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371 points clumsysmurf | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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xnx ◴[] No.43109665[source]
On average, we inhale 20 lbs of air per day. This is greater by weight than the food or water we consume in a day. We should be paying a lot more attention to air quality.
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asdff ◴[] No.43110361[source]
I can't help but feel like it has taken a nosedive as well. Modern homes are sealed and don't recirculate much outdoor air. As a result you have all this modern american living plastic material constantly offgassing. your fleece shedding microplastic particulate into the air that you then breath, eat, burn over the stove and inhale the fumes. You can't even do anything about it. Get rid of all the plastic you want in your life and the water supply is what is contaminated next. Your neighbors dryer exhaust and their fleece polluting your air. Restaurants. The food suppliers. Move a thousand miles away to the tip of the mountaintop upstream of everything conceivable, and you are liable to be bombarded with it carried via updrafts from around the world along with the rest of the usual pollution.

We can't even slow down the consumerism. Everyone's job around the world is someway tied into this rampant production of cheap plastic goods to replace cheap plastic goods from yesterweek. You try and nip it in the bud everyone is liable to lose their job and everything might very well collapse because of how we chose to stack this deck of cards on this planet.

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alt227 ◴[] No.43112030[source]
My house in the UK is 300 years old. It is built of stone with proper ventilation built in everywhere. It never gets damp, never too cold or hot. Air circulates enough to constantly be fresh yet not quick enough to create a draft.

Its a shame homes arent built like that anymore. Looking at how houses like this work really shows how we have created solutions to our own problems in modern home building.

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nkrisc ◴[] No.43113259[source]
What are average high and low temperatures where you live in the UK? I looked up the averages for the UK as a whole (which I’m sure can vary quite a bit once you get more local) but I found between 20C and 2C.

Where I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan average temperatures average between 32C and -6C. As for extremes, I have personally experienced there highs around 37C and lows down to -28C (still went to work in 3ft of snow).

So I will take my modern home with its ability to be well insulated and heated and cooled.

Yes, people lived there long before those modern conveniences, and they were cold and hot. They kept warm in the winter by keeping fires going inside their dwellings at all times. I even spent a week in autumn living in a recreation of one as a kid. Unsutprisingly, it was cold and everything smelled of smoke by the end of the week. Think of how much smoke and particulate we breathed in to stay warm (and there wasn’t even snow on the ground yet). I didn’t even mind it.

I’ll give the final word though to those living in even colder and more extreme climates, and any intrepid people living above the Arctic Circle.

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alt227 ◴[] No.43115738{3}[source]
We have highs of mid 30s and lows down to -10.

Stone is an incredibly efficient thermal material which is why animals and humans have lived in caves for thousands of years.

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1. nkrisc ◴[] No.43118752{4}[source]
They also died in caves for thousands of years. They lived there because it was the best shelter available, not because it was the ideal shelter.