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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Nearly 2 years ago, I moved from San Francisco (cold) to Saigon (hot). It has been interesting to watch how my body has become more accustomed to the heat over time. When I first got here, I would visibly sweat all the time. Now, that I'm more used to things, I sweat less and I feel cold easily. I suspect that humans will adapt to this new way of life we've brought upon ourselves.

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When I was in Vietnam in December a couple of years back, I was comfortable wearing a tshirt and shorts, it was about 25 degrees in Hanoi from memory.

I had several Vietnamese people ask me how I wasn't feeling cold, several of them were wearing jerseys to stay warm. I told them there where I'm from, it gets down to -6 in winter, 25 degrees is warm to me.

It's really the humidity in Asia that gets me though. It got up to 40 C in my (new) city this summer and I didn't really struggle at all, because it was dry heat.

I'm also living in Saigon and it's the same for me, at the beginning I was putting the AC to 17 degrees, now I put it at 27 degrees, you get used to it after a while.

27 degrees is still relatively cool. As somebody else said above:

> You can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. When the wet bulb temperature reaches the human body's natural 37 degrees Celsius, it'll be impossible for the body to expel heat via sweating (evaporative cooling). At that point no amount of adaptation will help, and humans need technology to stay alive.

When you come from a place when 25 degrees is exceptional, 27 seems very hot already :p. But yes I agree with you.

> I suspect that humans will adapt to this new way of life we've brought upon ourselves.

You can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. When the wet bulb temperature reaches the human body's natural 37 degrees Celsius, it'll be impossible for the body to expel heat via sweating (evaporative cooling). At that point no amount of adaptation will help, and humans need technology to stay alive.

Metabolic processes create unavoidable waste heat so the wet bulb temperature doesn't even need to reach 37. It starts to get dangerous already at 30 and 35 will kill any healthy person after a few hours even if they don't move at all.

that is true for most of the world, but not the tropics as the temp gets closer to the max a human can handle. Not to nention there are so many manual labourers in these coountries

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