One time I had an experienced hydraulics technician tell me he was going to loosen a fitting when the (stagnant) system was still under a thousand psi or so. I started panicking and having visions of high-pressure jets of hydraulic oil spraying everywhere, and was about to tell him to hold on, when he went ahead and loosened it anyway…
…and only a little bit of oil dribbled out of the fitting. That was it. That was when I remembered that with no gas in the system, there would be next to no expansion driving the oil outward. :smack:
But consider that with any such system, you cannot be SURE that signifcant amounts of gas have NOT managed to enter the system. Particularly one that doesnt appear to be working properly. Sure, they aren’t SUPPOSED to be there. Doesnt mean they arent. For safeties sake you should at least open it assuming liquids and or parts could possibly escape at high speeds.
Thinking about this, and the famous *Abyss *scene, and waterboarding - I wonder if it will ever be ready for the masses.
I remember Scylla’s post on his crazy caper, and how he noticed that once fluid goes past a certain point up the trachea, his body and brain went into full blown, automatic I-am-dying panic mode. If that’s half as intense as Scylla made it out to be (which I have no trouble believing, having near-drowned once myself), and if it is indeed a completely uncontrollable, deeply ingrained instinct ; then I wonder how even a trained human would deal with what essentially boils down to sustained drowning.
Except, you know, not - but the brain might not realize that part
If you pay them enough, I am sure they will find a way. I know it’s not exactly the same, but I had that sort of reaction the first time I used a neti pot (pouring water into your nose), and now I can do it half-asleep.
Styrofoam egg cartons come back looking pretty interesting too. My favorite was one of those heads that you use to mount wigs on. I might be able to track down a picture of it.
Zombie thread revived because I just found something relevant. Apparently high enough pressure is inherently fatal to the processes of life: Pascalization - Wikipedia
Dead whales and other animals have been sunk in deep ocean for research purposes. They retained their shape. I don’t see why human or other animal bodies would be any different.
Hoping that there are still competent people looking at this thread, I would like to ask the initial question in a different way.
Let’s hypothesise a human who had the ability to breathe water as well as air, this being the only significant difference between them and other people. To what depth could they swim until their body became unable to function. Would pressure and its effect on protein and the cell membranes/proteins and enzyme function be the only problem?
I found this article and wouldn’t mind experts opinions on it if there’s any available.
What I am thinking is that the ‘slicing effect’ he describes would only occur if the pressure was applied on one part of the body. But at depth one would be subjected to the same pressure everywhere.
Any other comments?
Maybe I can ask here: I’ve heard that in the past, divers got air pumped down from boats on the surface, and had tubes attaching them. Sometimes, if the air system failed and pressure was lost, the divers would be crushed by the water pressure and parts of them would be forced up the tubes. Is this true?
Absolutely true. The problem was that on old time dive suits, the helmet was rigid, so it retained its shape while the rest of the dive suit squeezed around the body, so it would eventually force the soft tissues of the body into the helmet. Here’s the Mythbusters clip where they recreated it with a pig carcass. SFW, but somewhat gory.
