Hey Patrick
I'm gonna be sealing myself in a jar with a bunch of plants and I'm
honestly
not really sure how long I'm gonna be able to survive in there because I'm a
Botanist, and I don't know that much about human biology, but then I thought hey you do so
What do you think my odds are could you uh, let me know. I would really appreciate that. What's up everybody?
My name is Patrick if you're coming over from curtis's channel. Hi. Hello. Nice to meet you. This is my channel
So when Curtis told me about his idea
My first question was alright, it sounds dangerous
But is he really in risk of dying and the short answer is no, I mean it's kind of yes
But it's also know at the same time experiments like this have been performed before
So Curtis at least had an idea of what to expect
Curtis got monitors for all the important gases and decided on numbers for those gases
that would get him to quit before his body wasn't any real harm and
He had the paramedic on site just in case but as you might expect he was still pretty concerned about his oxygen and carbon dioxide
Situation which ended up sealing the deal in the end
So in this video, we're gonna go behind some of the human physiology at work in curtis's experiment
So if you've been a human for a while now, you know that if you stop breathing bad things happen
You can cause permanent brain damage or death within just a few minutes and if Curtis had no air in his tent entirely
Then he would have died in just a few minutes because every cell in your body with a few exceptions demands
Oxygen all the time and outside of our theoretical box here
Even if you were to experience just reduced levels of oxygen even a normal atmosphere like it's a higher elevations
you can still experience hypoxia or lack of oxygen and if you get really low on oxygen you'll look like a
combination of sluggish and drunk you'd be
Disoriented potentially hallucinate drop in an out of consciousness and your heart rate will go either too high or too low and you'll experience cyanosis
Your skin will turn blue
Unfortunately, the exact oxygen production of these plants was a big unforeseen and totally out of my area of expertise
But Curtis was confident that they would pump out enough oxygen either way. We still changed up his breathing situation a lot
So, how are we so confident that he wouldn't just suffocate right away in your body?
the only reason that air goes in or out is because
Shirt and there's this fundamental gas law that says the gas will always go from areas of high pressure. It's a low pressure
So to get air into your lungs, we need to create a lower pressure inside your lungs than the ambient pressure outside of them
So when you breathe in your diaphragm drops, which lowers the pressure in your lungs since the pressure outside
Your body hasn't changed gas flows in then when you exhale you increase the pressure on your lungs and gas flows out
But we weren't worried about whether Kurtis had air to breathe
We were worried about not enough oxygen and too much carbon dioxide
And that was tricky to predict because the plants were such an unknown
So instead we just measured the end results how much oxygen actually got delivered to Kurtis his body now to check for this
Kurtis originally hadded monitor that would measure the oxygen in the air. He was breathing and that's great
But there's a big string of mistakes that can happen from the time that air enters your face
To the time it gets to your tissues
So I politely suggested that Kurtis by a device called pulse ox a small electrical device that measures the oxygen saturation
of your blood normal oxygen
Saturation is around 98% with anything lower than 85% getting really worrisome and death happening around 60%
Kurtis decided that his critical oxygen saturation would be
94% and he would eject for safety because yeah the oxygen in the tent is interesting
But the number on the pulse ox is the one that becomes life or death
But as you saw from curtis's videos his pulse ox stayed in the high 90s the entire time so oxygen wasn't an issue
Carbon dioxide was so why weren't we concerned with carbon dioxide poisoning?
Well, it was a real risk
But a design restriction kept it from being a real threat in a normal inhalation only about four
hundredths of a percent of that air is carbon dioxide and then because our body metabolizes
Oxygen and puts out carbon dioxide as a by-product that number jumps up to about 3.8
Percent of an exhalation now if we breathe in a little more carbon dioxide for whatever reason our bodies can develop a condition called
hypercarbia
Which among other things makes our blood more acidic and luckily our bodies can detect that it responds by breathing deeper and faster breaths
Increasing blood pressure and heart rates plus our kidneys up the production of bicarbonate a molecule that buffers the acidity from that carbon dioxide
but the body can only adjust to a point if the co2 in the air we breathe gets above fifty thousand parts per million we
Breathe it in for enough time
Our bodies compensation mechanisms can break down which is when serious harm happens and if that number gets up to about a hundred
Thousand parts per million. We start looking at death
These are rough numbers, by the way
And all the sources for these values can be found down in the description now
Curtis's monitor topped out at ten thousand parts per million
So he aborted way before that fifty thousand parts per million, but even at that lower value
He still felt kind of off and disoriented. So it was probably a good idea that he called it when he did either way
I'm glad he made it out safe and that his experiment was a success
That's it for me in this video
If you're new around here and you like learning about the human body consider subscribing or check it out any of these other videos
And if you thought that this experiment was just Curtis out of his mind leave us some comments like the video all that stuff
Either way. Have fun be good. I'll see you next time