We also need darkness and the occasional glance to infinity for the health of our eyes. I believe that kids today are just not getting the 'eye exercise' needed for healthy eyes. Everyone seems to be wearing glasses or contact lenses. We are going blind!!!<p>We have healthcare systems that put kids in glasses at the first available opportunity to correct things, eyes get lazier and more corrective optics is needed. We also have sunglasses for when the sun is out, again, eyes get less exercise. Then, as per this article, we have 24/7 lighting in offices, shops and selected homes. It is not just the stars we are not seeing any more, the sun is not seen either!<p>I was fortunate to grow up in a rural area with very few streetlights. Also, my childhood bedroom did not have electricity. If I wanted to read late into the night I had to be by the window. In those days it was apparently bad for your eyes to do just that, that was the new 'masturb*tion' as far as eye care was concerned.<p>I also had to walk or cycle to school. With cycling you do get to exercise your eyes properly, that glance behind and back again in a split second to see what car is going to 'hit you' puts those eye muscles through their paces. Stuck in traffic in the back of an SUV just does not give your eyes the chance to get good.<p>Nowadays I am amazed that people have the lights on during mid day during mid summer. Such an insult to the glowing thing in the sky! I detest that because I believe that anything short of an unshielded nuclear reactor is just bad for the eyes. Nobody I know sees it that way. My eyes are far from perfect, if I drink a dozen pints of beer I can get double vision, not that I have drunk enough to experience that in decades, uptime of non-blurry sight has been 9 nines for me.<p>There is also a myth that screens are bad for the eyes. Again I beg to differ. I have been working with screens as intensively as the next programmer to read this thread. However, in the office, if someone needs to read the (IMEI?) serial number on the back of an iphone, I can just read it fine, which is weird when it is a 19 year old asking the favour. (Actually just remembered also grew up with a lack of TV due to reception issues in aforementioned rural area so probably not watched screens as much as most).<p>Nowadays we have a culture of going to the gym, doing pilates and other such nonsense to compensate for sedentary lives. I say 'we', I mean us white folk in 'first world' countries. We could have gone the other route, just using wheelchairs everywhere, but, some semblance of physical health is an aspirational thing.<p>Now, eye health... If we could have dark skies for the sake of the children rather than a few anorak wearing boffins then that just might work.<p>As an aside, one benefit of having quality eyesight is that I can use hi-res screens with text the size that it used to be in books, i.e. small. My colleagues have to have normal resolution screens with text the size of the 'large type' books that public libraries have for old folk. Yet they can be in their early twenties. Quality eyesight with no corrective optics is as important to me as being able to breathe.