Why hasn’t anyone invented a better way to breathe underwater?

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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

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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