If you dive, then you dive. And if you really dive, then you have been in the room when someone got grumpy about Carl from Up…
If you dive, then you dive. And if you really dive, then you have been in the room when someone got grumpy about Carl from Up and his frivolous helium usage.
why is this getting notes? why is this getting any traction at all? I refuse to believe there are this many technical divers on Tumblr of all places. is it just the absurdity of a beef with a Disney character over an increasingly scarce non-renewable resource with niche technical applications used primarily for balloons? There is a guy experimenting with fucking hydrogen as a diluent gas now. we could put hydrogen in balloons and the inert noble gas in our lungs but NOOO. the children are just too flammable. do you even know what the state of hyperbaric medicine is? no, yeah of course you didn’t, nobody does. and that includes professionals who have spent their entire lives researching the field because you can’t exactly do a biopsy underwater. you can make an educated guess based on who makes it back to the surface alive. fun fact the N=1 guy who is currently the only human being to have trialed hydrogen as a diluent, on himself, because he couldn’t ethically ask anyone else to do it, Dr. Richard Harris, is also the guy who did the anesthesia on the kids in the Thai cave rescue, because as you might imagine the upper echelons of tech cave diving is a very small community and the overlap with anesthesiologists consists of one dude and it is him. but the point is, when he had to figure out how to knock out an entire soccer team worth of scared stressed dehydrated underfed children because dragging an unconscious body through two miles of flooded tunnels was the only way to get them out, he scoured the entire planet for a second opinion on the effects of anesthesia at high-pressure underwater environs and there wasn’t one.
the modus operandi of technical scuba is to throw every ounce of chemical and physical knowledge you have at the problem, plan for the very worst, come to terms with the fact that you can’t know what you don’t know, and hope for the best. is it any surprise that the guy who invented scuba diving died scuba diving?
NO, REALLY.
the issue with building and then tinkering with your own life support system is that when you get it wrong you die, which is why most advancements in the field are accompanied by an apology like this one. hey guys, thanks for helping me out, so sorry I made you party to this incredibly dicey proposition, thank god I’m around to apologize for it. gee if only we weren’t draining the planet’s helium reserves for birthday parties. fuck you carl.
N=1: The Inside Story of the First-Ever Hydrogen CCR Dive - InDEPTH