I once read a story when I was little, about a girl who was afraid of the dark. She lived in an enclosed room, never leaving it, with hundreds of artificial lamps providing light to her surroundings. She one day decided to go outside, and since it was morning, she saw sunlight for the first time, and it was, by far, the most intense, beautiful light she had ever seen, and she turned off all her lights, and opened her curtains, never to live without it again.
Since cavemen times, humans have been scared of the unknown that the darkness of night brings, and beginning with fire, man has always searched for a way to escape the darkness by igniting it with light.
In modern times, we cannot bear the thought of an existence without electricity and lights, and have come up with a wide array of innovative ideas of shapes, sizes and intensities of lights. Ceiling lights and fluorescent lights are examples of household types of incandescent lighting, which allow us to maintain the illusion of the morning light, even in the depth of darkness. This ready availability of artificial lighting has conditioned humans to be able to change their natural circadian rhythm on demand, essentially giving us the power to control our natural light and dark cycles.
Natural lighting, however, cannot be surpassed in intensity and beauty by any man-made artificial light. The Northern Lights, also known as Aurora Borealis, for example, are the most astonishing display of natural light known to man, and they display an array of colours, like an artist's painting on the canvas of the sky, for us to see. Solar lights, the most powerful form of natural light, is also incomparable in intensity and energy to any other type of light known to man, and we would not be able to survive without it.
In conclusion, the advent of artificial lighting, such as LED lights and many others, has provided humanity with a very important evolutionary tool, which allows us to disregard old useless instincts and truly live as twenty-four hour creatures with no circadian restrictions! Hooray for artificial lighting!
