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A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

bbc.com

51–60 of 180 posts

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#51
post #27
post #4

>If you lower the brain temperature down to 30C (86F), it can increase the survival time from 10 to 20 minutes. If you cool the brain to 20C (68F), you can get an hour. Wow, I actually didn't know this until now. Is this method used anywhere in medical procedures to resuscitate or prolong life?

So this may be the basis of cryogenics? If you just cool down in specific way, you can turn off metabolism and then turn back on again at later date?

Not for cryogenics, unfortunately, but yes for hibernation. NASA has funded the study of medically induced torpor for hibernating humans for deep space exploration: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201800...

If we ever do crewed interstellar travel, even if we can get the trip time down to 50 years or so, we’ll probably want something like this. But it’s useful even for Mars trips since you can fit a LOT more people in the same space.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#52
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting cold probably saved his life by reducing the metabolic burden. This is done intentionally during certain surgeries, such as aortic aneurysm repairs. It also informs the ER standard: you're not dead until you're warm and dead. Also, it's staggering how much oxygen can be dissolved into your system at depth. The Navy did some experiments where they put pigs in a chamber, pressurized them to something obscene, l…

That's also why hyperbaric oxygen therapy is an effective treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning. Even when all the hemoglobin receptors are bound to carbon monoxide, enough oxygen will diffuse into the blood to keep the patient alive.

That’s fascinating.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More info please. What happened?

someone tried to kill me for exposing them raping my girlfriend and the doctors used experimental oxygenated blood to save my life. I got really drunk the night i was assaulted because of a related incident. During the incident with my gf, her ex and i were trying to locate her after a party (we were in another dorm and she called us on a cell, not hers) and she recollected she didn't know where she was, she was nake…

Oh my god that sounds absolutely horrific.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#54
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone tried to kill me for exposing them raping my girlfriend and the doctors used experimental oxygenated blood to save my life. I got really drunk the night i was assaulted because of a related incident. During the incident with my gf, her ex and i were trying to locate her after a party (we were in another dorm and she called us on a cell, not hers) and she recollected she didn't know where she was, she was nake…

Oh my god that sounds absolutely horrific.

It's worse because the offender was politically connected and there was nothing I could do about the situation at the time i regained recollection. The offender also had large resources to pay ex spooks to keep the situation normal (for him), and digging up dirt on me and my family.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#55

Great, an ad for a documentary. Fascinating story but still an ad.

I got rid of my TV entirely in large part because of the ads. I run an ad blocker. I’m not a fan of most advertising. But man, when something is actually useful and unobtrusive I don’t complain! Imagine if every ad was a captivating story that made you think and introduced interesting concepts (like death being less something to fear and more about what you leave behind). That’s not going to happen, so even if this is an ‘ad’ I for one am quite happy with it.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#56
post #45
post #17

Question for the medical readers: a person dies when brain dies from lack of blood flow, right? So all those injuries, say a car crash where heart will stop soon. 1) Disconnect the head from body 2) plug it into a machine that supplies blood, etc 3) the body is repaired 4) reattach head to body. Overlooking the obvious trauma, is this possible? While extreme/traumatic, I think it could be more reliable as other facto…

We still cannot repair a spinal cord injury. A complete decapitation is a total spinal cord transection and more.

Head transplants have been carried out on mammals successfully in the past. The success criteria isn't in restoring limb function, but rather in keeping the brain alive on a host body.

One problem at a time.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#57
post #17

Question for the medical readers: a person dies when brain dies from lack of blood flow, right? So all those injuries, say a car crash where heart will stop soon. 1) Disconnect the head from body 2) plug it into a machine that supplies blood, etc 3) the body is repaired 4) reattach head to body. Overlooking the obvious trauma, is this possible? While extreme/traumatic, I think it could be more reliable as other facto…

That's what an ECMO is... a last-ditch effort to perfuse the brain and vital organs to see if the body can recover. It rarely does. Head transplantation is still too "out there."

It bothers me that it's called a head transplant and not a body transplant.

If I needed to, I would definitely choose a new body over a new head.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#59
post #22

The documentary is on Netflix, it's worth a watch: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80215139

Thank you. Just watched it. Good one.

The thing that bothered me that they resumed to do the same dive 3 weeks after the accident - it doesn't sound like enough time to setup protocols to prevent the same accident from occurring again. Also it was very weird to hear that they don't have checklist to follow when they ships's dynamic position system fails...They were essentially trying to control the ship by whatever they can think of for over 20 min while somebody is suffocating on the ocean floor.

Re: A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean

#60
post #37
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this may be the basis of cryogenics? If you just cool down in specific way, you can turn off metabolism and then turn back on again at later date?

Well not really. Cooling the patient down will give you a few hours at most under ideal conditions. Metabolism isn't turned off, just slowed down. If you freeze the patient the ice crystals damage the cells so much that revival becomes impossible.

Cryonics involves vitrification, not freezing. Ice crystals do no damage if they never form in the first place.

Now the method of achieving vitrification involves pumping the body full of toxic antifreeze. But in principle it's easier to flush the antifreeze out when warming than to reverse ice crystal damage, though the techniques have not yet been worked out.

Thankfully it's not necessary for the reversal procedure to exist now for cryonics to be successfully used in preservation for the future.

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