, the internet itself has been flakey the last few days. (Or is that just Google?) FWIW, they have some good stuff: https://archive.org/details/wholeearth https://archive.org/details/wholeearth

Tade0 6y ago

I've also been to genuinely dark places - that's why I said "something". It's the same, just more intense.

ianai 6y ago

There’s also having properly hued lights to minimize impact. We’re messing up all sorts of things like circadian rhythms and light pollution with overly aggressive lighting.

carapace 6y ago

Like most technology, artificial light is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you have things like aid programs to give poor folks LED lights so they can read at night (for e.g. kids' education) without burning fuel (typically wood or dung, leading to health problems and ecological degradation), creating "virtuous cycles". So that's good. On the other hand, light pollution is so bad that kids grow up never seeing the night sky, effectively they are inside a virtual world. Shall we become Krikkiters? ( https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/k/krikkit https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/k/krikkit ) When you look at a picture of the Earth at night from orbit and see the synthetic human mycelium of light spread over the land, it's kind of beautiful, but at the same time all those photons are waste, pollution. In infrared bands the waste is even more glaring. (That's not a pun, it's literal.) Also, humans have great night vision. There's a whole mode where the peripheral vision takes over from the foveal vision and you can see just fine. It's quite literally like "nightvision" in D&D: you can't see in the actual absence of light, but you can see in starlight. Also, in this mode you can see luminescent fungi and bugs and such clearly. There was an article in the old "Whole Earth Quarterly" (which I think is now online and maybe searchable somewhere, so maybe I can dig it up...) about folks experimenting with this. They made hats with a bit of clothes-hanger-wire attached and a dot of glow-in-the-dark paint, such that the dot of luminescence was in the air in front of their eyes and, um, several inches (?) away. The method was to go into a natural (dark but not deep-forest-pitch-black) area, put on the hat, let the eyes fixate on the dot (to prevent you trying to look around with your foveal cells) and then direct your attention to your peripheral field of view (basically everything from the foveal "sweet spot", which is actually quite small, IIRC the size of your fist on your outstretched arm, to the sides of your head. Humans can see nearly 180°. You can test this yourself. Put up your arm and do a thumbs' up gesture. Wiggle your thumb as you move your arm to the side while looking straight ahead (don't move your eyes or head.) You should be able to see the motion to nearly 90°.) Anyhow, the folks in that article were running around in the woods and fields at night with no flashlights. Literally running. I'll see if I can dig up the link later today. (Not to rant, but these new LED street lights and car head lights (and bike lights too) are blinding. They hurt my eyes!) - - - - Edit: Derp! It was "CoEvolution Quarterly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoEvolution_Quarterly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoEvolution_Quarterly Unfortunately the website is borken: http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'new' (T_NEW) in /nfs/c02/h04/mnt/28620/domains/wholeearth.com/html/includes/public-config.php on line 12 And the Wayback Machine? https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wholeearth.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wholeearth.com/ Fail with status: 503 Service Unavailable Hmm... Well, the internet itself has been flakey the last few days. (Or is that just Google?) FWIW, they have some good stuff: https://archive.org/details/wholeearth https://archive.org/details/wholeearth