And you regain consciousness. Do you make it out alive?
Two questions, really.
[ol]
[li]Does the typical coffin size (and burial process) allow you enough freedom of movement to get hold of the phone (assuming you knew to look for it, of course) get it up to where you could see what you’re doing, and make a call?[/li][li]How long does the oxygen hold out?[/li][/ol]
I’d burn up my battery checking Facebook. 
Was this supposed to be a GQ? If so, my apologies. If not; reported.
Yes, GQ.
To be clear I’m not asking “how would you feel about being buried alive?” or anything like that. This is about factual knowledge about 1) how much mobility would people have in coffins, and 2) how long the oxygen in a coffin would last.
It looks like a GQ question to me.
Don’t worry about that; you’ll die from CO2 buildup before you run out of O2. This was a major issue facing the crew of Apollo 13; they had to adapt some cube-shaped CO2-absorbing cannisters from the command module to fit in the round sockets of HVAC system in the lunar module where they holed up for most of the return journey.
Along with your questions, I wonder how deep below ground you can be buried and still have adequate cell phone reception.
OK. I’ve read that there is enough O2 in a coffin sized container to sustain an adults life approximately five or six hours.
Do any coffins have a Faraday Cage option?
Doesn’t the typical burial process consist of first draining all body fluids?
Yeah, I’m thinking the whole embalming process is gonna make reaching for that cell phone a bit difficult.
Many coffins these days are made of metal, so that’s your Faraday cage option, running coach. Even if you have a wooden coffin, I doubt that the cell phone signals will penetrate through six feet of earth, especially since cell towers don’t tend to transmit and receive straight down. The radio waves will be coming at you at a shallow angle, which means they need to penetrate a whole lot of dirt to get to you. I don’t see your cell phone getting any signal.
As for your survival time, there’s this:
I’m sure you could get the cell phone out and to your ear. Presuming you got a signal, what would you say that would help them find you? “I’m locked in a dark box” is hardly sufficient information to locate you in time. I believe they can only locate a cell phone within a several hundred square mile area, which is a lot of ground for SAR dogs to cover in 5 hours.
II’m assuming if a person is unconscious (to the point of being thought dead) they consume much less oxygen. But that clock would start ticking one the guy wakes up.
If the issue with cell phones is that they don’t transmit straight down, why would reception be worse than deep in a basement?
Not to say these aren’t issues, of course.
The other thing I was wondering about is mobility. If you’re tighly packed into a coffin you might not be able to reach the phone altogether, I wonder.
Presumably your family knows where you were buried. Call your spouse, kids, whoever.
You’re assuming it’s a legal burial? That seems pretty unlikely considering you’re not dead, not embalmed, and have a cell phone on you.
Yes the whole no signal thing through several feet of dirt would be a big hurdle… combined with the possibility of not having any signal even if you were on the surface… I’m presuming here that someone who buried you alive would not do so anywhere near a densely populated area with good cell coverage.
But assuming this happened in some bad ghetto back yard at night and there actually was cell service, and you somehow could transmit the signal through the ground (maybe you are just buried 8" deep)… sure you’d need hardly any range of motion to sweep a cell phone at waist level up across your chest to your face area and make a call. But then again…
What are you going to say during this call, especially considering the scenario laid out where you presumably were rendered unconscious during the whole process and would therefore not know where you were buried. All you can see is the inside of the coffin. I guess triangulation through the tower system would be possible to find you but I don’t think that process just happens in a matter of minutes after saying “hi” to any random 911 operator. At any rate, you’d better make sure you call someone with the right contacts/equipment to actually help you since you’ll not be able to tell them anything other than you’re trapped somewhere in a box. You probably wouldn’t even know if you were buried in the ground or stashed in some warehouse with the lid simply locked.
A lot of people have risen from being declared dead, even in recent years. Not as likely as being hit by lightning, but it happens. And not everyone gets embalmed. And the question was essentially whether you can preclude the possibly of waking up only to die in your coffin by having a working cell phone buried with you.
Jews don’t embalm. I’m sure there are other people buried without being embalmed. Seems fair to assume that wasn’t done.
Do you need an answer right away?
What if you could give whatever emergency service you made contact with your latitude and longitude? My Android phone can determine my location through GPS as well as by cellular and wi-fi location. The Google Maps asp on my phone can give me my current lat. and long.
Jews aren’t even allowed to be buried with wedding rings; let alone a charged cellphone.
Let us be very generous and give you 100 l of air in the coffin (enough to stack another body onto yours).
Let us also assume that you will be dead when CO[sub]2[/sub] levels reach 3%.
Let us further assume that your body will require 200 g of glucose/day to survive.
Working out the relative quantities is basic stoichiometry, and anyone can do it for themself (the density of CO[sub]2[/sub] at STP is about 2kg/m[sup]3[/sup]). I arrive at the conclusion that you will be dead at an amount of 6g of CO[sub]2[/sub] in the coffin, which corresponds to the consumption of about 5.6 g of glucose or 2.8% of your daily need. So I give you 40 minutes. Good luck!
the buildings on my company’s campus are connected via underground pedestrian tunnels. I think the ceiling of the tunnels is about 8 feet underground.
zero cell reception.