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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

"in pitch darkness and temperatures of 25 °C"

Is this supposed to be terrifying? Anyone who woke up at night and walked to the bathroom faced pitch darkness and temperatures of 25 °C!

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It is possible the authors were just trying to illustrate the remoteness of the ecosystem, without meaning to evoke emotion.

Regardless, I don't think many city dwellers have ever experienced pitch black.

I don't think anyone has. When it's that dark you get a free light show courtesy of your eyes. It was quite disconcerting the first time it happened to me.

Clearly you've never been in the (real) middle of nowhere at night when it's cloudy. Rural North Dakota, for example.

I think he means the noise you see in the complete absence of light, or Eigengrau.

Stars put out quite a bit of light in remote areas, cloud cover may block ~75% of this, but it's still far from 'pitch black'. One of the stranger things about caving is it just keeps getting darker as you go deeper.

PS: As a kid I used to spend a lot of time walking around in starlight. I only ever really used a flashlight inside. I moved much closer to a city and light pollution is terrible to the point where there is little need to turn lights on in my apartment unless I want to read something.

25 °C for British people is pretty terrifying :p

You'd be complaining about the heat at that point.

We need to start having conversations about whether the law compels people to go home from work and school at that sort of temperature.

I'd definitely be in shorts for that searing heat.

Google's Irish datacenter does not even need the cooling since it never gets that warm in Ireland and in an unlikely case it did you can just shut down servers for that few hours of unexpected summer.

Combine that with damp, low oxygen air, confined space and protective suit with all the equipment you must be wearing, and I'm sure it gets irritating pretty fast.

It adds to claustrophobia if you're descending through a narrow crack in the ground :-)

I was expecting a bit more extreme number myself after the 'alien place' buildup.

I don't know where you live, but I bet it's not Canada.

That whole section of the article seemed pretty silly. Talking about rappelling down a rope, through a tight passage, and through twisty, turny little passages is really just another cave, in that respect.

If you're claustrophobic it might put you off, but if you've done any spelunking, this is nothing at all to write home about.

Unless linked to geothermal structures, most deeply underground caves are much cooler than that, around 10-15°C.

In a deep maze of subsurface caves filled with all kinds of creepy crawling bugs, where you could easily get stranded if your ropes to the surface get cut, then yes.

Yes that's fucking terrifying.

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