[adwhit]

Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded.

The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1].

What is the endgame here?

[1] eg https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf

[blhack]

How much time have you spent in the woods? It's definitly far, far from quiet. At least where I grew up. Maybe in the dead of the night, but here in the middle of the city, on a Main Street, it is also so quiet in my room that I can hear my la croix fizzing from 8 feet away.

[brokenmachine]

There's lots of different sounds to hear, but on a decibel level it must be quiet in the woods I think.

[Symbiote]

Some visitors to Copenhagen remark that it's surprisingly quiet for a capital city. Others say it "feels boring", which I think is partly because they associate a noisy city centre (e.g. London or Paris) with fun.

There are far fewer cars in the city centre than most cities the size of Copenhagen; enough roads are restricted to people on foot or bicycles that relatively few people try and drive to, from or through it.

[brokenmachine]

Your comment has just added Copenhagen to my list of "must-visit" cities.

[probably_wrong]

I agree with cars being the problem. I only thought about that when I learned that laws were drafted to force electric cars to make noise - for a brief couple of seconds I realised how different the world would be if all cars were silent... and then I got my hopes crushed.

I truly cannot picture what life would be like without car noise and light pollution.

[matthewheath]

In the UK at least, there's a good reason behind the law. Electric cars are required to make noise so that visually impaired people know a car is approaching.

[keiferski]

Check out the movie Gattaca for a vision of a future world with silent electric cars.

[brokenmachine]

Most of the noise from cars is from the tyres.

[dsfyu404ed]

Traffic in a city where every street is cobblestone and they are traveled by horses with iron shoes pulling carts and carriages with iron tired wheels is not going to be very quiet.

I would expect that the noise was in fact less than modern vehicles but the cities of the past were not full of the quiet sounds of nature that people like to whitewash their imagination with.

[naravara]

Cars, industrial equipment, and things like HVAC systems all play a big role.

Racism was definitely the primary motivator of White flight for the cities, but I also wonder to what extent people just wanted to get away from industrial noise pollution, which surely must have been at a peak during that era.

[cr0sh]

> The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects.

I wonder if that hypothesis is related at all to hypothesis of bicameralism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Note: I haven't read the book, so maybe it was covered...

[blattimwind]

Woods are not quiet.

[saalweachter]

I was surprised as an adult how loud squirrels are scampering around the woods.