It's easy to take electric light for granted. It's ubiquitous for all but the most marginalized. It's also relatively cheap. It's only on the rare occasion that you find yourself without power that you are reminded of what a big difference it makes. Indeed, light is a factor of production, important enough to warrant switching clocks twice a year as so many places still do. Electric lighting accelerated industrialization, gets kids through school and even makes neighborhoods safer.
On the horizon for this technology are the same trends that are dominating elsewhere in the push for sustainability: smaller, safer, more efficient, longer-lasting. As that process has progressed we have seen compact fluorescent bulbs make their move from offices to homes, and I predict that we will soon see wider implementation of LED lighting.
LED lights are already commonplace in many household electronics. They're bright, sharp and colorful, look like lasers and thus speak visions of a high-tech future. I personally think it would be pretty cool to reside in an environment cast aglow by these lights' particular spectrum, but there are more material reasons to prefer them, not least because they can approach the same quality of light more conventional alternatives offer.
To start off with they use less energy to produce a given amount of light. For instance, straight from Wikipedia I've learned that a 7 watt LED bulb can produce as much light as a 60 watt incandescent bulb or a 15 watt fluorescent bulb. Beyond that LEDs live longer than incandescents by 30 times or more, with the latest fluorescents capable of shining for a comparable length of time. That's at least 30,000 hours, or 25-30 years.
Something lasting that long demands a comparable investment and for that reason LED bulbs are still pretty pricey. As is the case with all good things, that price is coming down. Whether or not it makes sense for you to put that money into a bulb you might forget or smash when you move depends on how inconvenient it is for you to front those funds and how inconvenient it is for society should you opt for something else - I wonder what the social costs of night vision goggles are. As long as you're not living hand-to-mouth though, the higher price should be more than offset by savings on energy and maintenance.
Speaking of a cool sci-fi future I now come to our second prospect on the horizon of lighting technology: bioluminescence. Bioluminescence, that alluring biochemical reaction that led more kids to aspire to become marine biologists than research funding could support, is not just for jellyfish. Genetic engineering long ago gave us glow-in-the-dark tobacco and monkeys as well. The next step is bioluminescent trees to replace street lights.
This idea has already been pretty well-documented. Here I will make the hardly profound observation that lighting in this form wouldn't require electricity. What interests me more though is the idea that overtaxed avenues of energy transformation can be relieved by redistributing that weight to other paths, and that one of those paths runs through life.
Is biology the answer to an electricity shortage? It seems to make increasing economic sense to produce what we need - light, industrial chemicals - not by the conventional means of combustion, electricity or mechanics, but by the pathways that exist within plants, animals and other organisms. That's an alarming thought when one considers the ways in which we have already exploited life. It could lead to some pretty freaky developments. We could also spare other species and engineer ourselves to see in the dark, which, again, would be pretty cool.
As long as such technology is used for the purposes of making human existence - and thus the planet - more sustainable, I find little cause for concern in engineering trees and other organisms. In the development of alternatives for lighting we have captured a glimpse of the greater integration with biology that will take place in many other areas.
