No, you still die, because a viscous and therefor slow-moving liquid physically can’t remove CO2 fast enough from your lungs. Otherwise we’d have lots of premature babies hanging out in jars.
Unfortunately, in humans CO2 is the thing that gives the “suffocating” feeling, and it takes a long time to actually kill you at modest levels, so that description still applies a bit.
Interesting. Liquid ventilators do use pumps; I guess because, as you say, we can’t push the liquid fast enough with our own force. But I think some research setups only fill the lungs and then use a regular oxygen ventilator, so maybe it’s not that infeasible to survive in a perfluorodecalin-filled tank for at least a few minutes, before becoming exhausted?
You’d definitely survive longer than in something non-oxygenated. I feel like I read a paper that involved a full hour of immersion in animal trials, but I can’t be sure now.
The wiki makes it sounds like in medical settings they only fill the lung partway, usually. That would allow CO2 to escape from the top part. The lung is both massively branched and somewhat delicate, so getting enough pumping going in a full lung sounds like it would be very difficult and invasive. CO2 is so rarefied in healthy blood it doesn’t take long at all for diffusion to start working backward in any one alveolus.
There’s also technology in trials to remove CO2 from the blood separately, which is only as invasive as a dialysis machine. I have no idea if anyone has tried combining them, although you have to assume it’d be an obvious next step.
Like waterboarding yourself whilst never dying
No, you still die, because a viscous and therefor slow-moving liquid physically can’t remove CO2 fast enough from your lungs. Otherwise we’d have lots of premature babies hanging out in jars.
Unfortunately, in humans CO2 is the thing that gives the “suffocating” feeling, and it takes a long time to actually kill you at modest levels, so that description still applies a bit.
Interesting. Liquid ventilators do use pumps; I guess because, as you say, we can’t push the liquid fast enough with our own force. But I think some research setups only fill the lungs and then use a regular oxygen ventilator, so maybe it’s not that infeasible to survive in a perfluorodecalin-filled tank for at least a few minutes, before becoming exhausted?
You’d definitely survive longer than in something non-oxygenated. I feel like I read a paper that involved a full hour of immersion in animal trials, but I can’t be sure now.
The wiki makes it sounds like in medical settings they only fill the lung partway, usually. That would allow CO2 to escape from the top part. The lung is both massively branched and somewhat delicate, so getting enough pumping going in a full lung sounds like it would be very difficult and invasive. CO2 is so rarefied in healthy blood it doesn’t take long at all for diffusion to start working backward in any one alveolus.
There’s also technology in trials to remove CO2 from the blood separately, which is only as invasive as a dialysis machine. I have no idea if anyone has tried combining them, although you have to assume it’d be an obvious next step.
Thanks, great insight!