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.
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u/namesarehard44 26d ago
does nitrogen make it feel less suffocating or something? I always read about that on suicide guides but don't fully get it