  Chinese people are talking about a national birth rate of 6.4 per 1,000
people in 2023, the lowest in the world. Whether this is related to the wrong
use of various artificial night light rays passing through our eyes is worth
reflection. Non-visual effects of light are the effects of the blue component
of light, which effectively inhibits the melatonin secretion in the pineal
gland. As melatonin acts through high-affinity receptors located centrally and
in all organs, blue light affects, in principle, the hormone secretion
throughout the body, including the secretion of sex hormones and cortisol.
These effects have been widely used in animal reproduction. Given that the
night light environment has significantly changed over the past century, an
effect of light on fertility and behavior could be detected in multiple cases.
We showed that the ovulation phase of hens could be shifted by the light as low
as 0.2 Lx, which corresponds to the illumination intensity at full moon,and the
effect of 0.2 Lx on ovulation is normally far greater than all other factors
combined. Two rounds of experiments and many other facts listed support that
human intrinsic fertility may have not declined significantly, and food,
chemical pollution and policy making are all not the main factors affecting
fertility. The longer lighting time at night has brought modern humans into a
radically different endocrine state compared with that of humans who lived 100
years ago, which has a huge impact on human reproduction, values and even the
progress of civilization. With the development of the digital era, our eyes
will be exposed to even longer light time at night. How to restore human beings
to a normal hormonal state by combating the misuse of light may be the urgent
issue. The light of the digital world (met averse, AI, and so on)may be should
not continue to flood.
