PhotoperiodEffect.com

11. Aren't humans supposed to be the most adaptive of all creatures, able to live in any environment on earth, and even to travel in outer space ? We're different – we're not exactly like plants that to detect the color spectrum typical of autumn days or they won't bloom or reproduce, or canaries that have to have a cover on their cage at night, lest a little extra light will kill them. We're special!

(“So special...” - to quote the popular song of a couple decades ago.) Actually, we don't adapt as well as all that: space travel is roughly the equivalent of A.I.D.S. for human beings, being in zero gravity knocks out the human immune system. More to the point, the long history of science has shown again and again that human beings aren't nearly as special as they delight in thinking they are. Copernicus broke the news that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth, as we once thought. Newton, that the solar system is just one amongst countless others, so that our solar system does not lie at the exact center of the Universe, either. Darwin and paleontology, that we weren't specially created, quite separately from all other animals - we are animals, and have evolved in just as other animals have. We once believed that other animals did not feel pain or have emotions – the last within my lifetime – that these were special to human beings. Now we know that other animals can learn by example and use tools... which we thought were special skills possessed only by human beings. One could go on endlessly. Of course, we are unique, as every animal is, and more eccentric in form and function than most. But we are not special in some god-like way. We must be modest enough to admit that we have material limits and constaints, and that light is one of those. The sun rises and sets on us just the same, with immense hormonal consequences within our bodies, as is the case for other animals. Gravity affects us in pretty much the same ways as it does other animals – so why not light?

We have ipRGCs (“independently photosensitive retinal ganglion cells” - see question 21) within our eyes just as other mammals do; which cells detect day and night and control most of our hormone system like a whipsaw. Therefore, there can be terrible consequences for indulging ourselves in all the artificial light we wish to expose ourselves to, extending our photoperiods as much as we please. We should have learned long before this that just because we can invent something such as lead water pipes, asbestos insulation, tobacco pipes, concentrated radiation sources or refined opium; it doesn't follow that it's good for us.