Clarified butter
I’d say perfluorocarbons, like perfluorodecalin. Harmless and clear, but they have huge oxygen absorption capacity, so you’d surely be able to breathe even if you sank your face in it (probably not fun to do so tho).
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!
Very difficult to immerse yourself into these, though, because of their density being about 2x that of the human body.
Oobleck for the experience. It wouldn’t clean you, but you’d have a story. Possibly mild regret if it’s in a bathtub that you need to clean or a house who’s plumbing you’re responsible for afterwards.
I like it – though how do I get out of it?
Very slowly.
Heavy water - like water, just heavier.
What dilution? 25% makes you sterile and 50% kills you after a week of drinking it
You have to have 25% and 50% in your body fluids for it to happen, if you drink a glass of 50% heavy water you won’t drop dead a week later.
Wait, would it work as a contraceptive, then?
Don’t eat your bath salts. Don’t drink your bathwater.
As a general rule: Just don’t.
but its me soup, how can I resist?
What happens if I make a me espresso using me soup?
Isn’t that what a lefty-cappuccino is? (urbandictionary…)
I was going to say heavy water, but TIL that it’s not just chonky water. It can be toxic.
Like, barely toxic. Table salt will kill you faster.
One line of evidence for this is a literal mixup at a nuclear plant where they managed to put it in the water cooler for an extended period, with no ill effects.
Only if you drink it in considerable amounts. Should be pretty fine for a bath though.
Maybe coconut water or aloe vera gel, I imagine it’d feel weird but probably not regrettable.
I guess we’ve got to beat Cleopatra as our baseline with her bath of asp milk.
Marmite would probably veer into the regrettable category, and I’m saying that as a marmite enjoyer
coconut water
in a heartbeat
aloe vera
I can imagine this feeling really tingly after a while, though not sure why.
asp milk
what is this? I googled and found nothing
marmite
I too partake joyfully in that hellish sludge, and have wondered what depths of depravity I would willingly go to to satisfy that dark craving
Wikipedia says donkey milk was used by Cleopatra, not asp milk. Maybe OP meant ass milk and got autocorrected, but that sounds really wrong.
An asp is a type of snake so that sounds uhh, difficult
You can milk snake venom. Still doesn’t sound too easy.
what is this? I googled and found nothing
Ah I got my history slightly wrong, she bathed in donkey milk and just liked asps (a kind of snake)
The asses’ milk would moisturize skin. I assume a water rinse though, because old milk stinks and could cause a yeast infection.
The asp was legendarily her choice to commit suicide, though it was probably an Egyptian Cobra, if it was a snake at all. (Asp bite death is slower and much more painful than cobra bite death.) I have a theory that the asp legend depends partly on the fact it’s easier to rhyme “asp” than Egyptian Cobra. As for snakebite in general, I note that male artists have universally portrayed the snake biting her on her bare booby. That’s not actually a good way to get the venom quickly to the heart/brain/lungs, because boobies are mostly fat, but it makes good
pornArt.It’s actually referred to by the longer aspic in Shakespeare (alongside some very questionable herpetology), which is the main place I imagine there would be influential Cleopatra rhymes in English. According to Wikipedia, they’re both the same snake anyway.
You’ve got two Cleopatra stories mixed up there.
She was said to bathe in ass’s (donkey’s) milk.
She killed herself by holding an asp (snake) to her breast.
Zero sugar energy drinks.
No sugar means its not gonna get sticky, it’d rinse right off.
I imagine a bunch of creams already use the b vitamins you’d get since they love shoving b vitamins in those.
And it’ll actually drain when you’re done and a quick rinse will get everything normal afterwards.
Would the caffeine have any effect? Can skin absorb it?
coke zero, no question. diet coke? no thank you. Pepsi max? gtfo
Imagine rocking up to the weird bath house all prepped to bathe in Coke and they’re like, “Oh, sorry. We only have Pepsi.”
burn the place to the ground would be the most reasonable response
why do you hate Pepsi so much? I like it
it beat me as a child
Warm egg custard
Honey
least regretable
The only one that’s physically repulsive to imagine though. It would be so sticky
The good news is, you could swim just fine.
Imagine being the janitor having to clean that up after the experiment
Get a hose. It would take time because of the large area, but that’s just job security.
The main thing I’ve heard janitors complain about IRL is actually shoe scuffs, because there’s no easy way to get them off. Which is interesting, because you know they’re also cleaning up apocalyptic bathroom messes. I guess one just gets used to that.
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
the physical description also applies to butter
You don’t want it to get in your body (holes, cuts etc…)
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.
This was my first thought. Terrifying! Claustrophobia has entered the chat.
Actually because of the density you wont be able to sink more than about 1/6th of your body into it.
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.
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.
Shit
Missed opportunity for a Saw film
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 20°C water is also not really an issue so i guess it depends on the thermal conductivity of the skin/gallium interface.
I’m sure an Infinite ice bath has an appeal to someone
Just use something similar with a lower melting point. Mercury or cesium both do. You’re welcome!
You’ll completely float on mercury, and cesium does no good to your body. Like, at all.
Thanks i will try it out later :)
150 litres of Gallium would cost $130800
Well that does make it quite regrettable for most people, I suppose
Hmm! Quite the investment vehicle!
(I’m now just picturing tech bros smugly smiling with bathtubs full of gallium)We need to convince the billionaires that this is the cool thing for them to do…
Vanta Black
I’m gambling that the experience of it would mitigate how much of a pain in the ass the repercussions would be.
Nice interrobang.
I had no idea a single symbol existed for an interrobang?!
It absolutely does‽ Just get your keyboard to auto replace an exclamation and a question mark next to each other into an interrobang.
There’s also ⸮ which was a (very) early attempt at what /s now is.
Vantablack isn’t really paint, it’s a coating of nanotubes the size of an atom. I wonder what that would feel like.
Yeah, after I looked at it a bit and saw that exposure to/inhaling nanotubes probably isn’t the greatest idea I figured nontoxic paint was the next go to.
I wanna know what it feels like though :(
On the morbidly curious side of things, I do wonder what such a person looks like. You would just notice the eyes and the hair. Everything else would just be stark contrast.
There’s also the whole, “went vanta black face” issue
Vanta black face is only 2d racism.Which is a measurable amount, but incomparable to 3d racism.
The unit analysis checks out.
Heinz Baked Beans.
Excuse you, this isn’t inconventional at all, 69,000,000 Brits do it every morning
It seems that you need to go watch Tommy: A Rock Opera immediately
Oh I’m a huge fan.
no regrets?
Baked Beans
Macaroni & cheese
no regrets? You’d just get up and go to bed covered in the stickiness?
Who says I’m going to bed?
You’re going to work
A non-Newtonian fluid
A mixture of Vaseline and baby oil, just enough to keep it liquified.
What is baby oil chemically?
I presume they cold press babies, but I could be wrong.
Cold press would make it extra virgin baby oil?
Cold press is the method, extra virgin means first pressing. After the first go, you start to get more baby juices and solids mixed in with the oil.
Traditionally, Mineral oil + fragrance
Mineral oil is also known as paraffin oil and is usually a petrochemical derivative composed of larger alkane hydrcarbons. Fragrance varies a lot.
That sounds… messy… but yes, you will technically be quite clean and fragrant after
