this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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Patch this Bish! (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)
  • Suffocation sensation is now tied to a lack of oxygen instead of an abundance of carbon dioxide.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Would that fix our carbonmonoxide weakness?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It wouldn't make carbon monoxide less poisonous to us, but depending on how sensitive the sensation of suffocation is made it would help us realize something is wrong and maybe even eliminate the need for carbon monoxide detectors.

Carbon monoxide isn't only dangerous because it's not oxygen, but because it disrupts our blood's normal process of absorbing oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. My laymen understanding is that it sort of jams the door lol. As opposed to things like nitrogen which merely gets in the way but don't disrupt the process.

Imagine if instead of getting a headache and feeling sleepy when carbon monoxide was in your body you started to feel like you were holding your breath too long.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

How about add a process that uses energy to convert co2 back to oxygen to increase the amount of time we can go without, plus enable weight loss via holding one's breath.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I'm trying to make reasonable patches, not change the laws if physics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Plants have a mechanism like that. Surely there's gotta be some chemical path that can take co2 plus some form of stored energy we use to break off the o2. I don't expect it to be efficient. Just useful in scenarios where oxygen is needed now, otherwise that stored energy is useless in the future.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

The issue is, plants do that by combining water and CO2 into energetic compounds, with an oxygen byproduct - then they do the same our bodies do, which is breaking up those energetic compounds using oxygen to release the stored energy. And yes, plants consume oxygen and produce CO2 - they just do more of the opposite turning the excess into structural materials.

This requires a supply of energy in a form that can be consumed (laws of physics prevent you doing it by cooling your body down), so you'd need to, for example, receive enough energy from sunlight to match your energy consumption, and generating oxygen through that would actively make you fatter.

Oh, and as an addendum, we could maybe use less oxygen to break up those energetic compounds, similarly to how fuel can burn with reduced oxygen - but the fun thing about that is, that produces carbon monoxide, actual poison, so that's also a no-go.