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Comment by Mtinie | Hacker News Reader

Without being glib, as well, there are tens of things I do everyday that have a high probability of depositing foreign nanoparticles in my lymph nodes: driving a car, standing next to a smoker, eating food from a production farm, being exposed to paint fumes, etc.

Tattoos may end up being a problem, and more power to those who have no interest or who decide to abstain because of possible issues, but let’s keep this in perspective.

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Just because are lots of common things that deposit nanoparticles in my lymph nodes doesn't mean I should give up on the exposure I can control.

I never suggested you should. My personal decision is to consider tattoo ink the lesser of the evils I chose to be concerned with.

You may have a different opinion and make different choices based on your personal risk rubric.

Sounds to me like you’d rather get a tattoo than drive a car...

That there's other things is meaningless when it comes to the potential dangers of any one of these cases (ie not just tattoos).

It's a matter of the specifics of each case. How much of the substances tends to end up there for each kind of case, what is the nature of those substances, etc.

Of course. Whataboutism is easy to promote.

Understanding the risk is the important part. Personally, I’ll take my chances and roll the proverbial dice with tattoo ink.

Could you please elaborate on how driving a car deposits nanoparticles?

Internal combustion engines produce exhaust fumes. Polycyclic hydrocarbons would be a good place to start.

Here’s an older study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223100...

so 10,000 years from now they can look at all these nano particles in our bodies as artefacts of our civilization, like we look back at Otzi the Iceman's stomach contents.... ??

10k years from now they'll probably pull up social media archives to know everything they want to know :p

There are no archives of walled gardens.

Except when we occasionally download our personal archives.

And then what?

And we will seem happier, fitter, more attractive, better traveled, more socially connected, and more politically engaged than we ever were.

"Seem"

I guess Twitter's archive didn't make it. :P The dim yet accurate view of humanity it provides would surely give pause to deep future archaeologists.

Seeing as Ötzi is covered in tattoos, potentially Ötzi’s lymph nodes are interesting too.

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