...and out went all the lights

[fleetfootmike]

So there we were in bed, talking over plans for the house, around 11pm last night, and it all goes completely dark, bar the LED on the baby monitor, which starts crackling.

Took me a second or two to realise we'd had a power cut, and the reason for the crackle was that it'd switched from mains to battery power, and the master unit in James' room had gone off ('cause it has no battery) so it wasn't getting signal.

Everything came back in about 5 minutes (barring a computer out in the office, which is a bleedin' stupid Compaq that doesn't reboot when the power is reapplied - sorry Dave!), but I got to thinking a little about light pollution.

The lights were off before the power cut: even so, it's quite amazing how much darker it got when the three nearby streetlights and the glow of a clock radio were taken away (we tend to turn the baby monitor on its front so the LED isn't as annoying). I was reminded of a night or two spent at an SF convention in Blankenheim in Germany: the venue was a youth hostel in a castle atop a hill, well above the few streetlights in the village below. And it was dark. Sufficiently dark that I suffered one of my occasional panic attacks (usually induced by not being able to see at all), and actually had to sleep with the bathroom light on. oreouk and demoneyes's spare room does that to me too, mostly because their blackout curtains are WAY too efficient: I tend to turn on one of the printers in the room, as the single green LED is enough light for it not to be totally dark.

So I wondered: how many kids - heck how many people - are there out there who have never experienced total darkness?

Comments

[bardling.livejournal.com]

I used to play a game with my friends, occasionally: make room as dark as possible (i.e. close curtains, hang up extra blankets if necessary, stuff something under door ir required). One of you stays in the room (with the light on ;) and assembles an obstacle course out of stuff that's in it (chairs, boxes, elastic bands, toys, chests, cushions, whatever), the other waits outside until ready, then gets brought in blindfolded, lights turned out, blindfold off and go... goal is to reach other side of room. The darker the better, some rooms it was easy to achieve total darkness in, others less so.

Aside from that - it seems to me that there's tendencially more light pollution in the UK than in Germany... or maybe I'm just imagining that?

*hugs* Neat new user-pic, btw :)

[delennara.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends what part of Germany you are comparing with...Duisburg is rather bright, too.
When I drive up here to the hospital in the morning, it is really dark, too. Sometimes teh road vanishes between two hills, so even the occasional villages are out, and there are only the car's lights, and the stars and moon above. I really love that sight, because the sky seems to be so close then.

[armb.livejournal.com]

One of the good things about the six months we spent living at my mother-in-law's previous house while she tried to sell it was the stars. It was a fair bit outside the village, and the village didn't have many streetlights, and no nearby towns. Now we have a constant yellow glow at night.
For real dark, you want to go caving.

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

No I don't :)

[bardling.livejournal.com]

I'd compare comparable places, of course. Comparing London to an outlying village in Germany wouldn't be fair, frex, nor would comparing, say, Hamburg & Welbourn, Linc.

[vampirdaddy.livejournal.com]

Graduating in applied physics, optics, is a "great" opportunity to count photons. Near literally. I've spent two summers in bunkers with concrete walls painted pitch black. As light by light is switched off bar a very few, dimmed readouts or a monitor turned lowest to utter minimum, the world first looses its colour. Later/darker (and after some accomodation) you still can "see" things - big things, that is. Things then appear as blackish gray against pitch black. The image is snowy like a (analogue) TV set with a bad antenna - but black "dots" (instead of white as in the TV) against the near-black of the black-grey-black objects. A notch darker, and you only can see the nearly-black drops against a completely-dark background - clouds in the shapes of the objects. At this phase humans really can see and maybe even count the single pohotons, the particles light is consisting of.

[occams_pyramid]

So I wondered: how many kids - heck how many people - are there out there who have never experienced total darkness?

How many people have never ever seen the stars on a clear dark night? And think that a starry night is one with ten or a dozen stars visible.

[delennara.livejournal.com]

So....what additional light pollution do they have in the UK?
(Comparability presumed)

[bardling.livejournal.com]

from my observation: more motorways seem to be equipped with streetlights, and the streetlights generally seem to be less downwardly drected, more all-around, than in Germany.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I've been inside an inside lavatory during a power outage, which is pretty damned dark.

It was quite dark during the Northeast power outage, but nowhere NEAR as dark as it was when I was in Yosemite and the stars were so close you could almost reach up and touch them.

[vampirdaddy.livejournal.com]

Well, one thing that occurred to me: even in a completeelectrical breakdown we wouldn't be without light - in our steet the lanterns still are all gaslights...

[braider.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I've ever gotten to experience total darkness. It's actually something I'd like to do, on a nice, clear night, so I could properly view the stars. It's what got me thinking to write this song.

[tnatj.livejournal.com]

They joke about being caught hundreds of feet into a twisty-turny mineshaft ... and the lights go out.

The tour into the Arcadia Copper Mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan features a minute of pure darkness when the guide turns off the electric lamps.

"Now you know what miners are faced with. Imagine yourself trapped below a thousand feet of rock without power, light or any idea of your location."

If that doesn't make your behind pucker, I don't know what will.

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

Mmmm.

I confess to being puzzled, once, at the reaction of a D&D party I was DMing, who were in general very good roleplayers - they woke up in total (magical) darkness and silence. And none of them roleplayed panic.

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Well, personally, the total silence would probably freak me out more than total darkness. But that may be positive associations with the cabins on the North Shore of Lake Superior, where outside lighting is nonexistent and there's nothing in the cabin to provide a glow, so once the lights are all out, it is truly *dark*.

But I can always hear the waterfall or the surf.

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Nor do you want to take the cave tour in Slovenia or one in MN where it is a part of the tour for all the lights to be shut out for a moment or two, just so you can experience a complete darkness.

[gnulfy.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I ever experienced real total darkness. But I know that as a child I had one dream repeatedly, where I was walking somewhere and couldn't see anything. No ceiling, not the ground, no shadows. It was all one black package. I was just walking on and at one point the ground would give and I'd fall into a hole. That was the moment panic set in and my arms flailed. Then I awoke. When I returned to that dream I remembered what would happen and since I wanted to know what was awaiting me at the bottom I tried not to move when the hole came, but it wouldn't come as long as I concentrated, only when I stopped waiting for it, then I'd fall. Never reached the ground. ;-)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

From my knowledge of the workings of the eye, I don't think you were seeing individual photons, but individual nerve pulses from your retina. It takes an accumulation of... I'm not sure how many, but I think it's a few hundred... photons before a rod or cone will say "Yes! I have detected light!", at which point it empties the electric bucket into the nerve ending, and starts collecting photons again...

This is one of the reasons why our reaction times are slower in low-light conditions. We literally have to wait longer for the signals to be generated by the retina, and reach the brain. It's the basis of one system of 3D movie viewing, whereby one eye is covered with a dark filter, so that it passes its image to the brain *later* than the other eye... It's also why my sister, when she was suffering from some of the nastier side-effects of MS, could watch TV quite happily in a darkened room, with the brightness and contrast turned way down low, but would become seasick if the brightness was raised, complaining that "its all happening too fast!". The reduced light levels had the effect of smoothing out jerky movements by increasing the motion blur (pictures (or parts therof) were averaged over a longer period of time before being reported to the brain), and reducing the visual data-rate to her brain!

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

I can assert that lying under the open sky in the middle of the Sahel, 30 miles or more form any kind of conurbation, at midnight on a clear September night... It is ANYTHING BUT totally dark!

I thought I'd been magically relocated a good few parsecs closer to galactic centre. =:o}

Where were you when the lights went out 2003...

[liadra.livejournal.com]

This summer I had the opportunity (I say that like it was a good idea) to be in the great North American blackout. My home was without power for nearly a full 24 hours, and then for sporadic bits after that. We were threatened with rolling blackouts for the week after, though in my area they weren't realized (thankfully!).

It was so creepy to look outside and see utter blackness. If a candle wasn't going there was no light (or a flashlight, I guess, but I didn't have one). Creepier still was the fact that there really weren't (m)any cars to speak of on the road. The world was silent and still but for the occassional overheard cnversation - and even those were scarse for the most part. I took a candle lantern and went outside with my daughter to see the stars. The three flights of stairs in the building were frightening to navigate. I was reminded of taller buildings in the city and glad I wasn't in one!

We really don't think much about the light around us. I watched a program this summer talking about light pollution. They remarked that in London (England, not Ontario ;) there were children who had never seen the stars in the night sky because of light pollution. And how the Observatory was effectively rendered useless.

I really enjoyed the change in pace the blackout brought *but* I really don't want to live through one like that again. It wasn't just lights - there were lost man hours and paycheques; lost food; threats of no water and/or water unfit to drink (and no way to boil it); no safe way to traverse the streets after dark; etc. So much we take for granted.

Lia

[bardling.livejournal.com]

If total silence includes not hearing yourself speak or move, that would freak me out more than total darkness, I think. I'm one of those people who usually won't turn on the light when I need the bathroom in the middle of the night - not even when I'm somewhere other-than-home. I'll navigate by what I can see in the darkness or memory.

There's dark and DARK ;)

[hrrunka]

My sister's children don't seem to be able to sleep without a little light somewhere. My brother's children don't seem to be able to sleep if there is light about. Could have a bit to do with their living in Australia (where day lengths change a bit, and electric power is reasonably reliable) and Kenya (where the day length is almost constant and electric power is not reliable) respectively...

I don't find a dark night sky at all unsettling, but the darkness of a cave is a different matter...