Nitrogen asphyxiation should be effective and painless, but not if the person fights it. Which means it’ll be hard to use as an execution method (unless you surprise them with it somehow)
Hell, regular suffocation isn’t that bad if you stay calm and relaxed and accept it. It’s all about the state of mind, and someone being murdered isn’t exactly going to be meditative about it.
My understanding is that we can’t detect oxygen deprivation, but we can detect CO² buildup which is the idea behind nitrogen asphyxiation. Wouldn’t regular suffocation (like, something obstructing your airflow) be quite agonizing then in comparison due to CO² buildup?
Complete tangent, but I don’t think superscript numbers are a good choice in chemical notation. You’re trying to use them here to stand-in for subscript numbers, but superscript numbers have a meaning in chemistry as well. They denote ions.
So, I think CO2 is more accurate than CO², since it could be confused as carbon monoxide with some sort of ion of charge 2 (unclear of positive or negative).
It’s certainly not pleasant, but not outright painful. The bad part of it is you feel like you should be panicking and struggling and fighting to breathe. If you’re rebreathing your air, so you’re not prevented from inhaling, and you take long, slow, breaths and keep calm and relaxed, it’s not nearly as unpleasant. I had a near suicide attempt where I gave it a try to see how bad it would actually be and it was scarily not as bad as I thought it would be. Granted I didn’t take it to unconsciousness or I wouldn’t be here to talk about it, but I got to the point my vision was getting fuzzy so I think it’s far enough to draw this conclusion.
I want to warn anyone thinking of trying this: don’t.
Obviously there’s the don’t commit suicide part, and that’s the most important part. But also, as someone who has unfortunately spent time considering various methods, I can tell you: don’t even consider doing it this way.
Genuinely sorry to be contradictive, but you absolutely would have been in a painful situation if you’d continued. The only explanation is that you didn’t get to the point that your body 100% takes over from you and forces a desperate, painful, writhing attempt to get air.
You would die of increased CO2 concentration in your blood long before you actually ran out of oxygen. That increased CO2 would be very painful. Like, lizard brain stem absolutely taking over, full panicking levels of painful. Don’t try it!
Tbh I would love nothing more than for my friends to throw me a surprise euthanasia party. Reminiscing, having a good time, then they suffocate me or something.
Put them in a small sealed room with airflow you control. Using a randomly generated number to pick the start time (within some maximum that’s deemed appropriate), you then throttle up the nitrogen and throttle down the oxygen.
The time spent in the room would still be pretty terrifying so I doubt it’d be much better than the mask… Maybe the room is their cell and it’s a randomly chosen day within an execution “week” where you make sure they’re asleep first?
Probably best just to not kill people of course, but if you’re gonna do it, do it the most humane way possible.
Nitrogen asphyxiation should be effective and painless, but not if the person fights it. Which means it’ll be hard to use as an execution method (unless you surprise them with it somehow)
Hell, regular suffocation isn’t that bad if you stay calm and relaxed and accept it. It’s all about the state of mind, and someone being murdered isn’t exactly going to be meditative about it.
My understanding is that we can’t detect oxygen deprivation, but we can detect CO² buildup which is the idea behind nitrogen asphyxiation. Wouldn’t regular suffocation (like, something obstructing your airflow) be quite agonizing then in comparison due to CO² buildup?
Complete tangent, but I don’t think superscript numbers are a good choice in chemical notation. You’re trying to use them here to stand-in for subscript numbers, but superscript numbers have a meaning in chemistry as well. They denote ions.
So, I think CO2 is more accurate than CO², since it could be confused as carbon monoxide with some sort of ion of charge 2 (unclear of positive or negative).
That’s a good point. My phone keyboard has the superscript so I used that without thinking too much
It’s certainly not pleasant, but not outright painful. The bad part of it is you feel like you should be panicking and struggling and fighting to breathe. If you’re rebreathing your air, so you’re not prevented from inhaling, and you take long, slow, breaths and keep calm and relaxed, it’s not nearly as unpleasant. I had a near suicide attempt where I gave it a try to see how bad it would actually be and it was scarily not as bad as I thought it would be. Granted I didn’t take it to unconsciousness or I wouldn’t be here to talk about it, but I got to the point my vision was getting fuzzy so I think it’s far enough to draw this conclusion.
I want to warn anyone thinking of trying this: don’t.
Obviously there’s the don’t commit suicide part, and that’s the most important part. But also, as someone who has unfortunately spent time considering various methods, I can tell you: don’t even consider doing it this way.
Genuinely sorry to be contradictive, but you absolutely would have been in a painful situation if you’d continued. The only explanation is that you didn’t get to the point that your body 100% takes over from you and forces a desperate, painful, writhing attempt to get air.
You would die of increased CO2 concentration in your blood long before you actually ran out of oxygen. That increased CO2 would be very painful. Like, lizard brain stem absolutely taking over, full panicking levels of painful. Don’t try it!
Surprise execution?! That sounds like fun
Tbh I would love nothing more than for my friends to throw me a surprise euthanasia party. Reminiscing, having a good time, then they suffocate me or something.
Thought experiment:
Put them in a small sealed room with airflow you control. Using a randomly generated number to pick the start time (within some maximum that’s deemed appropriate), you then throttle up the nitrogen and throttle down the oxygen.
The time spent in the room would still be pretty terrifying so I doubt it’d be much better than the mask… Maybe the room is their cell and it’s a randomly chosen day within an execution “week” where you make sure they’re asleep first?
Probably best just to not kill people of course, but if you’re gonna do it, do it the most humane way possible.
That would be colossal.
Only if they make it a live sporting event and I can buy a churro while watching. I guess I just want the Roman Colosseum back.