6 ms·

Scary. Or does everyone just carry oxygen tanks with them in the future?

guntars 5y ago
Just for the babies. The babies stay in a little bubble with the correct atmosphere and it's a big party when they come out the first time!
netr0ute 5y ago
If so, then Spaceballs predicted the future exactly.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Its not about O2, is about an excess of CO2. All of these schemes about CO2 capture don't make sense atmospherically (we're physically digging out too much carbon to put it back into the ground economically) - But CO2 capture makes sense inside buildings. Of course, all of this is just an extra burden on the individual - buying air filters, CO2 capture, expensive ventilation, CO2 monitors - when we could just restrict our coal and oil usage in the first place, much more economically.
perihelions 5y ago
Would be relatively inexpensive to scrub CO2 in indoor spaces (in developed countries), with NaOH for instance [0]. (I wonder why this wouldn't already be a thing: normal indoor CO2 [1] is in the same range as the global CO2 in the OP mouse paper. Indoor air pollution is underappreciated). [0] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber (The amine methods wouldn't be a good idea, because the smell is reportedly extremely vile. It's what nuclear submarines' life support uses -- I forgot the link but there was interesting article about this). [1] https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/carbondioxide.htm https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/carbondioxide.htm edit: I guess plants work too
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Could use (renewables produced) hydrogen and the Bosch process (consuming CO2) to have your scrubbers spit out graphite, water, and heat.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  edit: I guess plants work too You'd basically need to fit the entire food production capacity for each person inside a building to counteract the CO2 from breathing. Exhaled CO2 comes from food, so the same mass of carbon would have to be converted back into food or other plants. Chemical scrubbing seems more viable, and might be a thing we start seeing in HVAC systems of the future.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    Does all the CO2 from food get exhaled or does some get passed with stool?
    - ben_w 5y ago
      CO2 is a gas, stool isn’t. More specifically, the CO2 has to get out of your blood to make way for the next load of oxygen, and that happens in your lungs not via your digestive tract.
      - ivalm 5y ago
        He slightly mis-wrote, he meant percentage of carbon from food that gets converted to CO2 and then exhaled. Not all of food carbon becomes CO2 therefore you don’t need exactly equivalent biomass growth to offset food consumption.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
        But stool is gassing out too. Sometimes very noticably so...
        ben_w 5y ago
        Farts are not your breath. And if any significant fraction of the carbon in your stool converted into CO2 (which is odourless), released continuously would be bad enough (not as bad as breathing through your backside but much worse than any normal farting), and doing so all at once would be dangerously explosive — in the “you need emergency hospital treatment for a ruptured intestine” sense rather than a the slapstick comedy sense.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  The amine smell isn't vile but it's strong and sticks in clothes and other fabric and most people probably don't want to deal with it if there's an alternative.
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  It's probably easier to concentrate oxygen/nitrogen and add them, rather than scrubbing CO2. It's a lot harder to remove a gas than it is to dilute it by adding other gases. A home oxygen concentrator can be had for <$1k. The most difficult thing might be reliably monitoring the gas levels to make sure an unsafe imbalance isn't created.
  - perihelions 5y ago
    Scrubbing CO2 is very easy because it is a pretty reactive chemical -- simply spraying air with a strong alkaline solution works. Separating nitrogen is by comparison very involved (it's a cryogenic distillation of liquefied air), and also there's like three orders of magnitude more of it. Check the wikipedia article I linked: this is a solved problem in multiple contexts.
    - throwaway09223 5y ago
      I think you're right. I didn't realize how small of a percentage normal CO2 levels were. Thanks for the correction!
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Two humans will output a thousand liters of CO2 a day, so to keep that at a low level would require millions of liters of oxygen/nitrogen. Versus several pounds of scrubbing mixture.
    - krastanov 5y ago
      No? You use filtered outside air to mix it down to outside levels and only then add concentrated gas (cryogenically separated from the same outside air). It would probably be just a few pounds of oxygen (instead of a few pounds of scrubbing mixture that needs to be trucked in and out).
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        If you can just flood in outside air then you don't need any pure gas at all. If need pure gas, for example you're trying to avoid losing your air conditioning or you're aiming for sub-ambient CO2, then you can't mix in lots of outside air. For the former you'd need enormous amounts of cooling and humidity adjustment, and for the latter outside air will actually make your job harder. So in those circumstances, the math is very simple. A human outputs X CO2, you want X to be a fraction of a thousandth of the air, you either scrub it or you add thousands of X in purified oxygen+nitrogen.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  Humans produce about 2tonnes of CO2 annually, and even at an industrial scale, CO2 scrubbing costs about $1,000/tonne: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carbon-air-120911.html#:~:text=After%20a%20detailed%20comparison%2C%20the,for%20current%20power%2Dplant%20scrubbers https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carb.... And that's at an industrial scale - residential scale would be even more expensive. Not all of the CO2 in the air has to be removed though and humans are not at home all the time. It would cost, at the very highest range, $50t to stop climate change over 20 years. That's $2.5t per year, or $2,500 per middle class person for 20 years. Plus, we get a whole lot of benefits from a cleaner environment without oil and coal. https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/cost-to-end-climate-change/#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20how%20much%20money,how%20to%20stop%20climate%20change https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/cost-to-end-climate-chang.... Its cheaper and more effective to just... deal with oil and coal usage as a collective, rather than all of these ad-hoc individual amelioration measures.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Though it's quite possible the scrubbing cost could drop from $1000 to $100. 2011 is getting old for this kind of analysis.
secondcoming 5y ago
only going by the abstract, it seems not, but there may be a business opportunity for oxygen hotels catering to pregnant women. Go long oxygen!
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Yes. Perry, err... Perrier Air!

Just for the babies. The babies stay in a little bubble with the correct atmosphere and it's a big party when they come out the first time!

netr0ute 5y ago

If so, then Spaceballs predicted the future exactly.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Its not about O2, is about an excess of CO2. All of these schemes about CO2 capture don't make sense atmospherically (we're physically digging out too much carbon to put it back into the ground economically) - But CO2 capture makes sense inside buildings. Of course, all of this is just an extra burden on the individual - buying air filters, CO2 capture, expensive ventilation, CO2 monitors - when we could just restrict our coal and oil usage in the first place, much more economically.

perihelions 5y ago

Would be relatively inexpensive to scrub CO2 in indoor spaces (in developed countries), with NaOH for instance [0]. (I wonder why this wouldn't already be a thing: normal indoor CO2 [1] is in the same range as the global CO2 in the OP mouse paper. Indoor air pollution is underappreciated). [0] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber (The amine methods wouldn't be a good idea, because the smell is reportedly extremely vile. It's what nuclear submarines' life support uses -- I forgot the link but there was interesting article about this). [1] https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/carbondioxide.htm https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/carbondioxide.htm edit: I guess plants work too

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Could use (renewables produced) hydrogen and the Bosch process (consuming CO2) to have your scrubbers spit out graphite, water, and heat.
nitrogen 5y ago
edit: I guess plants work too You'd basically need to fit the entire food production capacity for each person inside a building to counteract the CO2 from breathing. Exhaled CO2 comes from food, so the same mass of carbon would have to be converted back into food or other plants. Chemical scrubbing seems more viable, and might be a thing we start seeing in HVAC systems of the future.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  Does all the CO2 from food get exhaled or does some get passed with stool?
  - ben_w 5y ago
    CO2 is a gas, stool isn’t. More specifically, the CO2 has to get out of your blood to make way for the next load of oxygen, and that happens in your lungs not via your digestive tract.
    - ivalm 5y ago
      He slightly mis-wrote, he meant percentage of carbon from food that gets converted to CO2 and then exhaled. Not all of food carbon becomes CO2 therefore you don’t need exactly equivalent biomass growth to offset food consumption.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      But stool is gassing out too. Sometimes very noticably so...
      - ben_w 5y ago
        Farts are not your breath. And if any significant fraction of the carbon in your stool converted into CO2 (which is odourless), released continuously would be bad enough (not as bad as breathing through your backside but much worse than any normal farting), and doing so all at once would be dangerously explosive — in the “you need emergency hospital treatment for a ruptured intestine” sense rather than a the slapstick comedy sense.
i_am_proteus 5y ago
The amine smell isn't vile but it's strong and sticks in clothes and other fabric and most people probably don't want to deal with it if there's an alternative.
throwaway09223 5y ago
It's probably easier to concentrate oxygen/nitrogen and add them, rather than scrubbing CO2. It's a lot harder to remove a gas than it is to dilute it by adding other gases. A home oxygen concentrator can be had for <$1k. The most difficult thing might be reliably monitoring the gas levels to make sure an unsafe imbalance isn't created.
- perihelions 5y ago
  Scrubbing CO2 is very easy because it is a pretty reactive chemical -- simply spraying air with a strong alkaline solution works. Separating nitrogen is by comparison very involved (it's a cryogenic distillation of liquefied air), and also there's like three orders of magnitude more of it. Check the wikipedia article I linked: this is a solved problem in multiple contexts.
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    I think you're right. I didn't realize how small of a percentage normal CO2 levels were. Thanks for the correction!
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Two humans will output a thousand liters of CO2 a day, so to keep that at a low level would require millions of liters of oxygen/nitrogen. Versus several pounds of scrubbing mixture.
  - krastanov 5y ago
    No? You use filtered outside air to mix it down to outside levels and only then add concentrated gas (cryogenically separated from the same outside air). It would probably be just a few pounds of oxygen (instead of a few pounds of scrubbing mixture that needs to be trucked in and out).
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      If you can just flood in outside air then you don't need any pure gas at all. If need pure gas, for example you're trying to avoid losing your air conditioning or you're aiming for sub-ambient CO2, then you can't mix in lots of outside air. For the former you'd need enormous amounts of cooling and humidity adjustment, and for the latter outside air will actually make your job harder. So in those circumstances, the math is very simple. A human outputs X CO2, you want X to be a fraction of a thousandth of the air, you either scrub it or you add thousands of X in purified oxygen+nitrogen.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Humans produce about 2tonnes of CO2 annually, and even at an industrial scale, CO2 scrubbing costs about $1,000/tonne: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carbon-air-120911.html#:~:text=After%20a%20detailed%20comparison%2C%20the,for%20current%20power%2Dplant%20scrubbers https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carb.... And that's at an industrial scale - residential scale would be even more expensive. Not all of the CO2 in the air has to be removed though and humans are not at home all the time. It would cost, at the very highest range, $50t to stop climate change over 20 years. That's $2.5t per year, or $2,500 per middle class person for 20 years. Plus, we get a whole lot of benefits from a cleaner environment without oil and coal. https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/cost-to-end-climate-change/#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20how%20much%20money,how%20to%20stop%20climate%20change https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/cost-to-end-climate-chang.... Its cheaper and more effective to just... deal with oil and coal usage as a collective, rather than all of these ad-hoc individual amelioration measures.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Though it's quite possible the scrubbing cost could drop from $1000 to $100. 2011 is getting old for this kind of analysis.

secondcoming 5y ago

only going by the abstract, it seems not, but there may be a business opportunity for oxygen hotels catering to pregnant women. Go long oxygen!

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

Yes. Perry, err... Perrier Air!