Don’t Need Answer Fast
Excluding trauma (gunshots, electrocution, decapitation, etc.), what is the fastest way from going to 100% healthy to 100% dead? Would a breathing mask hooked to a tank of CO do me in instantly? Some jellyfish off the coast of Australia whose sting takes you out in 40 seconds? Whatever they give prisoners condemned to lethal injection (which, IIRC, takes 6-7 minutes)?
CO takes time, maybe 30 mins.
Maybe you should call a hot line first. It gets better.
According to the thread on decapitation, loss of blood pressure and loss of feed to the brain causes unconsciousness in seconds. So, I would imagine choking and squeezng the blood supply to the brain would work - out cold in 20 seconds, dead in a few minutes.
Nothing beats the effect and irreversibility of a lethal poison straight to the bloodstream. Unlike poison, if all you do is deprive the body of air/blood flow, then presumably revival might be possible for several minutes - the only question being the extent of brain (or other) damage.
Very high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide are close to instantly lethal.
I assure you, I am only asking academically.
If the breathing mask is hooked to a tank of CO as the OP suggests, it seems to me you’d die faster than in 30 minutes, but it would be just the same as from a breathing mask hooked to a tank of nitrogen; the fact that CO is poisonous wouldn’t matter in the short term if you had no oxygen to breathe anyway.
Jumping from a high building takes seconds until SPLATT. Some of the people trapped in thr World Trade Towers chose to jump rather than die a slow, painful death from smoke inhalation.
I know, which is why I excluded trauma.
Cyanide is supposed to do the trick in a matter of seconds if you inhale enough of it.
Yeah, I’ll go with nitrogen asphyxiation. You’d detect nothing wrong, but you’d be unconscious within about a minute, and dead in about nine.
Especially if you arrange to do this while scuba diving. Just go to your favorite deep wall dive site and keep going down. The nitrogen will have you pretty loopy by about 150ft and as you pass 200ft the oxygen will start to become toxic. You probably won’t even notice your death.
It’ll be less than a minute to unconsciousness, especially if you’re actively inhaling/exhaling repeatedly to quickly remove all traces of air from your lungs. Just inhaling a lungful of nitrogen (or helium, or any other inert gas) will make you intensely, drunkenly dizzy within about twenty seconds.
Yeah, one time I exhaled as much air as I possibly could from my lungs and then just sucked on a slit mylar helium-filled balloon in one deep gasp. My vision went instantly black and I almost fell over in just a matter of seconds. I managed to pull the balloon away from my mouth and inhale some air too so I didn’t completely pass out, but it is nearly instantaneous I’m sure if you breathe out all the air you possibly can (like I did) and then breathe nothing but a pure inert gas.
Why so quick? People can hold their breath for much longer. Does the inert gas do something?
In high school kids would “do whippets” to white out for a few seconds. I did it once or twice. IIRC, a kid once brought in a large CO2 tanks with multiple masks attached to it.
Huffing gasoline from papee bags is a major and dangerous problem iin some areas.
When people do that, and with glue, is it for O2 snuffing or for inherent intoxicant nature of the fumes?
I was under the impression they were forced out by the heat, similar to the Triangle girls, not that the results were any different.
Possibly some, if you want to look at it that way. But it’s as close to the same thing as not to matter.
When you hold your breath, you’ve got a lungful of oxygen. That can supply your body’s oxygen needs for several minutes, even after the CO2 level in your lungs builds up to painful levels.
When you exhale as deeply as you can, there’s still a substantial quantity of residual air in your lungs; you simply can’t collapse your lungs to zero volume. According to this chart, the amount of lung volume remaining after a “complete” exhalation is about 19% of absolute maximum. So even if you exhale “completely” and hold your breath, you’ve still got a substantial amount of oxygen available, and can probably remain conscious for a minute or so.
When you replace all of the air in your lungs with inert gas, now there’s zero oxygen available, other than what’s already dissolved in your blood. And that’s even worse than it sounds, because now partially-oxygenated blood arriving at your lungs will actually lose oxygen into your lungs, since the concentration in the lungs is much less than the concentration in the blood. Your lungs are now literally deoxygenating your blood. Once that deoxygenated blood starts arriving at your brain, you will lose consciousness very quickly.
