this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Asklemmy
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Gallium? It's solid at room temperature, but your own body heat will melt it, so you lie down on a solid block of metal and then slowly sink into a melting puddle in the middle of it. It's non-toxic and six times denser than water so you'd be really floaty on it too
Sounds like something out of a horror film. Your body heat melts you into the material. Then, as heat gets distributed and you have more skin contact, you are no longer generating enough heat to keep the gallium melted.
You either suffocate as the material solidifies around your abdomen or you freeze to death as the material pulls enough heat from you to kill you.
Actually because of the density you wont be able to sink more than about 1/6th of your body into it.
I feel like this is worth uploading to Lemmy. It's an image, apparently from October 1972's National Geographic, of a Spanish miner floating on mercury:
It's denser than lead, so he's just sitting on the top of it like a block of styrofoam would on water. The effect of gallium would not be quite so pronounced, but same idea. This is also why you can't really drown in quicksand unless you work at it (which, if you completely panic, isn't impossible).
Meanwhile, you sink straight to the bottom in anything like oil, with no hope of swimming.
So, if you laid on a large enough block of it, you'd have the perfect shape to make a mold for a customized foam mattress?
I suspect there's an easier choice, if a dense bed is all you need. Every liter of the stuff goes for 872 USD as of 2019. And that's not even bad, considering how rare it is and how great the semiconductors you can make with it are. It's neighbor germanium is another digit up.
Edit: Wow, somebody already linked this exact thing elsewhere.
This was my first thought. Terrifying! Claustrophobia has entered the chat.
Shit
150 litres of Gallium would cost $130800
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prices_of_chemical_elements
Hmm! Quite the investment vehicle!
(I'm now just picturing tech bros smugly smiling with bathtubs full of gallium)
Well that does make it quite regrettable for most people, I suppose
We need to convince the billionaires that this is the cool thing for them to do...
It might act like a giant heatsink tho, making your body cool out as soon as it starts melting and creating proper surface contact. But chilling in 20ยฐC water is also not really an issue so i guess it depends on the thermal conductivity of the skin/gallium interface.
Just use something similar with a lower melting point. Mercury or cesium both do. You're welcome!
There's alloys with lower melting points, here's one that's 281K/8ยฐC
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/13/3/615
You'll completely float on mercury, and cesium does no good to your body. Like, at all.
Thanks i will try it out later :)
I'm sure an Infinite ice bath has an appeal to someone
You don't want it to get in your body (holes, cuts etc...)
the physical description also applies to butter
Missed opportunity for a Saw film