The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up?

Posted by joozio 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by everdrive 1 day ago

Per Blaise Pascal, no they cannot: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

We need to keep growing, building, making, taking. Some people seem to really love the bustle and creative destruction. I'm in my 40s, and I've always hated it. When I was a child, I wondered if when I grew up, I would fit naturally into the world the way that so many others seemed to. The answer was no. I don't know why people need to be the way they are. I don't feel comfortable in so many normal situations. The things that bother the animals bother me too, but for most people this is unthinkable in the same way that other modes of thought are unthinkable. (eg, when someone who thinks mostly in words learns that some people think only in pictures)

Comment by Tade0 1 day ago

You would absolutely love Switzerland.

Many things surprised me there, but it's the relative quiteness that did it the most.

Trains arriving like massive ghosts, cars obeying the speed limit and not a single soul gunning it from the intersection.

Meanwhile back home every night I can hear all kinds of "motoring enthusiasts" abusing their machines so that they won't hear their intrusive thoughts or something. It feels like a zoo in comparison.

Comment by sentrysapper 1 day ago

I experienced this in Japan and Korea as well. There are of course, neighborhoods where noise is tolerated but while I was there I noticed most commuters whisper conversations on their phone. The thought of blasting a call or music on speakerphone is unconscionable.

Comment by SamHenryCliff 1 day ago

Case in point: Marc Andreeson denigrating introspection not only in his own life, but extrapolating that to the population at large. As Dr, Jung noted, healing happens in solitude. That’s one of the reasons that Alcoholics Anonymous really didn’t help me much. Sitting around broken people isn’t going to magically cause a “spiritual awakening” but in a few, nearly statistically negligible instances.

Turning off Social Media from 10pm to 8am local time would be a great start toward the recovery of human interaction sabotaged by COVID. To put it another way, Grocery Stores which supply life sustaining nutrition are not typically open 24 hours. Comparatively speaking they are more “Good” than social media. As such, rein in the latter rather than expand the former (Wal-Mart finding open 24 hours isn’t worth it is an economic proof of concept here) and we can improve our collective ability to make progress.

Comment by dang 23 hours ago

Where did Jung say that healing happens in solitude? Do you happen to remember where you heard/read this?

Comment by philipkglass 21 hours ago

This was interesting enough to prompt an investigation. It looks like the idea comes from this letter that he wrote late in life:

https://philosophics.blog/2021/08/01/the-futility-of-words/

I don't know German so I can't search for the original with any facility.

Comment by ofrzeta 1 day ago

You are not alone.

Comment by oblio 1 day ago

Nice philosophising, but it's vehicles. Primarily cars, but not only.

By far the most common and the loudest source of noise, especially in cities, are vehicles, again, primarily cars.

During the pandemic it became painfully obvious how loud cars are. Every time a city closes down streets, the same thing can be noticed. It can be shocking to some, but even the most crowded places on the planet are quite silent when vehicles aren't around. There are some minor exceptions like concerts (duh!) or other huge public gatherings where the noise is the point.

It's going to take a really long time to heal this wound.

Comment by dec0dedab0de 1 day ago

Nice philosophising, but it's vehicles. Primarily cars, but not only.

Around here cars are more common, but quiet enough that I rarely notice. Trucks, motorcycles, quads, trains, and boats are all significantly noisier.

Comment by xnx 19 hours ago

Lawn care: mowers and blowers. Loud, polluting, waste of time, money, and water to maintain America's largest "crop", turfgrass. Would be immeasurably better to have something even remotely native that supported pollinators and birds.

Comment by pandaman 23 hours ago

I don't know where you live, but I have lived in a few cities in the US and cars don't make much noise by themselves, other than people turning music up inside the cars. Car music, in turn, is eclipsed by people turning up music from their homes, which is outpaced by people just screaming on the streets or inside venues.

Comment by oblio 13 hours ago

Use your favorite chatbot to find out how much noise cars make, at different speeds. And they make that noise constantly. I don't know where you live but people can't scream constantly unless you live in some sort of bazaar.

Comment by pandaman 7 hours ago

As I am not a bot, I can hear things myself without hallucinating chatbots. Try arguing instead of being a redditor.

Comment by oblio 3 hours ago

There are studies about it[1]. Spend 5 minutes researching instead of being a cranky techbro.

A <single> car at 40kmph, and there are a ton more cars on the road than trucks or trains or whatever, already drowns out the average human conversation (68+dB vs ~65dB).

And most roads are rated for 50kmph or even higher, even in city centres.

Cars are the main noise pollutant in every city in the world (and not only in cities). They raise the baseline noise levels from comparable to forests (~45dB) to louder than the average conversation (~65dB), and they raise that level <everywhere> they go, and they go everywhere, almost all the time. You're looking at outliers with trucks & co, but those are just that, outliers. They're loud and stressful, but they're not there all the time, everywhere.

I'm glad you still have functional ears, though.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sanja-Grubesa/publicati...

[2] Also double LOL at "redditor" insults :-)))

Comment by pandaman 3 hours ago

It drowns out average human conversation so what? Are you out of context tokens? We are comparing to people blasting music and screaming, not conversing in normal voice. Your knowledge of physics also seems to be lacking - sound levels depends on distance. Roads are much further away from places where humans and animals live than humans themselves (duh).

Comment by Tade0 1 day ago

> By far the most common and the loudest source of noise, especially in cities, are vehicles, again, primarily cars.

Hugely depends on the city. Where I live it's the cargo trains and airliners. Congestion is too severe for anyone to make significant noise, unless they have modified/dysfunctional exhausts or particularly large engines.

Comment by oblio 1 day ago

True, but the radius affected by airliners is generally much smaller. Once they're higher than a few thousand meters, you can't really hear them any more.

Cargo trains, I imagine it's similar.

> Congestion is too severe for anyone to make significant noise, unless they have modified/dysfunctional exhausts or particularly large engines.

Large numbers of cars idling make enough noise to basically rival human conversations at regular speech levels. Anything above that (usually anything higher than 30kmph) makes it even worse. I'm not sure it's exponential, but I think it increases supra-linearly afterwards.

Comment by duskdozer 1 day ago

Even quite a distance away I hear constant noise from a highway. It's a bit surprising too just how loud and for how long you can hear the cars and motorcycles they mod to be even louder, even through walls and windows.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 23 hours ago

I live in an apartment that's sandwiched between a freight train line and a light rail track that is on a 6-lane stroad. The noise from all of that is highly filtered and attenuated, and I consider it calming and soothing (90% of the time anyway.)

Most of my life I've used public transit, but I've also been a motorist and a vehicle owner. Looking back on my long rides on the train and bus, I began to miss them, because they are (70% of the time) an opportunity for stillness, solitude, and contemplation. I can be alone with God and the angels and I don't need to stress about driving or traffic or navigating anything but my own mindscape.

Riding around in taxis more often these days, it really puts on pressure and a rush. The taxis arrive way way faster than any bus. They put me on someone else's schedule when they arrive to pick me up and rush me somewhere, going at or above every speed limit. If there is a human driver, then there is some forced, awkward social interaction, and sometimes an incipient scam as a bonus!

It is why a lot of urban people take up walking, even getting a pet dog as an excuse to go walking on the regular, because walking is likewise low-stress, an opportunity for solitude and contemplation.

I like white noise and I like background noise. I can be alone in a busy nightclub or restaurant where there is pleasant, amiable background chatter of many people and instrumental music. I have slept inside elevators and on park benches outdoors. I also enjoy libraries, which are not always temples of silence, but at least calm and relaxing atmospheres conducive to thinking and studying.

Yeah, radio and TV can really get to me sometimes. The speech pressures and high-anxiety of capitalist swine trying to shove words into my ears, it hurts. More often I find myself seeking out Jesus in a silent Adoration chapel. It's become the best way to simply listen and open myself up to the numinous.

Comment by BLKNSLVR 1 day ago

I'd like to say that there may be some human cultures that are / were generally respectful to their environment and the animals therein, but it's hard to say how much that was an 'enforced' position based on their level of technological evolution.

I think it's a fundamental rule that the 'rape and pillage' types will always overrun the non-'rape and pillage' types. Much in the same way the sociopaths are able to climb the corporate ladder with relative ease. The nature of nature, seemingly.

Comment by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1 day ago

Ecuador has Rights of Nature articles incorporated into their 2008 Constitution [1] effecting national decision making in investment and development.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature_in_Ecuador

Comment by rob74 1 day ago

Yes - the current conservative president organized a referendum which would have allowed him to change it, but it got rejected:

https://constitutionnet.org/news/voices/peoples-verdict-why-...

> in the months leading up to the referendum, the government and several pro-government public figures and political commentators openly criticized the 2008 Constitution, particularly its recognition of Nature as a subject of rights, emphasizing that no other constitution in the world contains such a provision.

Comment by andai 1 day ago

As a kid I remember wondering why all the countries that exist seem to be jerks. Why aren't there any nice countries? Then I thought about it for another 5 seconds and it made a lot more sense.

Comment by Pay08 1 day ago

I'd very much hesitate characterising countries as a whole.

Comment by andai 1 day ago

No I mean if you set up a simulation where there's a bunch of entities who are chill and a bunch of entities who are not chill, and then you run the simulation...

Wait a minute, that rings a bell!

https://ncase.me/trust/

Comment by BobaFloutist 1 day ago

Cooperation usually beats out competition though. Which is why for all that things look bad right now, alliances of at least modestly liberal countries have handily dominated and out-competed most autocracies. And the autocracies that have thrived have mostly done so by liberalizing, at least a little.

Comment by BLKNSLVR 1 day ago

That game / simulation is fantastic. Thanks for sharing, I'm gonna pass it on at work.

More than fantastic, it's beautiful.

Comment by Pay08 1 day ago

By that logic, every single human should be a psychopath by now.

Comment by BLKNSLVR 1 day ago

I think that's far from true, going by the simulation game thingy.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by maccard 1 day ago

Machiavelli nailed this 500 years ago in the prince. If one person always plays by the rules, they will lose to the group who ignore the rules,

Comment by xnx 1 day ago

I'd like to include "humans" in the list of animals being hurt by anthropogenic noise.

Comment by BLKNSLVR 1 day ago

Unfortunately those least responsible will receive the greatest damage.

Comment by xnx 19 hours ago

Often, but I do feel bad for the groundskeepers with a literally deafening motor on their back for hours a day.

Comment by ddmf 1 day ago

I'm autistic and have misophonia and hyperacusis, not to mention auditory processing issues which mean I'm more likely to lock on to a noise rather than what I actually would like to listen to.

There's so much noise around - it really does tie in to the "social model of disability" in that a lot of my issues would disappear if environments weren't so hostile - that includes noise, smells, and lights.

Comment by windex 1 day ago

During the Covid lockdowns in India, I saw birds I had not seen in decades. It was amazing; the skies had cleared up, and nature truly was recovering.

Comment by BLKNSLVR 1 day ago

And humanity as-a-whole learnt nothing.

Let's hope there's some more movement in the right direction as a result of _this_ crisis.

Comment by jraby3 1 day ago

There will almost certainly be more pandemics and they'll probably be worse. The world is getting smaller, and what takes a super high end lab these days (in terms of virus creation) will be done by college students in 20 years.

Comment by vlachen 1 day ago

I firmly believe that William Gibson nailed it with the Jackpot in his recent books:

nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.

Comment by outime 1 day ago

The amount of suffering people go through because of noise is pretty insane (some more than others). The most common situation I see in Europe is living in poorly insulated apartments with neighbors who act like they're in a pub 24/7.

Comment by tsoukase 21 hours ago

Put an 8cm thick rockwool under your ceiling and you are 90% sound insulated. The rest is 5cm at neighbouring walls.

Comment by outime 8 hours ago

That does nothing for impact noise for example.

Comment by luckys 1 day ago

Yep. For contrast, I loved the elbow room in US flyover country.

Comment by QuantumNomad_ 1 day ago

https://archive.is/F7tiS

Comment by KempyKolibri 1 day ago

Lol have they seen what we do to animals for taste pleasure?

It's not a question of "can we learn to shut up?", it's "will humans ever care enough to even want to learn?".

Comment by wewewedxfgdf 1 day ago

Whenever there's a beaching of whales I wonder if a submarine has sailed past blasting sonar so loud the whales have to jump out of the ocean to their death.

Comment by dec0dedab0de 1 day ago

I noticed this directly a few weeks ago. I was camping with a friend pretty deep in the woods, but at a campground. About a half a mile away there was an RV running a generator, which was annoying as hell, but not the end of the world. Then in the middle of the night, while we were stargazing the generator turned off, and we could noticeably hear the wildlife adapt to the change. Some got quieter, but mostly it was wildlife returning to the area. As if the sound from the generator was a forcefield keeping everything away, or at least hidden.

That last part is what really opened my eyes about the noise polution from datacenters

Comment by dlcarrier 21 hours ago

I've never seen an article mention researchers so many times, without mentioning any actual research. They really made their point, by publishing an article that is nothing but noise.

Comment by throwpoaster 1 day ago

The noise we make is hurting _us_. Decibel levels in cities are unconscionable.

Comment by hombre_fatal 1 day ago

We breed animals into the most horrific existence imaginable just to eat them by the trillions.

But here we're concerned for the aural experience of some birds.

Comment by andai 1 day ago

Also noise pollution. Also pollution pollution...

Comment by andai 1 day ago

https://archive.ph/F7tiS

Comment by jlaternman 14 hours ago

This is a completely paywalled article.

Not being able to read the argument, I'll just note that dogs are horrible sound polluters. Possibly only when they have bad human owners, but I'm pretty sure they're biologically evolved to mark territory by sound pollution, and should learn to shut up, too.

Comment by black6 1 day ago

Not mentioned in the article is that whales were once able to communicate globally, but the low frequency noise generated by maritime traffic killed the "Whale Internet."

Comment by naasking 1 day ago

The noise we make is hurting humans too.

Comment by stonecharioteer 1 day ago

We don't have compassion for fellow human beings. I don't think we will ever have compassion for animals who are sensitive to noise.

Example: Diwali is a horrible time to be a stray animal in India. Heck, even my pets hate the festival. But humans will always be self obsessed and say it's for celebration. Sure.

Comment by setnone 1 day ago

The amount of noise on this website is ridiculous

Comment by fnord77 1 day ago

Hurting us, too. i have to wear noise cancelling headphones all day to filter out noises from outside my apartment

Comment by duskdozer 1 day ago

It's horrible. Often feels like the lawn guys plan things out so that as soon as one finishes, the next starts up, to make sure there's no time to be free

Comment by PunchyHamster 1 day ago

the deers and boars running around in my neighbourhood seems to DGAF

Comment by luckys 1 day ago

What about the impact of EMF pollution? The book "the invisible rainbow' goes into that, though I don't expect this type of position to be well received in HN. I find it very healthy that this type of "invisible" pollution gets at least some discussion, however. We have to start somewhere.

Comment by Pay08 1 day ago

Is that book actually based in science?

Comment by luckys 1 day ago

It's a book that challenges some established views. If that makes it anti-science... It's up to a person whether they judge a book based only on a superficial understanding of it and without having read it.

I recommend it. I can't promise you will like it or find it interesting or agree with any of it. I find it important enough to recommend to people when this type of subject comes up.

Comment by Pay08 1 day ago

A lot, I'd hazard the vast majority, of these things are pseudoscience at best (remember "microwaves will give you cancer"?). Does "challenging established views" means presenting hypotheses with empirical evidence or claiming that EMF is from Hell?

Comment by scq 1 day ago

No, the author is a crank named Arthur Firstenberg, one of the original "microwaves will give you cancer" people.

Comment by john_strinlai 1 day ago

>It's a book that challenges some established views.

this doesnt answer the question because you can challenge established views scientifically (i.e., using data and evidence and testing, etc.) or unscientifically by screaming vaccines cause autism or whatever nonsense directly in the face of (and contrary to) data, evidence, and testing.