How to monitor oxygen levels with medieval oxygen sphere
The characters in my world use oxygen spheres like the top answer to this post (a leather balloon filled with air) to safely traverse land filled with smoke. How would you know when you are running out of air? Only medieval technology allowed.
Edit: This is a balloon you can strap to your back. A leather chord attaches the balloon to a mask on your mouth. I want enough air to last about 2 hours, so assuming a human breathes 440 liters of air every 15 minutes, as the post I linked assumes, the balloon would be about 4 cubic meters. Also removed bad assumption that oxygen is more dense than c02
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/173981. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Bring a canary with them. When it dies, find fresh air fast.
Yes, it's a trite answer, but it's also what we did back before we had technological ways of monitoring air quality.
If they're allowed sufficient scientific knowledge, when they start getting headaches, that's another indicator. (Especially as COâ‚‚ may build up to problematic levels faster than Oâ‚‚ is depleted.)
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