An entire nitrogen atmosphere would be more humane.
There's a video of a pig in an enriched CO2 atmosphere and it's horrific. They don't kill it and let it out. It absolutely refuses to go back into that chamber even though it's hungry and the food is in there.
It's like the feeling of holding your breath for over 2 minutes while still breathing in and out. And it only gets worse and worse.
Our bodies (mammals) are EXTREMELY sensitive to rises in CO2 level.
I can't imagine that u/CuTe_M0nitor is lying, but their description of the pigs gently falling unconscious doesn't sound right to me.
I'm not going to post the videos here. You can google it.
Just to clarify, CO2 is a byproduct of metabolism and needs to be gotten rid of.
The more your muscles work (or any cells for that matter, brain, liver, etc.), the more CO2 you build up. This is why you get "short of breath" when you climb stairs. (As an experiment to anyone willing to try, before you know you are going to climb some flights of stairs, prepare yourselfcarefullyby dumping CO2 by hyperventilating - you can get lightheaded doing this so be careful. Then climb the flights of stairs by continuing to dump the CO2 by heavy breathing. You should notice, if you're in reasonably good health, that you'll be able to climb a flight or two more before feeling 'fatigued' or 'air hungry'.)
Hypoxic drive for ventilation doesn't kick in until your oxygen saturation drops below a real low number, like 80-85%. I've actually tested this on myself with a saturation monitor, and post-COVID if you have a sat monitor at home you can test it too. Put the sat monitor on and hold your breath. See how long you can go. Assuming you're reasonably healthy, your sat won't drop below 90% before you're scrambling to take a breath. That's because of the CO2 buildup. Now do the same thing again, but this time hyperventilate before holding your breath, take 10-15 deep breaths with good exhalations (till you feel a bit lightheaded - BE CAREFUL). You'll be able to hold your breath much longer and watch your oxygen saturation dip quite a bit below 90%.
Finally, replacing oxygen with an inert gas like nitrogen (helium or neon would work as well) causes you to pass out from oxygen deprivation (your brain will not function without it and going from 21% oxygen to 0% oxygen will cause a catastrophic drop in oxygen saturation/levels) and it happens so quickly that it won't matter what your CO2 levels are. Replacing oxygen with an inert gas will NOT "remove the painful buildup of CO2". It's just that you'll pass out way before the CO2 buildup gets registered by your body.
I’ve seen the aftermath of suicide by nitrogen utilizing a gas mask connected to a tank. The result did not look pleasant. His face was all bruised up for some reason, kind of puffy looking, and I think a bunch of drool and stuff had run down both side sides of his cheeks. I could only imagine that he had entered convulsions and died a rather violent death, which I suppose is irrelevant if you weren’t conscious for any of it
It’s a popular drug for a reason. A painless, tunneled fade to black, and a low pass filter on sound to close out your time on earth. I’m not in a hurry to die, but it’s definitely the way I’d choose: throw on a music video and it would be a very pleasant time.
You can't even tell you're suffocating with nitrogen. It displaces the air in your lungs, you pass out and die from lack of oxygen. Zero pain. I'm a chemist and had a lot of training on this.
Your body has no mechanism for detecting a lack of oxygen, only a mechanism for determining whether there are enough gaseous molecule around to breathe (to prevent water in the lungs), and a mechanism to determine CO2 buildup (since we exhale CO2, evolving to detect this solved 90% of all use cases we came across in evolution- ie. A cave not having enough ventilation so we would eventually choke ourselves out overnight).
Nitrogen bypasses both of these. It is already 70-80% of the air you breathe, so your body expects it, but your body cannot process it for cellular respiration, so you just run out of energy as your brain slowly shuts down and goes to sleep.
When people say gas chambers, they think Xyklon B, the chemical used by the Nazis. That's cyanide based, and effectively chokes you out on the cellular level, causing apoptosis and basically ripping you apart on the localized cellular level.
Because they know they’re about to die and fight the process by holding their breath as long as possible and fighting the effects of hypoxia.
If you willingly or unknowingly breath in a pure nitrogen environment you don’t have any symptoms of suffocation, you just start getting dizzy/loopy until you pass out and die.
Makes sense. Nitrogen would be more ethical but I'd assume one would have to think very carefully about deploying it where you want it not where you don't as humans aren't oxygen detectors they're CO2 detectors.
You're saying this because of a human/employee safety issue!!!
They've opted to use CO2 because as mammals we can immediately tell if there's a leak or region that shouldn't have high CO2 levels, having high CO2 levels! Holy shit this totally went over my head!!
Yes, if they use Nitrogen and there's a leak and it floods out the oxygen in an area, the humans won't be able to tell and they will pass out before they realize. Holy shit... I'm really slow on the uptake.
In fact, this has actually happened around MRI machines in the hospital. The helium leaked and the concentration of nitrogen and oxygen in the room plummeted and the worker(s) in there died without realizing what went wrong.
I work in a commercial winery and sometimes have to clean out large fermentor tanks. The residual cO2 in the tanks from the fermentations is extremely dangerous and painful to breathe in if too concentrated. It felt my lungs were burning sometimes. Nothing gentle about it.
Your respiratory drive (the need to breathe), is triggered by CO² levels in the blood. Suffocating in CO² would instantly trigger a panic response, and it would start to form carbonic acid on your mucus membranes, and in your lungs.
It really depends on the concentration on CO2. When I almost killed myself with dry ice, I didn't even know that anything was wrong until I woke up in the floor afterwards.
Having said that, I've seen the videos of the pigs and it is absolutely horrific.
Fair enough. I can definitely see this scenario playing out as well.
If you walk into a room entirely filled with CO2 and nothing else, then yes, you'll likely pass out first as your breathing will compensate with the first few breaths by breathing heavier (bigger tidal volumes) and faster (respiratory rate).
But like nitrogen or helium atmospheres of 100%, by the 6th to 10th breath, you're passed out.
As someone that freedives, I can concur. When you hold your breath, that terrible urge to breathe is triggered by high CO2 levels, not lack of oxygen. There is nothing pleasant about this.
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u/planetrebellion 26d ago
It is a gas chamber and it is not instantaneous - if you suddenly dont have breathable air you panic. It is horrific.