If most people can hold their breath for at least a minute at ground level, why would we lose consciousness within seconds of being exposed to high altidude air pressure?
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It would be fine if you’re just chilling and hanging out at the park on the bench or tables, assuming you’re sober. Once you add your own chairs, shade tent, picnic table, lil Joe bbq, and alcohol, you are going to start feeling the effects a lot more. Add a good hike, some dehydration, and some hot sun, you’ll start really feeling the low oxygen levels.
Alcohol feels more intense when you add altitude. Your already oxygen deficient and it’s not helping. Any physical activity demands more oxygen from your body. Your blood cells are sending it through your body to help power your muscles. Now your brain should be telling you to stop, but what does it know? You’re already making bad decisions, and next thing you know, you’re passed out.
When you hold your breath, you start breathing again when you feel the pressure. When the air is thin, you’re already breathing, so why would you panic? You can become conditioned to the thinner air, but it takes a few weeks to a month to adjust.
When you hold your breath you still have the air at sea-level pressure in your lung it has oxygen you can use. A normal breath is around 25% of the oxygen in the air, you can use more if you hold you breath.
Gases are not just moving from the air in your lungs to the blood like oxygen do at sea level. CO2 move from the blood to the air. The gas to from a higher to lower concentration.
The result is if the pressure is low enough the concentration starts to be lower in the low-pressure air in the lung and oxygen moves from your blood to it.
So you go unconscious quickly because you do not have the oxygen in the lungs you can absorb and that oxygen leaves your blood and escape into the low-pressure air.
Remember that the lungs are organs designed to rapidly exchange gas from the blood with the surrounding air. When you hold your breath the air within the lungs stays there, exchanging gas with the blood as you hold it. You can still absorb oxygen and expel carbon dioxide for a while, just less efficiently as the relative proportions begin to equalize.
But when you are exposed to high altitudes the air pressure is very low. This means the relative concentration of oxygen in the blood is much higher than in the thin air outside the body. The lungs then can act in reverse, rapidly dumping oxygen into the air! What this means is that your blood oxygen level will drop much faster than if you were holding your breath at normal air pressure.
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There is literally less air at altitude than at sea level. At sea level you have miles of air above pressing down on the air, compressing it. I remember reading that at 10,000 ft (I may be a bit off on the altitude) there is half as much air molecules above you as at sea level, and the curve gets even more pronounced at 40,000 ft
The best visual example I’ve seen of this was a 2 ft clear cylinder of cotton balls. At the top of the cylinder the balls are big and fluffy like you’d expect, but you can see the balls at the bottom compressed flat from the weight of all the cotton balls above
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