Thinking specifically of scuba diving. It requires a ton of equipment and training and can still be dangerous. In movies there’s always some kind of little gadget that allows people to breathe underwater without all that equipment. Why can’t we build a simple mouth piece with an oxygen canister attached that we could carry around and breathe into when we need?
In: Engineering
Artificial gills are a conceptual possibility however humans consume alot more oxygen than fish so the size of the gills would be massive to generate enough oxygen for a single.person to breathe
>Why can’t we build a simple mouth piece with an oxygen canister attached?
That is exactly what a scuba setup is…
You could use a smaller tank but then you get less time underwater. You could get rid of the second regulator but then you are compromising safety. You could get rid of the buoyancy control device but then you can’t control your buoyancy.
Scuba needs training and could be dangerous because you are spending time underwater, not because of the specific equipment.
Such canisters:
* can only carry a small amount of air,
* they don’t mittigate the issues of the Bends or Nitrogen Narcosis if used enough to allow you to do what SCUBA lets you do,
* still have to have a regulator so that you can suck the air out of them without them venting their contents (which is the key technology of SCUBA)
* all the extra equipment and training SCUBA divers get are to reduce the risks inherent to being deeper underwater than humans are evolved for
Water has weight, and as you get deeper that weight adds up. Every 33 feet you dive adds another atmosphere of pressure.
As an animal full of air bags that are supposed to work at just 1 atmosphere, this quickly becomes a problem.
So the oxygen availability isn’t really the problem with deep diving, it’s the oxygen *pressure*. You’re not tough enough to breathe 1atm gas when the pressure around you is a crushing 9atm, you need to breathe 9atm gas so you don’t get squeezed like a toothpaste tube.
Keeping an eye on the relative gas pressures and the effects this has on your blood and lungs is what requires all the training.
Movies use the little gadget because it looks cool on screen, not because there’s actually a good way to squeeze scuba technology into a pocket-sized device.
You need a fairly large yet strong container to store enough pressurized gas to do anything useful underwater. You can’t use straight oxygen either because it damages your lungs at high pressure. You need a monitoring system and control valves because running low while underwater can turn lethal very quickly.
They have, what you’re talking about exists. But they’re not very useful if you actually want to stay underwater for a decent amount of time, or go deep.
The other main drawback with it is all the things you take off are the things that tell you you’re going to die or are doing a job to keep you alive. There’s no unnecessary stuff just for fun, or to be awkward.
Scuba can be very hazardous if you don’t know why you are doing. That’s why it has so many levels of training.
As far as the tech is concerned there is no better way. Only other option than the tank attached is to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen in the water but that takes so much energy it would never work.
What has advanced with scuba in the past 10-20 years are the dive computers.
When I trained very few people had them. You had to do calculations manually and look up tables. You didn’t want to get your numbers wrong.
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