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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

Higher carbon dioxide makes us dumber: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7229519/

I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.

The high school my friend's kids attend installed CO2 sensors during the pandemic as an indirect way to measure airflow.

It turned out the building had been sealed extremely tightly to keep out the winter cold and because it is old, it does not have a proper HVAC system.

They discovered that CO2 levels stayed around 1200 ppm throughout the entire winter, sometimes even higher. This had likely been the case for decades.

It is a school in a small, low‑income town. I cannot help wondering how many kids were labeled as underperforming when they were actually struggling with the effects of chronically elevated CO2 levels.

I went to a Catholic school and had to attend services. I thought that I was just bored, but I'm pretty sure that my yawning had more to do with elevated CO2 levels.

I've thought about making a C02 scrubber for indoor use. The simplest way, using commercial lime, would mean replenishing a consumable to keep it going. The C02 scrubbers that acquarium owners use also don't seem to be able to be regenerated.

I think it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, an indoor C02 level of near 0 would have on humans and mammals. Because your blood has to stay in a narrow PH range, and C02 is part of maintaining that, I wouldn't presume it would be good.

I think a small desktop C02 scrubber might have a market in the same demographic that pays for air ionizers, de-ionizers, HEPA filters and incense burners.

We'll have AGI not because the AI becomes smarter but because humans become stupider.

And the AI build out will release more co2, making the crossover point even closer.

This is actually really funny to think about.

I have friends that fell down air monitoring rabbit holes in the situation of the early 2020s and one of the things they have remained obsessed about is home CO2 levels and have active monitoring equipment and "pager alerts" and other things setup.

Home carbon capture is sort of a thing already: buy more houseplants, keep them alive and healthy.

Though the most common home interventions for now are still "open a window" and/or "run a fan to circulate the air better". I suppose it's neat that we can home automate that, if you are willing to invest in that.

House plants make too minor a difference to be worthwhile.

Opening windows is better but if you want a more energy efficient solution you should invest in a HRV/ERV

To my understanding, as with most carbon sequestration efforts, house plants are a long-term planning horizon solution. Filling your house with plants won't fix your biggest spikes in the CO2 in your home, but they'll lower the overall floor/median/average over a large enough span of time (months to years).

Relates to the long running "joke" that the best way to sequester CO2 today is to plant new growth forests 50 years ago.

I can't find it now, but I saw a video where a guy was trying to offset just the CO2 he produced himself with plants.

   1. He gave up on "plants" because they were nowhere close to offsetting him.
   2. Switching to algae, he used a 55 gallon drum of it because the numbers said that would work. He gave up when the CO2 level reached something like 2000 ppm
   3. He ended up with something like 3 drums, as well as special mixers to make sure the algae got access to as much CO2 as possible, and he had lights focused on the algae drums to make them as efficient as possible, and he still ended up barely keeping the CO2 at the "dangerous but not completely toxic" level, and it wasn't stable either.

Plants are a terrible way to try to manage CO2.

It will be mandated by the state of California for new homes and office buildings.

This is honestly much, much scarier than climate change. We can adapt to a changing climate but not if we're losing IQ and focus.

CO2 increase of 400ppm decreases cognitive function by >20% [1]

I frequently send this medium article [1] to friends + family for a basic dive into how CO2 affects our thinking and abilities at various levels in common areas.

The article cites a study [2] which graphs cognitive score for different activities at different CO2 concentrations. Each activity's cognitive score is worse at higher CO2 concentrations, EXCEPT "focused activity" or "Information search" (up to some point)

[1, note it is from 2016] https://medium.com/@joeljean/im-living-in-a-carbon-bubble-li... [2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26502459/

That article really needs a pre-and post fixing his house.

I find it hard to believe that stat you provide -- seems like a bit of a shiny lure without much merit.

Maybe if CO2 PPM wasn't so high I could make sense of it.

I've started questioning this premise given that concentration of CO2 in the lungs (while resting) never falls below 10000ppm (I'm possibly underestimating this number).

Though I'm not excluding the possibility that indoor CO2 concentration strongly correlates with cognitive underperformance, which may be caused by other compounds emitted by human body.

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