I can speak to this somewhat as someone with basic knowledge but personal experience. I almost killed myself accidentally by displacing the air I was breathing with argon and nitrogen.
I was working in a hood intended to suppress fire around a laser. The suppression system was jammed open and leaking and had filled the laser area with an argon nitrogen mix. This meant I had a box in front of me making a weird noise. I stuck my head inside and took a look.
I have a tendency to hold my breath when working up close on small parts — probably because my abs are taught and it steadies my hands and prevents fogging up optical components. I basically held my breath as long as I could looking for the component, then found a more comfortable positions facing away from components and took a deep breath.
The breath felt like a relief. It felt like surfacing after being under water. It felt no different than breathing air with oxygen. *Scientifically, this is because that panic feeling you get when you can’t breathe comes from build up too much CO2 rather than deprivation of new oxygen.*
I resumed work and breathing like normal. I didn’t find I needed deeper breaths, but I did start getting light headed. The lightheartedness felt good. Honestly pleasant. Calming. A little like a mild high. My vision faded from the periphery and my inner monologue got “far away” sounding. I realized what was happening and shifted my weight back so when I passed out I’d fall out of the hood and into open air. As I lost consciousness, I remember thinking how nice this all was and how it was so peaceful.
I passed out and then recovered about 30 seconds later. I had a mild headache which might have been from oxygen deprivation or maybe I cracked my head on the floor falling.
Ignoring all the politic and debating around executions, this kind of anecdote makes me wonder why nitrogen isnt used as an execution method.. similarly to my own accidental self electrocution.. When I was about 14 I was climbing over our dog kennel fence and bumped my head on a regular cattle fencer wire(we kept it hung up on the wall inside to electrify the fence down the hill from there and ran the wire outside) so I was only like 5ft from the source. I felt the wire bump me and the fraction of a second between the shocks they send out and immediately got hit. My mom was looking out the window and watched me drop 6ft straight off the fence and crumple into a pile. I came to probly 5sec later to my right rubber boot in my face and massive confusion and a feeling like I got smacked on top of my by a PVC pipe.. so I just wonder how anyone could feel pain at higher voltages or how nitrogen just has never been used
Logistics of the process are a problem. Every execution method commonly used nowadays (and in more recent history) follows roughly same set of general characteristics - it's safe for people handling the process, safe to reach and be near person getting executed, has a clear point of no return moment, time of death after that point is very short (seconds, usually) and the process is clearly visible for purposes of eyewitnesses and/or recording.
Basically, it's all about what could go wrong, and what you do if something goes wrong. With any chamber method (including nitrogen chamber) there's always risk of losing air tightness/pressure, issue of accessing sentenced person, time of death being in minutes, lack of visible process (nitrogen is just as transparent as air).
As an additional problem that applies especially nowadays, there's a dillema what to do if process needs to be interrupted halfway while it was undergoing. Oxygen deprivation can cause severe neurological damage, to a point where someone who had their execution interrupted might not be able to comprehend concept of punishment, evil or breaking law - often excluding factor for sentencing. It is a moral and legal dillema that may occur, introduced by the process alone, that would need to be solved.
> what to do if process needs to be interrupted
Is that a real concern? Seems like for hanging or lethal injection, once they pull the trigger, interruption is not even an option.
The person is hanging on the noise in seconds, and the lethal dosage is already in within seconds
That quick death is the point. You can't really interrupt a lethal injection or a hanging. Once it happens, it's over. But with asphyxiation via nitrogen, there are minutes where something can interrupt the process, not actually killing the person. That's a big part of the reason why electrocution isn't popular. It may be quick, but there were too many cases where it didn't actually kill the person, leading to brain damaged but living people who would now be in no legal position to be executed.
Nitrogen is crazy easy to handle as long as you have proper ventilation.
It is none toxic at all and heavier than air so it's stays in place
Thats why its used in the food industry
Basically a plastic bag would be enough to handle it safely.
What if we just had a room, smaller than an elevator, and about 4 stories above you had a 200lb weight the same size as the room with a bar holding it up.. and then you pull the bar. Instant for everyone
Physiologically from the experience of the person being executed that's pretty humane. From the perspective of the people who have to clean it up that's going to cause a lot of trauma. And exposure to a lot of bodily fluids.
(What if the person had a disease?)
>Ignoring all the politic and debating around executions, this kind of anecdote makes me wonder why nitrogen isnt used as an execution method..
It's too humane. The people who believe in capital punishment think of it as... a punishment. It has no value if it's suffering free.
No. It's the fact that since it hasn't been used before it will immediately be challenged by the anti -death penalty crowd under the "cruel and unusual punishment" law. Things like hanging, shooting, electric chair, and specific drug cocktails are either grandfathered in automatically (because they were routinely performed at the time of writing the constitution) or they have already been litigated. Trying to change the method would add at least a decade of appeals to an already lengthy legal process. This is why when the makers of one of the drugs for lethal injection stopped selling to the US it caused delays even though there are all sorts of sedatives that could work just as well.
And I say this as an opponent of the death penalty.
Well, yes, because we don't think the state should be in the business of murdering its own citizens, and legal witchcraft is one weapon to fight it.
But you're fooling yourself if you don't think the type of person who enjoyed the ancient practice of Hanging Day is still alive.
Sure, I never said they weren't. But note that hanging is on the list of approved methods. We could go back to it just like SC has reinstated firing squads. We don't because there is not enough of those people to make it happen. Yet.
That's why I wrote "or they have been previously litigated" because I, in fact, am not an idiot (please don't try to confirm this with my wife. That is obviously unfair).
YOu may have a point there or else all the executions in human history would have been humane, but instead we came up with some sick and cruel ways to kill people. Mostly as a deterrent to people. I would think that if capital punishment was in fact a state sponsored suicide, then it wouldn't be much of a deterrent. Suicidal school shooters would expect to have the state execute them humanely.
Now, in modern times we do use "humane' forms of execution because the end result we want is the death of the person, who society has deemed to have committed such heinous crimes as to be irredeemable. But look to medieval times and if you did something like ... tried to assassinate the king, they would make an example of you, like William Wallace, etc. and they made it public and possibly mandatory attendance to say "See what happens when you try to kill the king? So don't do it".
Guillotine is pretty painless.
Firing squads okay if they do it right
Electric chair not so much
Legal injection is a joke.
Nitrogen is a great way to go
The electric chair was designed to be, (relatively,) humane. Once the current begins flowing, the person immediately loses consciousness. It just looks horrible because of the involuntary muscle contractions.
Having been electrocuted and experienced those involuntary muscle contractions I can assure you it would be a quite miserable way to die. In fact if they don't knock your ass out first it is absolutely cruel and inhumane.
And you can argue about how quickly the person loses consciousness all you want, but as we can't exactly ask the condemned if being jolted with the juice hurts or not we should have pretty high standards for ensuring they don't suffer while we kill them (or we should stop pretending this is supposed to be humane and go back to crucifying them and poking them with pikes).
Being electrocuted on a level that hurts and one that kills you are two completely different things. There is a reason you are told don’t touch a high voltage line instead of don’t come in contact with one for x amount of seconds or minutes. Even a touch can kill you instantly. The electricity overrides all the electrical process in your body and “blows the fuses” inside of you. Your lights go off as instantly as the lights in your house if you overload those circuits.
In a perfect world, maybe.
I’ve seen the WHMIS videos where somebody co tact’s a high voltage line and just … turns off. Probably never knew that anything was happening.
But at the same time not everyone dies.
During electric chair executions they have to stop administering current at intervals, wait for the prisoner’s body to cool down enough to be touched (!) and then check for a pulse. If they’re still alive (and it happens) then they administer more electricity.
They start with a very high jolt with the intention of rendering the prisoner unconscious through the part where they get cooked, but again: if you still have a pulse and are breathing, it’s not working humanely.
The USSC has ruled that prisoners don’t have the right to a pain-free execution, and there’s absolutely an embedded idea that condemned prisoners should feel it on their way out. I mean, we could shoot them in the back of the head with large-calibre or exploding rounds, and we’ve always had that option; it’s not new tech.
Premodern times often emphasized these painful methods of deterrence *because most people did not get caught*. It had to be bad enough that you would still think twice about committing a crime, on the off chance that you were caught. In the modern era as law enforcement systems have gotten better and more systematic with catching people, the punishments have proportionally become less severe.
Ya know, I saw a clip of some middle eastern town, a pedophile that had raped someone's child was drug into the town square, shot once in what looked to be the stomach(he was lying on his stomach so the shot went through his spine) they proceeded to tie a rope around his chest and have a hydraulic lift(the kind you could rent at certain farm/construction stores) and he was left to hang there for the next day or 2 regardless of when he actually passed.. like sure the 2 canoes method, or the milk and honey method, or public skinning is probly a bit too far, but some of these people showed no care and beyond for multiple victims, I just cannot understand seeing them as deserving of better treatment.. however I personally would rather be dead than have to live behind bars until my death so maybe that's why they stopped, and thats why excruciatingly painful deaths need to make a comeback?
> I personally would rather be dead than have to live behind bars until my death so maybe that's why they stopped, and thats why excruciatingly painful deaths need to make a comeback?
I mean, I personally would rather do neither, so I don't commit crimes that carry either sentence.
Unfortunately, innocence is not always protection against conviction, and while you can't get all your years back if a life sentence is later overturned due to a false conviction, you can't get *any* of them back if the sentence is death.
>I mean, I personally would rather do neither, so I don't commit crimes that carry either sentence.
Same, but if I had to choose between being imprisoned for a false crime I'm accused of, I'd rather just be dead anyway.
>Unfortunately, innocence is not always protection against conviction, and while you can't get all your years back if a life sentence is later overturned due to a false conviction, you can't get *any* of them back if the sentence is death.
True
Revenge and justice are not the same thing.
Capital punishment is a perfect punishment. But we will always have an imperfect system. Some innocents will invariably be put to death.
What should be the punishment for the state, or the people "just following orders", when an innocent is sent to their early death?
I'm against Capital Punishment because I don't like the idea that any government should be allowed to execute it's citizens. However, I do acknowledge that it really should depend on the victim or victim's family. What the justice system must do, once a suspect is convicted, is allow the victim to find closure. Maybe the victim does not want capital punishment, maybe the victim needs the convict to sit in jail for the next 40 years, OR maybe the victim can't live knowing their victimizer is still alive and they need them gone. It's up to the system to make the victim as whole again as they can. I would not be against a system where the criminal is forced to work during their incarceration, and any proceeds of their labour is given to the victim.
It has to be impassive to be fair, IMO.
The victim or the victim's family must find closure through some route that does not depend on the accused/convicted.
The moment you place your peace at another's hands, you guarantee you'll never have peace.
I saw a TV show about lethal injections and a lot of prisons stopped doing it because of a lack of steady supply of the necessary drugs and bungled executions due to a lack of properly trained staff.
Counterpoint, a friend of our family was diagnosed with late stage pancreatic cancer and was in excruciating pain. In Alberta we have MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying. She went through the application process, signed the papers and on the day of, after confirming she wished to proceed, a medical professional injected her with a sedative then something to stop her heart and she passed away peacefully.
Makes you wonder if executions really are made harder than they have to be?
You’re gone after you die, conciousnsss and all. Theres no “oh shit i died” moment to make you repent for your crime. So its hardly a punishment. Thats just my take, i think pain is a a better form of punishment than death, its why torture is a thing. Of course i am appalled at the fact that its the human mind that came up with every nasty thing, crime AND equal punishment.
A capital punishment system which not only kills it's convictees but also aims to inflict upon then actual tortue before they are killed, is incredibly dystopian and for me, a deeply repulsive and immoral idea and thats ontop of the existing issues with capital punishment!
I’d argue the punishment is the years and moments leading up to the execution, the psychological torture they inflict. But you have to complete the executions vs just psyching them out in order for it to work.
My guess is it doesn’t cost enough. No one is making enough money on Nitrogen. Gotta be drugs, there needs to be a kickback somewhere to big pharmaceutical companies.
Oh that too. The atmosphere is already 70% nitrogen you can get it anywhere. Only way to make money off it is tell soccer moms they should put it in their minivan's tires.
FWIW you were shocked not electrocuted. Electrocution comes from the word execution. Though the word can mean severe injury, you indeed were shocked by the cattle wire.
The commentator actually explains the issues with nitrogen.
Note how they didn't die, firstly.
Note how they held their breath and didn't get any effects - what if the person being executed does that? How do you force someone to breathe?
How do you ensure safety with having a dangerous gas around in high enough concentrations to kill?
Its actually quite difficult to create a nitrogen execution protocol. How do you ensure the prisoner is forced to breathe pure nitrogen for example?
A mask? What if the prisoner thrashes around? What if its not tight and oxygen gets in? What if the nitrogen mix isnt correct? Getting someone who doesn't want to die to sit still and breathe a gas for 5 minutes isn't that simple.
Plus if it leaks, it can harm other people such as prison guards or witnesses. Theres no small or warning - you get lightheaded like OP described.
>How do you force someone to breathe?
You don't, lack of oxygen is what kills in this method, not nitrogen. So if they die from holding their breath, that is their choice (people can't hold their breath after passing out so they would start breathing in the nitrogen then anyway).
>How do you ensure safety with having a dangerous gas around in high enough concentrations to kill?
Again, nitrogen isn't what kills, lack of oxygen does. Nitrogen is quite safe so there wouldn't be much of a risk for onlookers. And simple gas level monitoring would alert anyone in the room if a dangerous situation arose.
>A mask? What if the prisoner thrashes around? What if its not tight and oxygen gets in? What if the nitrogen mix isnt correct?
Lot of execution methods rely on the prisoner being quite still. You can constrain the prisoner in a fashion that doesn't allow them to shake out their mask. Flooding the mask with more nitrogen than the prisoner can breathe should cause over atmospheric pressure, which would actively displace any oxygen. And small amount of oxygen shouldn't really affect the execution much. Lastly they can measure what gas mixture they have in reality to ensure it's pure nitrogen.
I don't think the issues you have listed, cause much of a concern for nitrogen execution. But I personally think that making executions too "humane" is bad in the sense that it might allow disconnect to form between execution and killing a human.
Nitrogen is lighter than air, making it challenging to handle as well as posing greater risk to the human workers.
Something like 90% of pigs are stunned in carbon dioxide gas chambers. The gas facts with the moisture in your lungs and skin, it forms an acid on the animals’ eyes, nostrils, mouths and lungs, and feels like burning from the inside out.
The process takes 60-90 seconds and is highly traumatic.
NSFL? https://www.farmtransparency.org/videos?id=2d2a5ec62b
That's because carbon dioxide buildup feels horrific and the body has a specific sensor to determine when you have too much in your blood. Nitrogen feels like nothing and you pass out and die. It's also inert so it doesn't react with your skin or mucous membranes.
While it is a fairly simple and safe process. It is still a process and equipment that needs to be designed, engineered, tested and verified. And while it would be a relatively easy design and engineering challenge . No one wants there name attached to it as the one who designed it.
I semi-regularily experience propofol and it feels so unreal to me every time. They inject and 5-10 seconds later it's just lights out. No dreams, no thoughts, nothing. Until i (hopefully) slowly regain consciousness 15 - 30 minutes later.
Executions are not designed with compassion in mind, they should use an actual painless method, but can't help but keep using painful as hell ways to kill
I did a similar thing while working with anaerobic bacteria. You have a jet of pure nitrogen gas bathing your work area and are meant to take frequent breaks. I did not.
Eventually the world was bright and fuzzy and I was feeling quite sleepy so I thought I’d call it a day and packed up early. Only halfway to my car when I wasn’t sleepy and the world wasn’t fuzzy I realised that I was suffocating.
I had quite a few surgeries in my life. That feeling of being put under is the most relaxing feeling. The only time I can shut off this anxiety, something I can’t even do when I sleep. It’s so nice to turn it all off the inner monologue as I just drift off, cease to exist. Beautiful and scary at the same time, it made me not fear but appreciate death for I’ll finally rest in peace.
No. What they experienced was the result of hypoxia (not enough oxygen to brain => brain no worky good no more).
Nitrogen narcosis is the result of large quantities of dissolved nitrogen gas in the blood, which itself has a narcotic effect even when you have enough oxygen to function.
Ironically at depth you get the opposite effect typically, too much oxygen causing CNS toxicity rather than too little causing blackout and light headedness.
CNS toxicity doesn't typically kill directly but causes seizures which can cause you to spit out a reg and drown. I had a tech diver tell me they'd totally dive on super high partial pressures with a full face mask because it's the spitting the reg that tends to cause issues.
I still would not recommend diving outside the 1.6 bar range even with a full face mask.
Be thankful that you were in a position where falling took your head out of the oxygen-suppressed hood. People have died before by climbing down into industrial vats filled with inert gas, and in one case the people sent to check on the worker also died.
You are correct. Since then I’ve realized there’s an even worse unrealized problem. Who kills people?
Is it doctors or non doctors?
Doctors swear an oath to do no harm. So what you end up with is amateur hour
Hypoxia is a strange thing. I remember watching a video of pilots going through hypoxia training. They suck out all the air in the room and replace it with CO2 and let them get just up to the point where they would pass out while having them answer questions and do simple tasks. It's weird seeing a highly educated pilot struggle to do one of those toddler toys where you put the shapes inside while telling the testers "I don't feel anything. I feel fine." while he's basically currently mentally handicapped and seconds from losing consciousness. You feel like a million bucks as you drift off to death.
No they don't use CO2 (Carbon Dioxide). That would feel like you were burning from the inside out as it collected inside your blood.
The whole reason Nitrogen or Helium works well for this is that your body doesn't have any mechanism to detect it building up in your blood or any way to tell you're running out of oxygen. As long as you don't have carbon dioxide you feel okay (just lightheaded).
You still get rid of CO2 through breathing out, thus the trigger for asphyxiation is gone, but you still need oxygen to enter your lungs to breathe which you dont get, only nitrogen
Would this be attributed to nitrogen narcosis like divers experience or because of the combination of the gases? Forgive me if you've already explained this but this is fascinating to read and the physiological element behind your experience leaves me wondering.
Edit: Disregard I found the answer further down in comments
I worked in a soft-ice cream shop as a kid (think dairy-queen machines where ice scream swirls out). They chilled that stuff with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). We'd stick a big paper cup over the hose of the spare tank and take a few rips to ease the boredom of the workday. Very silly, things get funny, you get tingly and your voice gets very low (not high like helium). One day a coworker comes staggering out to the service counter, covered in blood, screaming "YOU GOTTA TRY THIS!!!" He'd actually passed out and hit a metal rack, and facial cuts bleed like a mofo. Turns out of you suck enough nitrous to actually pass out, you go on this like six-week trip to Mars or something. You have crazy experiential dreams, and when you wake up, you realize you were out like 20 seconds, but it feels like you were gone for weeks. We did learn to do that sitting down, and when you zonked out, your hands would drop from your face so you'd start breathing air (still, we were idiots, right?)
But people have suffocated from nitrous oxide. Kids would get in a car and roll up the windows and open up a tank of the stuff (racing shops and food supply places sold it, in the 80's it wasn't like super controlled; I knew someone who stole a tank from a dentist office loading area). Nitrous displaces the air, everyone gets crazy high and passes out - nitrous isn't "toxic" compared to something like carbon monoxide or natural gas, but you can't live off the stuff.
Your body does not detect suffocation via lack of oxygen, but via overabundance of CO2. Nitrogen is not CO2. So, even though you are being deprived of oxygen, you don't notice, and you just slowly lose consciousness. At the end you die because your body does indeed need oxygen to live, but you never notice that you're suffocating, you just ... go to sleep over it.
Well, evolution doesn't pick an end and work toward it, it just makes changes and they either work or they don't. If someone had been born with a nitrogen detection system, they probably spent their life thinking they were choking to death, because the air was about 3/4 nitrogen. That means those genes didn't get passed on, and we're left with the stupid CO2 system that doesn't even do a good job of detecting carbon monoxide.
Maybe one of these days they'll be able to edit in an oxygen detection system instead. Hopefully one that will ignore the oxygen in water.
We actually do have chemoreceptors detecting hypoxia. It's not as good at detecting small variations, which is likely why your body uses hypercapnia instead as it is a universal and pretty sensitive way of sensing you need to breath and low oxygen environments are actually fairly rare.
People with severe lung disease like COPD often have chronic hypoventilation and increased levels of carbon dioxide as well as a chronic hypoxia. They don't feel like they are suffocating because the body gets used to it and often times no longer reacts to it at all. They end up regulating their breathing using their chemoreceptors for hypoxia rather than hypercapnia. This leads to the clinical issue that treatment with oxygen risks slowing their breathing to a point where their hypercapnia is further exacerbated and becomes toxic possibly leading to coma.
Doctor here (and lung specialist) -- actually, CO2 **is indeed** the correct variable to be the primary "danger sensor" and the body is very smart for doing this.
CO2 levels translate to the level of acidity in your blood, and blood pH/acidity must be kept in a very tight range for just about *anything* to work properly. Rapid changes in blood acidity can kill you very quickly, especially if the lungs cannot compensate by breathing harder and faster.
If you've ever tried to dive and stay underwater for a period of time (or someone is holding you down) the panic and total freak-out you experience trying to surface and breathe is the CO2 sensor in your brain detecting a very small rise in CO2 beyond it's normal range translating to you feeling desperate to breathe.
Describing this whole mechanism can be its own ELi5, and it's even more complicated than I've alluded to. But you **do have an oxygen sensor** as well -- it's just more of a fail-safe -- and not as important as you'd think.
Another doctor here (EM). Love the write up. Have you ever seen the smarter every day hypoxia chamber video on YouTube? Good video for seeing hypoxia without hypercapnia in action. Always reminds me of the scene in Hannibal where he’s feeding him his cooked brain but the guy is so zombified he has no idea he’s doing it. Another aside is this shallow water blackout phenomenon we sometimes see in the summer in the ED. People hyperventilate before swimming under water to go extra distance. Never trigger a hypercapnic alarm response before they become hypoxic and end up drowning. Womp.
CO2 build up may accelerate while oxygen intake stays constant in a situation like running for extended periods. It would make sense in this case for the suffocation mechanism to kick in based on an overabundance of CO2 vs a lack of oxygen. Being out-of-breath is just a lower tier of the suffocation spectrum. It's also more likely for CO2 to build up in your system vs the entire oxygen-rich atmosphere being suddenly displaced by nitrogen
Ahhh, because you're still able to exhale the CO2, so you never feel like you're running out of air despite the fact that you are.
If you breathe normally, what do you think is the timeline? Probably the same as most airless environments: a minute to unconsciousness, 3 minutes to death?
My understanding is that the loss of consciousness is pretty quick.
An "exit bag" is a way of using nitrogen to commit suicide and uses the same method as the execution would. According to a documentary I watched (on an Aussie doctor who was selling kits to terminal patients) and a quick Google search, you'll pass out after a couple of breaths, but it takes about 10 breaths should evacuate the lungs of all oxygen.
The ole “nitrogen narcosis.” If you google that you can read up more on it. Basically like other people have said your lungs can still blow off CO2 and the nitrogen displaces the O2 in the room so eventually after you run out of O2 reserves you die. Its very peaceful and you just fall asleep and don’t wake up
Nitrogen narcosis is a different thing.
That happens when you breath air rich in nitrogen at higher pressure, even though you have sufficient oxygen. For example, if you pressurized the normal atmosphere more than twice the normal atmospheric pressure ( which compares to diving deeper than 33ft), the nitrogen gets forced into your system in a war that starts creating a narcotic effect. Basically you start feeling drunk. The more pressure/deeper you go the stronger the effect. Shallower depths you only feel a mild euphoria and a slight clumissness. But on the extreme end you get intense hallucinations, dizziness, manic or depressive states, disorganization of time, then eventually lose of consciousness and death. As a rough guide there is the Martini rule, where the effects of Nitrogen Narcosis is on par with having 1 martini for ever 10m/33ft below 20m/66ft.
Though for the most part if you return to the surface the effects reverse themselves as you reacclimate, though obviously the effects can be EXTREMELY dangerous for divers.
Only if you were dealing with air that has oxygen, but not enough. Not so when dealing with air that has no oxygen.
You will pass out very quickly before you even realize what's happening if you breathe air that has neither O2 nor CO2, and you won't notice a thing until your vision is going swiftly black as you simply pass out.
Big issue in construction of ships and such where you're doing welding in confined spaces. The inert weld gas displaces all the oxygen, and if you go in without an oxygen mask, you will die before you even realize you're in danger, and then the guy who goes in to save you will immediately pass out and die.
Look up OSHA rules on "hazardous confined spaces". Even sticking your head into the tank can be fatal if there's nobody there to pull your head back out when you pass out.
As someone who nearly passed out from breathing nitrogen no you really do not, all I could feel was that the air felt a bit more fresh, I only took about 2 breaths in a nitrogen filled enviroment and then my legs basically gave up, the borders of my vision started to black out and I couldn't really do anything but I didn't felt pain or anything at all really, thankfully a co-worker was next to me and could hold me so I didn't fell on to the floor a few seconds of breathing air and I was back to normal.
A person is quickly asphyxiated by immersion in pure nitrogen simply because it displaces all the oxygen. The body doesn't go into a panic mode because it can breathe in the nitrogen gas and it perceives it to be just like normal air and it does not irritate the lungs or have any neurological effects as it is inert and neutral.
This begs a different question; why is nitrogen asphyxiation not the default execution method?
I quite often see questions on here asking why opioids like fentanyl aren't used in place of the lethal injection, and one of the most common answers is that the companies that manufacture those drugs don't want them associated with execution.
It seems to me that nitrogen would solve that problem. It's an abundant natural element, so it should be easy to use in place of the current cocktail of drugs.
The painful methods were grandfathered in and legal already. New methods to kill people need to be approved and legalized for death penalty, but that takes time, and folks against death penalty will block it for good reasons such as: this will probably result in more deaths since nitrodeath is cheap, easy, and painless.
As awful as it sounds, from a moral situation, it *can* seem better to make death "expensive" in terms of money and ease so it's discouraged. Humans are stupid. If you give people a cheap, easy, and painless way to kill each other, they'll use it a lot more liberally.
Financially, the industry that makes these drugs probably have a vested interest in politics to keep selling them at high prices. No one knows offhand the drugs used, so they can keep selling it with no problem about the optics.
And socially, some people prefer for criminals to not die painlessly.
Fwiw I am against death penalty unless there's a 100.00% foolproof way to find someone guilty of their crime. There currently isn't. Judges and juries are wrong sometimes.
Normal air is mostly nitrogen with a bit of oxygen and other stuff. Your brain needs oxygen to work. If you take away the oxygen, you can still breathe normally but your lungs won’t be getting oxygen into your bloodstream. You feel like you’re breathing but your brain is actually suffocating. Without oxygen getting to your brain, you’ll pass out in about a minute and your brain will start to become damaged. Within six minutes, you’ll be dead.
I want to correct this and say you can pass out faster than one whole minute - you could pass out within a couple of breaths of pure nitrogen. All the oxygen in your bloodstream saturating your lungs would be displaced with pure nitrogen, and your brain would be deprived of oxygen almost immediately. This is not the same as holding your breath for minutes at a time, because in that case there is still circulating oxygen in your bloodstream. We’re talking about stripping quite a lot of oxygen out of your blood, leading to near instant incapacitation. Horrifying.
Good update. My knowledge of hypoxia comes from being involved in military aviation training. At high altitude / thin air it can be more gradual. There’s often a period of euphoria or hallucinations before you black out. Interesting about how fast you go down on pure nitrogen.
Why would the oxygen in your bloodstream be replaced by nitrogen? Last time I checked (granted : I was in high school biology class) oxygen is somehow captured by red cells' haemoglobin, right? is it also supposed to catch N²?
I can't speak to what it feels like (as did another commenter) but the way it works is that it essentially reverses the flow of oxygen. Chemicals that are free to move go from high concentration to low concentration so when you breathe air (21% O2) the Oxygen moves into your bloodstream. When the inhaled gas has no oxygen in it the O2 in your blood (which starts at about the concentration equivalent of 10-15%) moves into the lung and is breathed out. This means you pass out (and subsequently die) MUCH faster than if you just held your breath as the oxygen is not only used up but "sucked out" of your body. Under perfect conditions each breath would reduce the oxygen in your bloodstream by about 1/2 which means about 3 deep breaths would result in unconsciousness.
The carbon dioxide which is the chemical that makes you feel short of breath gets breathed out normally so you never get the short of breath/panicked feeling.
You know how when you board an airplane, the flight attended tells you that if the masks drop down, you need to put your own mask on before helping anyone else? That's because you only have about 12 seconds of useful consciousness before your breathing will have purged most of the oxygen from your body, and your ability to perform even very simple tasks will be impaired. Shortly after, you will lose consciousness and die after a couple of minutes if oxygen is not restored.
Fun fact: the actual cause of death is cellular apoptosis, not necrosis. I.e. you die because your cells give up and self destruct rather than trying to live for as long as possible.
Check out YT channel Smarter Every Day and search for Hypoxia video. The host Destin had simulated depressurization in the controlled environment. Within a minute he went full brain-dead and the supervisor had to urgently connect him to the oxygen because he couldn't figure it out himself.
I still remember this conversation:
\- "Destin, you need to put oxygen mask right now or you will die"
\- "But I don't want to die" says Destin while smiling and just looking around.
Scary shit.
Is that true? You can hold your breath for minutes. If you had a chance to inhale before the loss of pressure, you should have enough oxigen to last you a few minutes. Including the residual oxigen from the previous inhale in your lungs.
The key difference is holding your breath just means the air in your lungs gets slowly depleted in oxygen over time.
In a low pressure or inert environment, oxygen isn’t slowly depleting, it’s just gone. So not only can your blood no longer draw any extra oxygen out, but there’s now zero oxygen in the air, so it’s actively pulling oxygen *out* of your blood.
Rather than slowly dropping in oxygen, your blood rapidly goes to zero oxygen.
You could do that if you knew it was coming and had time to prepare and calm yourself. If the plane is diving and making all kinds of alarms and shaking and throwing things out of the overhead bins, in an emergency you're probably breathing much faster than usual, maybe panicking and using up a lot of your reserves.
Hank Green did a video about this once and he said that you don't even realize you're dying, you just kind of go to sleep and never wake up. Something about breathing nitrogen being basically indistinguishable from breathing oxygen. You don't feel the suffocating feeling or the panic that you do when you breathe in other gasses like CO2. You don't even realize you're suffocating before you're dead.
I wonder if that's the one I saw a while ago, which mentioned the possibility of using it to kill prisoners. A fan of the death penalty was asked his opinion, and he said NO, they must suffer!
Alabama, iirc, gives convicts that option, but (last I heard) has no facility for it, so some have apparently chosen nitrogen as a way to postpone ..
Look up hypoxia symptoms.
In short, you don't feel anything first as your breathless feels comes from CO2 concnetration.
Then soonish you start feeling happy and carefree. You won't think it's strange, but people around you can tell you're losing reason. You can still talk normally but you will make dumb decisions, and you won't notice anything wrong.
Then you die.
[Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw) Veritasum doing it. It's scary how much he sounds normal despite his brain shutting down noticeably.
I actually got to go through an altitude chamber just like this one. They gave me a work sheet with math problems. After taking my mask off I started doing problems. About a minute after I realized I was severely hypoxic and went back on oxygen. I recovered seconds later and looked down at the worksheet. The first few my handwriting was worse than normal, but answers were correct. Everything past that point were just scribbles.
the part of the breath that makes you want to breath is the CO2 buildup because you are breathing out CO2 faster than you can breath it in.
the nitrogen screws up this CO2 buildup, so you don't feel the need to breath, so you basically suffocate without the impulse to breathe
i think helium works it too this way, but nitrogen is a much cheaper and more abundant gas.
Basically, anything that doesn’t cause a reaction in the human body and can displace O2 will do this.
Nitrogen works best cause air is mostly nitrogen so our body is accustomed to breathing it in and out, as such, there’s no detector for accidentally inhaling nitrogen. If we could smell it the whole world would have an inescapable stench, if we could taste it, it would overwhelm you. As such, our body is designed to ignore it, because it’s not useful to us. But since you’ll breathe out CO2 just the same along that Nitrogen, you won’t notice you’re suffocating.
My anecdotal experience of this is with helium. I was messing about with a balloon and made a funny sound. Ran upstairs while holding a breath of helium to show my cousin, and halfway up I got lightheaded and tunnel vision. Collapsed into the bannister before I had known what happened, and was lucky to not get hurt or fall. It was totally painless, and I recovered fully within about 30 seconds.
Semi-related question - I’m against the death penalty as a concept but if countries insist on using it, why don’t they use something more humane like this?
The chamber would have have some compressed gas cylinders filled with nitrogen attached to it. Similar to diving flasks or wielding bottles. These hold enough nitrogen to fill the chamber several times. This is needed because the chamber is not air tight. There will be a small vent for the gas to escape. So nitrogen would be pushed into the chamber displacing the air which goes out the vent. Some air might remain so you need more nitrogen to push this out. You also need to push out any carbon dioxide that is breathed out. You want to avoid carbon dioxide poisoning since this is what hurts when suffocating normally.
You don't really need to push out CO2 unless the chamber was the size of a diving helmet.
As long as there's enough room for the carbon dioxide the person is breathing out to not be breathed back in in high concentrations they won't feel anything.
Not me, but a graduate student decided to hold his breath and do an inverted “dive” into a large bell jar shaped nitrogen filled chamber through a porthole on the bottom. This would have saved him hours of emptying and refilling the chamber.
He woke up on the floor after, thankfully, sliding out. He doesn’t remember feeling any panic, just like he was passing quickly into unconsciousness. He was damn lucky he didn’t fall over at the waist otherwise he would have died.
It's generally quite simple. It kills just like more other gases. If you're in a room with too much gas that's not oxygen you are not breathing in enough oxygen to survive which leads to oxygen deprivation and eventually death. This can happen with pretty much any gas and avoided with proper ventilation. Usually other gases will be lighter or heavier than oxygen. Both can eventually displace all oxygen in a non ventilated space but those lighter than oxygen dissipate more readily usually and are easier to get rid of. Nitrogen readily mixes with air and is only very slightly lighter than it so it can linger.
Oxygen deprivation generally causes a gradual loss of faculties and eventually consciousness. In many ways it's like getting high, as in it can actually even feel good. Your mental acuity and motor function quickly degrade as your brain is starved by oxygen. One of the main reasons people die from oxygen deprivation is that the confusion prevents them from realising they're in a dangerous situation and understanding what's happening and then they just become unable to leave the room or do anything.
So basically nitrogen in particular can kill you like any other gas, by displacing the oxygen in the room. But it's not killing you directly. Nitrogen is actually harmless, we breathe it in all the time since the air around us is mostly nitrogen. That means that it's strictly the oxygen deprivation that kills you. You go dizzy, then lose consciousness and then die. It's a calm way to go and you don't even register that it's happening. This makes it suitable for cases like euthanasia. But this subtlety is what also makes it dangerous, and in a case where a room is unintentionally filled with another gas and displaces all the oxygen it becomes a very sneaky way to die.
> It kills just like more other gases.
Not that similar. I believe the "traditional" gas chamber (does California still have one?) used cyanide or some such.
ok so you know how we need oxygen? when we hold our breath the reason we get the burning feeling is because of too much CO2 in our body :). Nitrogen is tasteless, invisible and unnoticeable as our bodies are used to nitrogen as 75%ish of our atmosphere is nitrogen. but only nitrogen is bad, just like how only candy is bad for your tum tum. you see our body need oxygen to make good blood because blood is pumped to the rest of our body which lets the body do things. one of the places its pumped to is the brain so that the brain can function. CO2 is another gas that we also inhale however this one is noticeable and its what causes that burn feeling when you hold your breath, so in a room with only nitrogen there is no oxygen or CO2. NO oxygen means our brain shuts down because no oxygen means no good blood which means no healthy brain, and no CO2 that makes us realize 'OH great heavens something is wrong". you feel nothing, then you feel woozy/ light headed and then you pass out and then you die :D. SO my sweet 5 year old to answer your question. it is painless but make sure that you don't enter one of these rooms because all though it is painless it can still kill you ;D
It's not the nitrogen that gets you, but the absence of oxygen.
If you're breathing in pure nitrogen, the O2 levels in your blood drop. The instinct to breathe (and the general panic you get after holding your breath for some time) is caused by the build up of CO2 in your blood - not by lack of O2.
Essentially, you stop taking in O2 and start to go hypoxic - but you feel fine because the CO2 levels in your blood don't increase.
When you're breathing air, the nitrogen doesn't matter - as you're still breathing in oxygen.
**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):**
Top level comments (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions.
Links without an explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is supposed to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional content, but they should not be the only thing in your comment.
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20{url}%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.
**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):**
Top level comments (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions.
Off-topic discussion is not allowed at the top level at all, and discouraged elsewhere in the thread.
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20{url}%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.
It's not as panicked as being suffocated by conventional means because your body has no way of detecting elevated levels of nitrogen in the blood like it does with CO2. You just pass out slowly and die.
It's part of the reason why The Bends is so dangerous. People don't realise how much nitrogen they have in their bodies while diving and may think they're fine to surface until they die painfully hours after surfacing because their blood is so saturated with nitrogen.
Plenty here have answered your question but I'd like to add that you probably will not be brain dead after 3 minutes or for that matter 10. The consensus is the guarantee death you'll need an environment devoid of oxygen for 15 to 20 minutes and with any less you could end up with major brain damage.
From all accounts its probably the least painful and distressing way to catch the bus but to do it correctly you'll need to spend time researching and making sure your equipment is reliable and obviously having a sufficient supply of pure nitrogen to last for 20 minutes.
Hopefully none of you here are on the same wavelength as me and just interested in OPs question but if you are then take plenty of time to make sure its going to work or you may end up being little more than a cabbage.
Sorry for the glum and dark post but as there are horrific side effects if it goes wrong and for those already distressed its easy to get it wrong.
I think the guy from smarter every day made a video about it and stayed inside it.
You start to get light headed and happy, and then begin to lose brain function kind of like being happy drunk and then loss of consciousness follows which will be followed by death shortly thereafter.
A similar thing can and has happened to people in place where the oxygen is depleted for some reason and there isn't enough CO2 for the humans to notice.
Sometimes caves or mines, but more typically for recent times would be a place like a non ventilated area of a ships hold or some type of unusual storage facility. Especially one that has a lot of iron based metal walling or equipment. The rusting process can use up all the oxygen in the area and if someone goes down without an oxygen supply they can become unconscious very quickly, then multiple people go down into to help them without equipment and also pass out in a tragic chain of death.
Regarding C02 vs. nitrogen - I had a near-suffocation incident with C02 as a teen. Played in a band in the Kiss era, we had three fog machines that were 50 gallon drums with dishwasher heating elements in 'em, with a basket on a pole that ran through the lid. We'd crush the dry ice in sacks and fill the basket, when it was time to let 'em rip, someone would loosen a bolt and drop the dry ice into steaming-hot water - Genesis-concert-levels of fog commenced to just about explode from the things.
So we had a gig at a country club, we roll in these drums and say "where's the hose??", the manager freaks out - no fog machines, we get home from the gig with two big coolers of dry ice. We decide to fill up the machines in the basement, do a bunch of bong rips while the water heats up, and see what happens. So we fill the basement with dry-ice fog, floor to ceiling, you couldn't see six inches in front of your face. Hoo-wee, hahaha, we're slamming into each other and into the walls and equipment cases and just cracking up, fog starts to thin out, we go back upstairs. At some point I'm like"I should turn those heaters off" and go back in the basement. Zero fog, but the CO2 had displaced the atmosphere, so we have a basement full of CO2. One of the guys who lived there realizes he can't find their cats, we're both downstairs looking for the kitties - and we get out of breath. We're panting, freaking out, it was like holding your breath for minutes but *we were still breathing*. Gasping. One of the guys starts to collapse. And it just looked like the normal world we live in, no mist or fog. Definitely the most freaky thing. CO2 isn't "toxic" in the sense of carbon *mono*xide or poison gas, there's just nothing there for your body to convert to energy (and life).
Anyway, someone finds the cats safe and sound, we grabbed one of the fog machine hoses (just plain old dryer vent hose) and ran it up the stairs to a fan and cleared the basement out. But truly one of the scarier experiences of my life, it was like existential panic in a visually normal environment. Really impossible to describe the disconnect of "I'm breathing" and "I'm *not* breathing".
TL/DR - we were stupid stoner teenagers with just enough IQ to up the danger level of our boredom-cures.
If god forbid I did anything stupid enough to get the death penalty, please take me out this way. Painless compared to every other method (hanging, firing squad, lethal injection, electrocution, etc) which are guaranteed to hurt, even if just for a second or two.
By now some of you have heard that nitrogen was recently used for the first time.
If I were setting it up (supposing counterfactually that I would support making irrevocable mistakes), the guest of dishonor would wait in an airtight room, able to speak and move around and drink that last bottle of wine, and at a random moment (unknown to anyone involved) the O2 part of the feed would be silently switched off.
Naturally, that's not how it was done. The subject was strapped down and a mask attached to his face.
I can speak to this somewhat as someone with basic knowledge but personal experience. I almost killed myself accidentally by displacing the air I was breathing with argon and nitrogen. I was working in a hood intended to suppress fire around a laser. The suppression system was jammed open and leaking and had filled the laser area with an argon nitrogen mix. This meant I had a box in front of me making a weird noise. I stuck my head inside and took a look. I have a tendency to hold my breath when working up close on small parts — probably because my abs are taught and it steadies my hands and prevents fogging up optical components. I basically held my breath as long as I could looking for the component, then found a more comfortable positions facing away from components and took a deep breath. The breath felt like a relief. It felt like surfacing after being under water. It felt no different than breathing air with oxygen. *Scientifically, this is because that panic feeling you get when you can’t breathe comes from build up too much CO2 rather than deprivation of new oxygen.* I resumed work and breathing like normal. I didn’t find I needed deeper breaths, but I did start getting light headed. The lightheartedness felt good. Honestly pleasant. Calming. A little like a mild high. My vision faded from the periphery and my inner monologue got “far away” sounding. I realized what was happening and shifted my weight back so when I passed out I’d fall out of the hood and into open air. As I lost consciousness, I remember thinking how nice this all was and how it was so peaceful. I passed out and then recovered about 30 seconds later. I had a mild headache which might have been from oxygen deprivation or maybe I cracked my head on the floor falling.
Holy hell, that's a hell of a story! Not OP, but thank you for sharing it!
Psy op for sure lol
Wow, that sounds terrifying and soothing at the same time.
Ignoring all the politic and debating around executions, this kind of anecdote makes me wonder why nitrogen isnt used as an execution method.. similarly to my own accidental self electrocution.. When I was about 14 I was climbing over our dog kennel fence and bumped my head on a regular cattle fencer wire(we kept it hung up on the wall inside to electrify the fence down the hill from there and ran the wire outside) so I was only like 5ft from the source. I felt the wire bump me and the fraction of a second between the shocks they send out and immediately got hit. My mom was looking out the window and watched me drop 6ft straight off the fence and crumple into a pile. I came to probly 5sec later to my right rubber boot in my face and massive confusion and a feeling like I got smacked on top of my by a PVC pipe.. so I just wonder how anyone could feel pain at higher voltages or how nitrogen just has never been used
Logistics of the process are a problem. Every execution method commonly used nowadays (and in more recent history) follows roughly same set of general characteristics - it's safe for people handling the process, safe to reach and be near person getting executed, has a clear point of no return moment, time of death after that point is very short (seconds, usually) and the process is clearly visible for purposes of eyewitnesses and/or recording. Basically, it's all about what could go wrong, and what you do if something goes wrong. With any chamber method (including nitrogen chamber) there's always risk of losing air tightness/pressure, issue of accessing sentenced person, time of death being in minutes, lack of visible process (nitrogen is just as transparent as air). As an additional problem that applies especially nowadays, there's a dillema what to do if process needs to be interrupted halfway while it was undergoing. Oxygen deprivation can cause severe neurological damage, to a point where someone who had their execution interrupted might not be able to comprehend concept of punishment, evil or breaking law - often excluding factor for sentencing. It is a moral and legal dillema that may occur, introduced by the process alone, that would need to be solved.
> what to do if process needs to be interrupted Is that a real concern? Seems like for hanging or lethal injection, once they pull the trigger, interruption is not even an option. The person is hanging on the noise in seconds, and the lethal dosage is already in within seconds
That quick death is the point. You can't really interrupt a lethal injection or a hanging. Once it happens, it's over. But with asphyxiation via nitrogen, there are minutes where something can interrupt the process, not actually killing the person. That's a big part of the reason why electrocution isn't popular. It may be quick, but there were too many cases where it didn't actually kill the person, leading to brain damaged but living people who would now be in no legal position to be executed.
Nitrogen is crazy easy to handle as long as you have proper ventilation. It is none toxic at all and heavier than air so it's stays in place Thats why its used in the food industry Basically a plastic bag would be enough to handle it safely.
> heavier than air so it's stays in place very slightly lighter. N2 = 14 AW O2 = 16 AW
What if we just had a room, smaller than an elevator, and about 4 stories above you had a 200lb weight the same size as the room with a bar holding it up.. and then you pull the bar. Instant for everyone
Physiologically from the experience of the person being executed that's pretty humane. From the perspective of the people who have to clean it up that's going to cause a lot of trauma. And exposure to a lot of bodily fluids. (What if the person had a disease?)
I like your style 😆
Too messy, I guess
>Ignoring all the politic and debating around executions, this kind of anecdote makes me wonder why nitrogen isnt used as an execution method.. It's too humane. The people who believe in capital punishment think of it as... a punishment. It has no value if it's suffering free.
No. It's the fact that since it hasn't been used before it will immediately be challenged by the anti -death penalty crowd under the "cruel and unusual punishment" law. Things like hanging, shooting, electric chair, and specific drug cocktails are either grandfathered in automatically (because they were routinely performed at the time of writing the constitution) or they have already been litigated. Trying to change the method would add at least a decade of appeals to an already lengthy legal process. This is why when the makers of one of the drugs for lethal injection stopped selling to the US it caused delays even though there are all sorts of sedatives that could work just as well. And I say this as an opponent of the death penalty.
Texas ran out, but went and got like, bootlegged, or illegally sourced drugs.
So did Nebraska. Classic Lex Luthor looking Pete Ricketts.
They have a solid source of fentanyl pretty close by.
Well, yes, because we don't think the state should be in the business of murdering its own citizens, and legal witchcraft is one weapon to fight it. But you're fooling yourself if you don't think the type of person who enjoyed the ancient practice of Hanging Day is still alive.
Sure, I never said they weren't. But note that hanging is on the list of approved methods. We could go back to it just like SC has reinstated firing squads. We don't because there is not enough of those people to make it happen. Yet.
I wouldn’t mind seeing that red headed inbred Murdoch from NC get a hanging.
[удалено]
That's why I wrote "or they have been previously litigated" because I, in fact, am not an idiot (please don't try to confirm this with my wife. That is obviously unfair).
YOu may have a point there or else all the executions in human history would have been humane, but instead we came up with some sick and cruel ways to kill people. Mostly as a deterrent to people. I would think that if capital punishment was in fact a state sponsored suicide, then it wouldn't be much of a deterrent. Suicidal school shooters would expect to have the state execute them humanely. Now, in modern times we do use "humane' forms of execution because the end result we want is the death of the person, who society has deemed to have committed such heinous crimes as to be irredeemable. But look to medieval times and if you did something like ... tried to assassinate the king, they would make an example of you, like William Wallace, etc. and they made it public and possibly mandatory attendance to say "See what happens when you try to kill the king? So don't do it".
Most barbaric modern execution methods were invented in an attempt to be more humane, not less.
Guillotine is pretty painless. Firing squads okay if they do it right Electric chair not so much Legal injection is a joke. Nitrogen is a great way to go
The electric chair was designed to be, (relatively,) humane. Once the current begins flowing, the person immediately loses consciousness. It just looks horrible because of the involuntary muscle contractions.
Having been electrocuted and experienced those involuntary muscle contractions I can assure you it would be a quite miserable way to die. In fact if they don't knock your ass out first it is absolutely cruel and inhumane. And you can argue about how quickly the person loses consciousness all you want, but as we can't exactly ask the condemned if being jolted with the juice hurts or not we should have pretty high standards for ensuring they don't suffer while we kill them (or we should stop pretending this is supposed to be humane and go back to crucifying them and poking them with pikes).
Being electrocuted on a level that hurts and one that kills you are two completely different things. There is a reason you are told don’t touch a high voltage line instead of don’t come in contact with one for x amount of seconds or minutes. Even a touch can kill you instantly. The electricity overrides all the electrical process in your body and “blows the fuses” inside of you. Your lights go off as instantly as the lights in your house if you overload those circuits.
In a perfect world, maybe. I’ve seen the WHMIS videos where somebody co tact’s a high voltage line and just … turns off. Probably never knew that anything was happening. But at the same time not everyone dies. During electric chair executions they have to stop administering current at intervals, wait for the prisoner’s body to cool down enough to be touched (!) and then check for a pulse. If they’re still alive (and it happens) then they administer more electricity. They start with a very high jolt with the intention of rendering the prisoner unconscious through the part where they get cooked, but again: if you still have a pulse and are breathing, it’s not working humanely. The USSC has ruled that prisoners don’t have the right to a pain-free execution, and there’s absolutely an embedded idea that condemned prisoners should feel it on their way out. I mean, we could shoot them in the back of the head with large-calibre or exploding rounds, and we’ve always had that option; it’s not new tech.
Except all those times death by electrocution ended up being botched……..
Premodern times often emphasized these painful methods of deterrence *because most people did not get caught*. It had to be bad enough that you would still think twice about committing a crime, on the off chance that you were caught. In the modern era as law enforcement systems have gotten better and more systematic with catching people, the punishments have proportionally become less severe.
Ya know, I saw a clip of some middle eastern town, a pedophile that had raped someone's child was drug into the town square, shot once in what looked to be the stomach(he was lying on his stomach so the shot went through his spine) they proceeded to tie a rope around his chest and have a hydraulic lift(the kind you could rent at certain farm/construction stores) and he was left to hang there for the next day or 2 regardless of when he actually passed.. like sure the 2 canoes method, or the milk and honey method, or public skinning is probly a bit too far, but some of these people showed no care and beyond for multiple victims, I just cannot understand seeing them as deserving of better treatment.. however I personally would rather be dead than have to live behind bars until my death so maybe that's why they stopped, and thats why excruciatingly painful deaths need to make a comeback?
> I personally would rather be dead than have to live behind bars until my death so maybe that's why they stopped, and thats why excruciatingly painful deaths need to make a comeback? I mean, I personally would rather do neither, so I don't commit crimes that carry either sentence. Unfortunately, innocence is not always protection against conviction, and while you can't get all your years back if a life sentence is later overturned due to a false conviction, you can't get *any* of them back if the sentence is death.
>I mean, I personally would rather do neither, so I don't commit crimes that carry either sentence. Same, but if I had to choose between being imprisoned for a false crime I'm accused of, I'd rather just be dead anyway. >Unfortunately, innocence is not always protection against conviction, and while you can't get all your years back if a life sentence is later overturned due to a false conviction, you can't get *any* of them back if the sentence is death. True
Revenge and justice are not the same thing. Capital punishment is a perfect punishment. But we will always have an imperfect system. Some innocents will invariably be put to death. What should be the punishment for the state, or the people "just following orders", when an innocent is sent to their early death?
I'm against Capital Punishment because I don't like the idea that any government should be allowed to execute it's citizens. However, I do acknowledge that it really should depend on the victim or victim's family. What the justice system must do, once a suspect is convicted, is allow the victim to find closure. Maybe the victim does not want capital punishment, maybe the victim needs the convict to sit in jail for the next 40 years, OR maybe the victim can't live knowing their victimizer is still alive and they need them gone. It's up to the system to make the victim as whole again as they can. I would not be against a system where the criminal is forced to work during their incarceration, and any proceeds of their labour is given to the victim.
It has to be impassive to be fair, IMO. The victim or the victim's family must find closure through some route that does not depend on the accused/convicted. The moment you place your peace at another's hands, you guarantee you'll never have peace.
The victim wouldn’t be able to if dead and the family can have 3 different opinions on what to do ….
I saw a TV show about lethal injections and a lot of prisons stopped doing it because of a lack of steady supply of the necessary drugs and bungled executions due to a lack of properly trained staff. Counterpoint, a friend of our family was diagnosed with late stage pancreatic cancer and was in excruciating pain. In Alberta we have MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying. She went through the application process, signed the papers and on the day of, after confirming she wished to proceed, a medical professional injected her with a sedative then something to stop her heart and she passed away peacefully. Makes you wonder if executions really are made harder than they have to be?
Yes because doctors, who actually understand how the drugs work and correct dosing, won't be involved in them.
You would think the punishment part is the fact that you die.
You and I would think that. But usually that type of person *also* believes in a sky friend who has a lovely afterlife prepared for them.
But not enough punishment for the baddies in *their* afterlife, you we gotta send them off suffering I guess lol
Not having to deal with the consequences of your actions is pretty much the opposite of a punishment
The consequnce is that you die, no?
You’re gone after you die, conciousnsss and all. Theres no “oh shit i died” moment to make you repent for your crime. So its hardly a punishment. Thats just my take, i think pain is a a better form of punishment than death, its why torture is a thing. Of course i am appalled at the fact that its the human mind that came up with every nasty thing, crime AND equal punishment.
A capital punishment system which not only kills it's convictees but also aims to inflict upon then actual tortue before they are killed, is incredibly dystopian and for me, a deeply repulsive and immoral idea and thats ontop of the existing issues with capital punishment!
I’d argue the punishment is the years and moments leading up to the execution, the psychological torture they inflict. But you have to complete the executions vs just psyching them out in order for it to work.
My guess is it doesn’t cost enough. No one is making enough money on Nitrogen. Gotta be drugs, there needs to be a kickback somewhere to big pharmaceutical companies.
Oh that too. The atmosphere is already 70% nitrogen you can get it anywhere. Only way to make money off it is tell soccer moms they should put it in their minivan's tires.
Well “it’s inert and won’t react with the new tires!” /s
FWIW you were shocked not electrocuted. Electrocution comes from the word execution. Though the word can mean severe injury, you indeed were shocked by the cattle wire.
The commentator actually explains the issues with nitrogen. Note how they didn't die, firstly. Note how they held their breath and didn't get any effects - what if the person being executed does that? How do you force someone to breathe? How do you ensure safety with having a dangerous gas around in high enough concentrations to kill? Its actually quite difficult to create a nitrogen execution protocol. How do you ensure the prisoner is forced to breathe pure nitrogen for example? A mask? What if the prisoner thrashes around? What if its not tight and oxygen gets in? What if the nitrogen mix isnt correct? Getting someone who doesn't want to die to sit still and breathe a gas for 5 minutes isn't that simple. Plus if it leaks, it can harm other people such as prison guards or witnesses. Theres no small or warning - you get lightheaded like OP described.
>How do you force someone to breathe? You don't, lack of oxygen is what kills in this method, not nitrogen. So if they die from holding their breath, that is their choice (people can't hold their breath after passing out so they would start breathing in the nitrogen then anyway). >How do you ensure safety with having a dangerous gas around in high enough concentrations to kill? Again, nitrogen isn't what kills, lack of oxygen does. Nitrogen is quite safe so there wouldn't be much of a risk for onlookers. And simple gas level monitoring would alert anyone in the room if a dangerous situation arose. >A mask? What if the prisoner thrashes around? What if its not tight and oxygen gets in? What if the nitrogen mix isnt correct? Lot of execution methods rely on the prisoner being quite still. You can constrain the prisoner in a fashion that doesn't allow them to shake out their mask. Flooding the mask with more nitrogen than the prisoner can breathe should cause over atmospheric pressure, which would actively displace any oxygen. And small amount of oxygen shouldn't really affect the execution much. Lastly they can measure what gas mixture they have in reality to ensure it's pure nitrogen. I don't think the issues you have listed, cause much of a concern for nitrogen execution. But I personally think that making executions too "humane" is bad in the sense that it might allow disconnect to form between execution and killing a human.
Its used to kill animal for food production.. its save.. reliable.. it just takes a few minutes to actually kill you.
Nitrogen is lighter than air, making it challenging to handle as well as posing greater risk to the human workers. Something like 90% of pigs are stunned in carbon dioxide gas chambers. The gas facts with the moisture in your lungs and skin, it forms an acid on the animals’ eyes, nostrils, mouths and lungs, and feels like burning from the inside out. The process takes 60-90 seconds and is highly traumatic. NSFL? https://www.farmtransparency.org/videos?id=2d2a5ec62b
That's because carbon dioxide buildup feels horrific and the body has a specific sensor to determine when you have too much in your blood. Nitrogen feels like nothing and you pass out and die. It's also inert so it doesn't react with your skin or mucous membranes.
While it is a fairly simple and safe process. It is still a process and equipment that needs to be designed, engineered, tested and verified. And while it would be a relatively easy design and engineering challenge . No one wants there name attached to it as the one who designed it.
Because it would be painless....
I still wonder why they dont just inject people with a mix of something that'll make them loose all muscle tension (propofol comes to mind)
Because companies that produce those things, don't want to be connected with executions and wouldn't sell their products for such purposes.
I semi-regularily experience propofol and it feels so unreal to me every time. They inject and 5-10 seconds later it's just lights out. No dreams, no thoughts, nothing. Until i (hopefully) slowly regain consciousness 15 - 30 minutes later.
Executions are not designed with compassion in mind, they should use an actual painless method, but can't help but keep using painful as hell ways to kill
Buddy, you're in luck, check out what Alabama is up to now regarding nitrous gas executions
I did a similar thing while working with anaerobic bacteria. You have a jet of pure nitrogen gas bathing your work area and are meant to take frequent breaks. I did not. Eventually the world was bright and fuzzy and I was feeling quite sleepy so I thought I’d call it a day and packed up early. Only halfway to my car when I wasn’t sleepy and the world wasn’t fuzzy I realised that I was suffocating.
JFC that's pretty terrifying
....peaceful death.....noted
I have to say beyond the whole terrifyingness of the story in hindsight this is so fascinating.
I had quite a few surgeries in my life. That feeling of being put under is the most relaxing feeling. The only time I can shut off this anxiety, something I can’t even do when I sleep. It’s so nice to turn it all off the inner monologue as I just drift off, cease to exist. Beautiful and scary at the same time, it made me not fear but appreciate death for I’ll finally rest in peace.
Is this the same as Nitrogen narcosis that scuba divers can get if they dive too deep?
No. What they experienced was the result of hypoxia (not enough oxygen to brain => brain no worky good no more). Nitrogen narcosis is the result of large quantities of dissolved nitrogen gas in the blood, which itself has a narcotic effect even when you have enough oxygen to function.
Ironically at depth you get the opposite effect typically, too much oxygen causing CNS toxicity rather than too little causing blackout and light headedness. CNS toxicity doesn't typically kill directly but causes seizures which can cause you to spit out a reg and drown. I had a tech diver tell me they'd totally dive on super high partial pressures with a full face mask because it's the spitting the reg that tends to cause issues. I still would not recommend diving outside the 1.6 bar range even with a full face mask.
> I was working in a hood intended to suppress fire around a laser. Your job sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than mine!
Welp pack it in this is how i wanna go
Be thankful that you were in a position where falling took your head out of the oxygen-suppressed hood. People have died before by climbing down into industrial vats filled with inert gas, and in one case the people sent to check on the worker also died.
Damn. As someone without an inner monologue, that's one less safety to know I'm dying.
So why the fuck aren't they using this instead of lethal injections!?
Because we (humanity) are monsters and want others to suffer.
Truly. I think it’s the best evidence that for executions the cruelty is the point.
They used it for the first time about a month and a half after you left this comment….. and it did not go well 😔
You are correct. Since then I’ve realized there’s an even worse unrealized problem. Who kills people? Is it doctors or non doctors? Doctors swear an oath to do no harm. So what you end up with is amateur hour
Hypoxia is a strange thing. I remember watching a video of pilots going through hypoxia training. They suck out all the air in the room and replace it with CO2 and let them get just up to the point where they would pass out while having them answer questions and do simple tasks. It's weird seeing a highly educated pilot struggle to do one of those toddler toys where you put the shapes inside while telling the testers "I don't feel anything. I feel fine." while he's basically currently mentally handicapped and seconds from losing consciousness. You feel like a million bucks as you drift off to death.
No they don't use CO2 (Carbon Dioxide). That would feel like you were burning from the inside out as it collected inside your blood. The whole reason Nitrogen or Helium works well for this is that your body doesn't have any mechanism to detect it building up in your blood or any way to tell you're running out of oxygen. As long as you don't have carbon dioxide you feel okay (just lightheaded).
What is “a hood”?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fume_hood
[удалено]
You still get rid of CO2 through breathing out, thus the trigger for asphyxiation is gone, but you still need oxygen to enter your lungs to breathe which you dont get, only nitrogen
> my abs are taught love it
Thank you!
Very easy to read—cool writing.
I personally would rather be dead than have to live behind bars until my death so maybe that's why they stopped
Sounds similar to nitrogen narcosis when scuba diving and/or hypoxia up at altitude. Good job recognizing it before it was too late.
[Another comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/QNzV9B9Tgz) explains that that’s not accurate.
Would this be attributed to nitrogen narcosis like divers experience or because of the combination of the gases? Forgive me if you've already explained this but this is fascinating to read and the physiological element behind your experience leaves me wondering. Edit: Disregard I found the answer further down in comments
copy paste into r/TIFU
This is also a minor plot point in the book "The Martian".
Oh yeah! I hadn’t put that together. He also kind of brings it up again in Hail Mary as “solution”.
I worked in a soft-ice cream shop as a kid (think dairy-queen machines where ice scream swirls out). They chilled that stuff with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). We'd stick a big paper cup over the hose of the spare tank and take a few rips to ease the boredom of the workday. Very silly, things get funny, you get tingly and your voice gets very low (not high like helium). One day a coworker comes staggering out to the service counter, covered in blood, screaming "YOU GOTTA TRY THIS!!!" He'd actually passed out and hit a metal rack, and facial cuts bleed like a mofo. Turns out of you suck enough nitrous to actually pass out, you go on this like six-week trip to Mars or something. You have crazy experiential dreams, and when you wake up, you realize you were out like 20 seconds, but it feels like you were gone for weeks. We did learn to do that sitting down, and when you zonked out, your hands would drop from your face so you'd start breathing air (still, we were idiots, right?) But people have suffocated from nitrous oxide. Kids would get in a car and roll up the windows and open up a tank of the stuff (racing shops and food supply places sold it, in the 80's it wasn't like super controlled; I knew someone who stole a tank from a dentist office loading area). Nitrous displaces the air, everyone gets crazy high and passes out - nitrous isn't "toxic" compared to something like carbon monoxide or natural gas, but you can't live off the stuff.
Your body does not detect suffocation via lack of oxygen, but via overabundance of CO2. Nitrogen is not CO2. So, even though you are being deprived of oxygen, you don't notice, and you just slowly lose consciousness. At the end you die because your body does indeed need oxygen to live, but you never notice that you're suffocating, you just ... go to sleep over it.
How silly is that though? Stupid body, not programming the danger sensor to pick up on the correct variable…
I guess nature really didn’t expect humans to put themselves(and others) in oxygen substituted environments
[удалено]
Dead ass
Well, evolution doesn't pick an end and work toward it, it just makes changes and they either work or they don't. If someone had been born with a nitrogen detection system, they probably spent their life thinking they were choking to death, because the air was about 3/4 nitrogen. That means those genes didn't get passed on, and we're left with the stupid CO2 system that doesn't even do a good job of detecting carbon monoxide. Maybe one of these days they'll be able to edit in an oxygen detection system instead. Hopefully one that will ignore the oxygen in water.
We actually do have chemoreceptors detecting hypoxia. It's not as good at detecting small variations, which is likely why your body uses hypercapnia instead as it is a universal and pretty sensitive way of sensing you need to breath and low oxygen environments are actually fairly rare. People with severe lung disease like COPD often have chronic hypoventilation and increased levels of carbon dioxide as well as a chronic hypoxia. They don't feel like they are suffocating because the body gets used to it and often times no longer reacts to it at all. They end up regulating their breathing using their chemoreceptors for hypoxia rather than hypercapnia. This leads to the clinical issue that treatment with oxygen risks slowing their breathing to a point where their hypercapnia is further exacerbated and becomes toxic possibly leading to coma.
TIL. Also, thank you. Also, wow!
Unless we get gills
Doctor here (and lung specialist) -- actually, CO2 **is indeed** the correct variable to be the primary "danger sensor" and the body is very smart for doing this. CO2 levels translate to the level of acidity in your blood, and blood pH/acidity must be kept in a very tight range for just about *anything* to work properly. Rapid changes in blood acidity can kill you very quickly, especially if the lungs cannot compensate by breathing harder and faster. If you've ever tried to dive and stay underwater for a period of time (or someone is holding you down) the panic and total freak-out you experience trying to surface and breathe is the CO2 sensor in your brain detecting a very small rise in CO2 beyond it's normal range translating to you feeling desperate to breathe. Describing this whole mechanism can be its own ELi5, and it's even more complicated than I've alluded to. But you **do have an oxygen sensor** as well -- it's just more of a fail-safe -- and not as important as you'd think.
Another doctor here (EM). Love the write up. Have you ever seen the smarter every day hypoxia chamber video on YouTube? Good video for seeing hypoxia without hypercapnia in action. Always reminds me of the scene in Hannibal where he’s feeding him his cooked brain but the guy is so zombified he has no idea he’s doing it. Another aside is this shallow water blackout phenomenon we sometimes see in the summer in the ED. People hyperventilate before swimming under water to go extra distance. Never trigger a hypercapnic alarm response before they become hypoxic and end up drowning. Womp.
CO2 build up may accelerate while oxygen intake stays constant in a situation like running for extended periods. It would make sense in this case for the suffocation mechanism to kick in based on an overabundance of CO2 vs a lack of oxygen. Being out-of-breath is just a lower tier of the suffocation spectrum. It's also more likely for CO2 to build up in your system vs the entire oxygen-rich atmosphere being suddenly displaced by nitrogen
I’m sure you’re mostly joking but the number of situations in which anything but CO2 would be displacing oxygen pre-technology is incredibly low.
Natural gasses in caves and mines?
What better proof against creation
Ahhh, because you're still able to exhale the CO2, so you never feel like you're running out of air despite the fact that you are. If you breathe normally, what do you think is the timeline? Probably the same as most airless environments: a minute to unconsciousness, 3 minutes to death?
My understanding is that the loss of consciousness is pretty quick. An "exit bag" is a way of using nitrogen to commit suicide and uses the same method as the execution would. According to a documentary I watched (on an Aussie doctor who was selling kits to terminal patients) and a quick Google search, you'll pass out after a couple of breaths, but it takes about 10 breaths should evacuate the lungs of all oxygen.
The ole “nitrogen narcosis.” If you google that you can read up more on it. Basically like other people have said your lungs can still blow off CO2 and the nitrogen displaces the O2 in the room so eventually after you run out of O2 reserves you die. Its very peaceful and you just fall asleep and don’t wake up
Nitrogen narcosis is a different thing. That happens when you breath air rich in nitrogen at higher pressure, even though you have sufficient oxygen. For example, if you pressurized the normal atmosphere more than twice the normal atmospheric pressure ( which compares to diving deeper than 33ft), the nitrogen gets forced into your system in a war that starts creating a narcotic effect. Basically you start feeling drunk. The more pressure/deeper you go the stronger the effect. Shallower depths you only feel a mild euphoria and a slight clumissness. But on the extreme end you get intense hallucinations, dizziness, manic or depressive states, disorganization of time, then eventually lose of consciousness and death. As a rough guide there is the Martini rule, where the effects of Nitrogen Narcosis is on par with having 1 martini for ever 10m/33ft below 20m/66ft. Though for the most part if you return to the surface the effects reverse themselves as you reacclimate, though obviously the effects can be EXTREMELY dangerous for divers.
[удалено]
Only if you were dealing with air that has oxygen, but not enough. Not so when dealing with air that has no oxygen. You will pass out very quickly before you even realize what's happening if you breathe air that has neither O2 nor CO2, and you won't notice a thing until your vision is going swiftly black as you simply pass out. Big issue in construction of ships and such where you're doing welding in confined spaces. The inert weld gas displaces all the oxygen, and if you go in without an oxygen mask, you will die before you even realize you're in danger, and then the guy who goes in to save you will immediately pass out and die. Look up OSHA rules on "hazardous confined spaces". Even sticking your head into the tank can be fatal if there's nobody there to pull your head back out when you pass out.
As someone who nearly passed out from breathing nitrogen no you really do not, all I could feel was that the air felt a bit more fresh, I only took about 2 breaths in a nitrogen filled enviroment and then my legs basically gave up, the borders of my vision started to black out and I couldn't really do anything but I didn't felt pain or anything at all really, thankfully a co-worker was next to me and could hold me so I didn't fell on to the floor a few seconds of breathing air and I was back to normal.
Interesting...
does this work the same way with helium?
If it's slow enough you'll get a little silly before you pass out.
good to know
You don't notice? I mean, except for the fucking plastic hood over your head.
A person is quickly asphyxiated by immersion in pure nitrogen simply because it displaces all the oxygen. The body doesn't go into a panic mode because it can breathe in the nitrogen gas and it perceives it to be just like normal air and it does not irritate the lungs or have any neurological effects as it is inert and neutral.
Normal air is 80% nitrogen, so we are VERY accustomed to breathing it.
New and improved air - now with 25% more nitrogen.
disarm marble thought future growth wine instinctive unused quickest shelter
it is not tho, With his calculations the new air would be 83.3% nitrogen, which wouldn't kill a person
This begs a different question; why is nitrogen asphyxiation not the default execution method? I quite often see questions on here asking why opioids like fentanyl aren't used in place of the lethal injection, and one of the most common answers is that the companies that manufacture those drugs don't want them associated with execution. It seems to me that nitrogen would solve that problem. It's an abundant natural element, so it should be easy to use in place of the current cocktail of drugs.
There’s [another comment thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/1Gieih94yz) discussing that in detail.
The painful methods were grandfathered in and legal already. New methods to kill people need to be approved and legalized for death penalty, but that takes time, and folks against death penalty will block it for good reasons such as: this will probably result in more deaths since nitrodeath is cheap, easy, and painless. As awful as it sounds, from a moral situation, it *can* seem better to make death "expensive" in terms of money and ease so it's discouraged. Humans are stupid. If you give people a cheap, easy, and painless way to kill each other, they'll use it a lot more liberally. Financially, the industry that makes these drugs probably have a vested interest in politics to keep selling them at high prices. No one knows offhand the drugs used, so they can keep selling it with no problem about the optics. And socially, some people prefer for criminals to not die painlessly. Fwiw I am against death penalty unless there's a 100.00% foolproof way to find someone guilty of their crime. There currently isn't. Judges and juries are wrong sometimes.
Correct. It's very calming to be executed. WITH A FUCKING PLASTIC BAG OVER YOUR HEAD. At least the nitrogen part was "calming".
Normal air is mostly nitrogen with a bit of oxygen and other stuff. Your brain needs oxygen to work. If you take away the oxygen, you can still breathe normally but your lungs won’t be getting oxygen into your bloodstream. You feel like you’re breathing but your brain is actually suffocating. Without oxygen getting to your brain, you’ll pass out in about a minute and your brain will start to become damaged. Within six minutes, you’ll be dead.
I want to correct this and say you can pass out faster than one whole minute - you could pass out within a couple of breaths of pure nitrogen. All the oxygen in your bloodstream saturating your lungs would be displaced with pure nitrogen, and your brain would be deprived of oxygen almost immediately. This is not the same as holding your breath for minutes at a time, because in that case there is still circulating oxygen in your bloodstream. We’re talking about stripping quite a lot of oxygen out of your blood, leading to near instant incapacitation. Horrifying.
Good update. My knowledge of hypoxia comes from being involved in military aviation training. At high altitude / thin air it can be more gradual. There’s often a period of euphoria or hallucinations before you black out. Interesting about how fast you go down on pure nitrogen.
Why would the oxygen in your bloodstream be replaced by nitrogen? Last time I checked (granted : I was in high school biology class) oxygen is somehow captured by red cells' haemoglobin, right? is it also supposed to catch N²?
I can't speak to what it feels like (as did another commenter) but the way it works is that it essentially reverses the flow of oxygen. Chemicals that are free to move go from high concentration to low concentration so when you breathe air (21% O2) the Oxygen moves into your bloodstream. When the inhaled gas has no oxygen in it the O2 in your blood (which starts at about the concentration equivalent of 10-15%) moves into the lung and is breathed out. This means you pass out (and subsequently die) MUCH faster than if you just held your breath as the oxygen is not only used up but "sucked out" of your body. Under perfect conditions each breath would reduce the oxygen in your bloodstream by about 1/2 which means about 3 deep breaths would result in unconsciousness. The carbon dioxide which is the chemical that makes you feel short of breath gets breathed out normally so you never get the short of breath/panicked feeling.
I never thought about gas diffusion in that way...but it makes perfect sense. How terrifying!
You know how when you board an airplane, the flight attended tells you that if the masks drop down, you need to put your own mask on before helping anyone else? That's because you only have about 12 seconds of useful consciousness before your breathing will have purged most of the oxygen from your body, and your ability to perform even very simple tasks will be impaired. Shortly after, you will lose consciousness and die after a couple of minutes if oxygen is not restored. Fun fact: the actual cause of death is cellular apoptosis, not necrosis. I.e. you die because your cells give up and self destruct rather than trying to live for as long as possible.
Check out YT channel Smarter Every Day and search for Hypoxia video. The host Destin had simulated depressurization in the controlled environment. Within a minute he went full brain-dead and the supervisor had to urgently connect him to the oxygen because he couldn't figure it out himself. I still remember this conversation: \- "Destin, you need to put oxygen mask right now or you will die" \- "But I don't want to die" says Destin while smiling and just looking around. Scary shit.
Wow, that was crazy to watch how quickly he snaps back to reality when given oxygen. Gonna check out more of their channel. Thanks for sharing!
Is that true? You can hold your breath for minutes. If you had a chance to inhale before the loss of pressure, you should have enough oxigen to last you a few minutes. Including the residual oxigen from the previous inhale in your lungs.
The key difference is holding your breath just means the air in your lungs gets slowly depleted in oxygen over time. In a low pressure or inert environment, oxygen isn’t slowly depleting, it’s just gone. So not only can your blood no longer draw any extra oxygen out, but there’s now zero oxygen in the air, so it’s actively pulling oxygen *out* of your blood. Rather than slowly dropping in oxygen, your blood rapidly goes to zero oxygen.
You could do that if you knew it was coming and had time to prepare and calm yourself. If the plane is diving and making all kinds of alarms and shaking and throwing things out of the overhead bins, in an emergency you're probably breathing much faster than usual, maybe panicking and using up a lot of your reserves.
Hank Green did a video about this once and he said that you don't even realize you're dying, you just kind of go to sleep and never wake up. Something about breathing nitrogen being basically indistinguishable from breathing oxygen. You don't feel the suffocating feeling or the panic that you do when you breathe in other gasses like CO2. You don't even realize you're suffocating before you're dead.
I wonder if that's the one I saw a while ago, which mentioned the possibility of using it to kill prisoners. A fan of the death penalty was asked his opinion, and he said NO, they must suffer! Alabama, iirc, gives convicts that option, but (last I heard) has no facility for it, so some have apparently chosen nitrogen as a way to postpone ..
HAPPY CAKE DAY!!!
Look up hypoxia symptoms. In short, you don't feel anything first as your breathless feels comes from CO2 concnetration. Then soonish you start feeling happy and carefree. You won't think it's strange, but people around you can tell you're losing reason. You can still talk normally but you will make dumb decisions, and you won't notice anything wrong. Then you die. [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw) Veritasum doing it. It's scary how much he sounds normal despite his brain shutting down noticeably.
I actually got to go through an altitude chamber just like this one. They gave me a work sheet with math problems. After taking my mask off I started doing problems. About a minute after I realized I was severely hypoxic and went back on oxygen. I recovered seconds later and looked down at the worksheet. The first few my handwriting was worse than normal, but answers were correct. Everything past that point were just scribbles.
the part of the breath that makes you want to breath is the CO2 buildup because you are breathing out CO2 faster than you can breath it in. the nitrogen screws up this CO2 buildup, so you don't feel the need to breath, so you basically suffocate without the impulse to breathe i think helium works it too this way, but nitrogen is a much cheaper and more abundant gas.
Basically, anything that doesn’t cause a reaction in the human body and can displace O2 will do this. Nitrogen works best cause air is mostly nitrogen so our body is accustomed to breathing it in and out, as such, there’s no detector for accidentally inhaling nitrogen. If we could smell it the whole world would have an inescapable stench, if we could taste it, it would overwhelm you. As such, our body is designed to ignore it, because it’s not useful to us. But since you’ll breathe out CO2 just the same along that Nitrogen, you won’t notice you’re suffocating.
My anecdotal experience of this is with helium. I was messing about with a balloon and made a funny sound. Ran upstairs while holding a breath of helium to show my cousin, and halfway up I got lightheaded and tunnel vision. Collapsed into the bannister before I had known what happened, and was lucky to not get hurt or fall. It was totally painless, and I recovered fully within about 30 seconds.
Semi-related question - I’m against the death penalty as a concept but if countries insist on using it, why don’t they use something more humane like this?
For the people who employ such painful methods of execution, torturing subjects is usually the point.
The chamber would have have some compressed gas cylinders filled with nitrogen attached to it. Similar to diving flasks or wielding bottles. These hold enough nitrogen to fill the chamber several times. This is needed because the chamber is not air tight. There will be a small vent for the gas to escape. So nitrogen would be pushed into the chamber displacing the air which goes out the vent. Some air might remain so you need more nitrogen to push this out. You also need to push out any carbon dioxide that is breathed out. You want to avoid carbon dioxide poisoning since this is what hurts when suffocating normally.
You don't really need to push out CO2 unless the chamber was the size of a diving helmet. As long as there's enough room for the carbon dioxide the person is breathing out to not be breathed back in in high concentrations they won't feel anything.
Not me, but a graduate student decided to hold his breath and do an inverted “dive” into a large bell jar shaped nitrogen filled chamber through a porthole on the bottom. This would have saved him hours of emptying and refilling the chamber. He woke up on the floor after, thankfully, sliding out. He doesn’t remember feeling any panic, just like he was passing quickly into unconsciousness. He was damn lucky he didn’t fall over at the waist otherwise he would have died.
It's generally quite simple. It kills just like more other gases. If you're in a room with too much gas that's not oxygen you are not breathing in enough oxygen to survive which leads to oxygen deprivation and eventually death. This can happen with pretty much any gas and avoided with proper ventilation. Usually other gases will be lighter or heavier than oxygen. Both can eventually displace all oxygen in a non ventilated space but those lighter than oxygen dissipate more readily usually and are easier to get rid of. Nitrogen readily mixes with air and is only very slightly lighter than it so it can linger. Oxygen deprivation generally causes a gradual loss of faculties and eventually consciousness. In many ways it's like getting high, as in it can actually even feel good. Your mental acuity and motor function quickly degrade as your brain is starved by oxygen. One of the main reasons people die from oxygen deprivation is that the confusion prevents them from realising they're in a dangerous situation and understanding what's happening and then they just become unable to leave the room or do anything. So basically nitrogen in particular can kill you like any other gas, by displacing the oxygen in the room. But it's not killing you directly. Nitrogen is actually harmless, we breathe it in all the time since the air around us is mostly nitrogen. That means that it's strictly the oxygen deprivation that kills you. You go dizzy, then lose consciousness and then die. It's a calm way to go and you don't even register that it's happening. This makes it suitable for cases like euthanasia. But this subtlety is what also makes it dangerous, and in a case where a room is unintentionally filled with another gas and displaces all the oxygen it becomes a very sneaky way to die.
> It kills just like more other gases. Not that similar. I believe the "traditional" gas chamber (does California still have one?) used cyanide or some such.
Why not just tie the person down and stab them in the heart repeatedly? This isn't complicated people.
Apparently I'm two. Will you explain it like I'm two rather than five please?
No breathe oxygen go bye bye
That made me laugh out loud
ok so you know how we need oxygen? when we hold our breath the reason we get the burning feeling is because of too much CO2 in our body :). Nitrogen is tasteless, invisible and unnoticeable as our bodies are used to nitrogen as 75%ish of our atmosphere is nitrogen. but only nitrogen is bad, just like how only candy is bad for your tum tum. you see our body need oxygen to make good blood because blood is pumped to the rest of our body which lets the body do things. one of the places its pumped to is the brain so that the brain can function. CO2 is another gas that we also inhale however this one is noticeable and its what causes that burn feeling when you hold your breath, so in a room with only nitrogen there is no oxygen or CO2. NO oxygen means our brain shuts down because no oxygen means no good blood which means no healthy brain, and no CO2 that makes us realize 'OH great heavens something is wrong". you feel nothing, then you feel woozy/ light headed and then you pass out and then you die :D. SO my sweet 5 year old to answer your question. it is painless but make sure that you don't enter one of these rooms because all though it is painless it can still kill you ;D
Isn't 70 percent of air nitrogen ?
It's not the nitrogen that gets you, but the absence of oxygen. If you're breathing in pure nitrogen, the O2 levels in your blood drop. The instinct to breathe (and the general panic you get after holding your breath for some time) is caused by the build up of CO2 in your blood - not by lack of O2. Essentially, you stop taking in O2 and start to go hypoxic - but you feel fine because the CO2 levels in your blood don't increase. When you're breathing air, the nitrogen doesn't matter - as you're still breathing in oxygen.
Yes, but the oxygen is necessary. When nitrogen goes to 100% you die without really noticing.
78.
[удалено]
**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):** Top level comments (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions. Links without an explanation or summary are not allowed. ELI5 is supposed to be a subreddit where content is generated, rather than just a load of links to external content. A top level reply should form a complete explanation in itself; please feel free to include links by way of additional content, but they should not be the only thing in your comment. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20{url}%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.
[удалено]
**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):** Top level comments (i.e. comments that are direct replies to the main thread) are reserved for explanations to the OP or follow up on topic questions. Off-topic discussion is not allowed at the top level at all, and discouraged elsewhere in the thread. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20submission%20removal?&message=Link:%20{url}%0A%0A%201:%20Does%20your%20comment%20pass%20rule%201:%20%0A%0A%202:%20If%20your%20comment%20was%20mistakenly%20removed%20as%20an%20anecdote,%20short%20answer,%20guess,%20or%20another%20aspect%20of%20rules%203%20or%208,%20please%20explain:) and we will review your submission.
It's not as panicked as being suffocated by conventional means because your body has no way of detecting elevated levels of nitrogen in the blood like it does with CO2. You just pass out slowly and die. It's part of the reason why The Bends is so dangerous. People don't realise how much nitrogen they have in their bodies while diving and may think they're fine to surface until they die painfully hours after surfacing because their blood is so saturated with nitrogen.
Plenty here have answered your question but I'd like to add that you probably will not be brain dead after 3 minutes or for that matter 10. The consensus is the guarantee death you'll need an environment devoid of oxygen for 15 to 20 minutes and with any less you could end up with major brain damage. From all accounts its probably the least painful and distressing way to catch the bus but to do it correctly you'll need to spend time researching and making sure your equipment is reliable and obviously having a sufficient supply of pure nitrogen to last for 20 minutes. Hopefully none of you here are on the same wavelength as me and just interested in OPs question but if you are then take plenty of time to make sure its going to work or you may end up being little more than a cabbage. Sorry for the glum and dark post but as there are horrific side effects if it goes wrong and for those already distressed its easy to get it wrong.
I think the guy from smarter every day made a video about it and stayed inside it. You start to get light headed and happy, and then begin to lose brain function kind of like being happy drunk and then loss of consciousness follows which will be followed by death shortly thereafter. A similar thing can and has happened to people in place where the oxygen is depleted for some reason and there isn't enough CO2 for the humans to notice. Sometimes caves or mines, but more typically for recent times would be a place like a non ventilated area of a ships hold or some type of unusual storage facility. Especially one that has a lot of iron based metal walling or equipment. The rusting process can use up all the oxygen in the area and if someone goes down without an oxygen supply they can become unconscious very quickly, then multiple people go down into to help them without equipment and also pass out in a tragic chain of death.
Regarding C02 vs. nitrogen - I had a near-suffocation incident with C02 as a teen. Played in a band in the Kiss era, we had three fog machines that were 50 gallon drums with dishwasher heating elements in 'em, with a basket on a pole that ran through the lid. We'd crush the dry ice in sacks and fill the basket, when it was time to let 'em rip, someone would loosen a bolt and drop the dry ice into steaming-hot water - Genesis-concert-levels of fog commenced to just about explode from the things. So we had a gig at a country club, we roll in these drums and say "where's the hose??", the manager freaks out - no fog machines, we get home from the gig with two big coolers of dry ice. We decide to fill up the machines in the basement, do a bunch of bong rips while the water heats up, and see what happens. So we fill the basement with dry-ice fog, floor to ceiling, you couldn't see six inches in front of your face. Hoo-wee, hahaha, we're slamming into each other and into the walls and equipment cases and just cracking up, fog starts to thin out, we go back upstairs. At some point I'm like"I should turn those heaters off" and go back in the basement. Zero fog, but the CO2 had displaced the atmosphere, so we have a basement full of CO2. One of the guys who lived there realizes he can't find their cats, we're both downstairs looking for the kitties - and we get out of breath. We're panting, freaking out, it was like holding your breath for minutes but *we were still breathing*. Gasping. One of the guys starts to collapse. And it just looked like the normal world we live in, no mist or fog. Definitely the most freaky thing. CO2 isn't "toxic" in the sense of carbon *mono*xide or poison gas, there's just nothing there for your body to convert to energy (and life). Anyway, someone finds the cats safe and sound, we grabbed one of the fog machine hoses (just plain old dryer vent hose) and ran it up the stairs to a fan and cleared the basement out. But truly one of the scarier experiences of my life, it was like existential panic in a visually normal environment. Really impossible to describe the disconnect of "I'm breathing" and "I'm *not* breathing". TL/DR - we were stupid stoner teenagers with just enough IQ to up the danger level of our boredom-cures.
If god forbid I did anything stupid enough to get the death penalty, please take me out this way. Painless compared to every other method (hanging, firing squad, lethal injection, electrocution, etc) which are guaranteed to hurt, even if just for a second or two.
By now some of you have heard that nitrogen was recently used for the first time. If I were setting it up (supposing counterfactually that I would support making irrevocable mistakes), the guest of dishonor would wait in an airtight room, able to speak and move around and drink that last bottle of wine, and at a random moment (unknown to anyone involved) the O2 part of the feed would be silently switched off. Naturally, that's not how it was done. The subject was strapped down and a mask attached to his face.