1 June 2007 Cluj-Napoca, Romania - Lighting Engineering Center ...

International Conference ILUMINAT 2007
offerings. The opposes to this theory consider that, of existing a similar species, it would necessarily
have reached a minimum grade of intelligence, while all the remaining available data confirm the total
absence of this quality in the Blue Planet.)
Figure 21
If this vision carries out it with more vicinity that an artificial satellite-and don't say a Martian
observatory-we can check that the logical use of the Artificial Lighting, encouraged by the benefits that
have been mentioned before, produces, given its intensity, a phenomenon of “overflow.” The light
doesn't stay in the homes, in the streets, in the places of work… this accumulation of particular uses,
invades the general space: the light invades the environment.
And when to final of month we have to pay the electricity invoice, we can deduce that, that
same environment that we invade, we extract the necessary resources to have that light.
The outline suggested previously is certain, but incomplete. It forgets that the useful functions
of a process always go accompanied by parasitic functions, not wanted but indispensable for the
operation of the System. It forgets the necessary resources for the operation, and the residuals
generated by the same one.
Consumed resources and generated residues
The previous diagrams express the “lighting intention” and it must to be completed with the “lighting
necessity”.
Our action is not “costs free” and have “consequences”; in order to realise our function we
have to consume material, energy and also informative resources, understanding the last ones not
only as technical or scientific knowledge, but also as a “qualitative demands and judgements” , what
we call “culture of the light”, whose conceptions shape our proposals and they condition answers of
the artificial lighting users. Generated residues also takes the three forms: material (lamps,
equipment... at the end of their useful cycle of life), energetic (heat, UV and electromagnetic radiation,
non optical effects...) and informative (intrusion and light pollution, landscape intrusion...).
I think most of the lighting technicians would agree that our discovery about this “tangential”
aspects has been passive: this aspects have been going imposed as the problem got importance and
magnitude. Maybe the beginning is in 1970 when the rise in prize of energy, because of war reasons,
concerns the sector about energy efficiency; it is only necessary to analyse the Lighting Congress
rates before this date and after it, in order to check this inflection point. Even though the discovery has
been passive, the answer has generally been “defensive”.
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