Electric Lights

31-05-23 00 / episode: 135

Script

"Electric lights.

Do you have electric lights? If you're listening to this podcast, you probably have electric lights.

In fact, you've always lived with them.

Probably the number of people who don't have electric lights is very small today and the number of people who have experienced no electricity is very small.

Now, I'm not including camping.

If you go camping for a day or a week, you don't have electricity, that's fine.

But I mean, living without electricity, I had the good fortune to have that experience.

When I went to Africa, we had no electricity and I lived with candle lights and gas lights.

That was a whole another story at any rate.

You sure start to appreciate electricity when you come back to it.

And electric lights are getting better all the time.

The round electric light bulbs of yesteryear were very, very energy inefficient.

They wasted a lot of energy and they made a lot of heat after you turned off the light bulb, you couldn't touch it for a while because it was so hot.

Now, we're getting better and better at lights.

In fact, they say the cost of the light that we have today is about 1000 times lower than it was 20 years ago.

Now.

I'm not exactly sure about that number.

The point is it's really, really cheap today and it's still getting cheaper.

We're making more and more efficient light and that's got some problems.

It's wonderful for inside our houses, but it's starting to interrupt nature.

We're starting to have places that don't have darkness and they should have darkness.

Darkness is part of the natural rhythm of things.

There's places where insects don't grow anymore because it's not dark and that can mean they get eaten by other insects or other animals or they don't have babies because they need the darkness.

So we're starting to find our electric lights are disrupting nature.

But the biggest one for me is more personal.

The electric light we make, makes it harder to see the beautiful Starlight in the evening and you have to go far away from the cities to see the beautiful stars.

What do you think about electric lights? Do you want more or less?"