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Are you sure all those numbers are in the right ballpark? With a 3.3V supply and a 1 MΩ resistor, the most current you can get from that circuit is in the neighborhood of 3μA, and that's ignoring the LED voltage drop. I would think the LED won't be visible until you're around the mA range. Or are some LEDs visible in the low μA range?

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Modern LEDs light up with incredibly low currents. In a RF noisy environment, I've often seen LEDs glow just by touching one side with a wire and the other to ground. Just the parasitic from such a crude antenna was enough.

Of course as stated by another comment, our eyes are also incredible, and can pick up very faint amount of light.

human eyes are logarithmic and can easily see microamps.

In fact, just hold an LED between your fingers in a dark enough room and you'll sometimes see them glow from stray magnetic fields inducing enough current in your body to light them.

Beautiful if true!

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