I was watching hamilton’s pharmacopeia and he was inhaling xenon and seemed to think it was pretty safe. As a layman, my intuition tells me inhaling anything besides oxygen is not safe. Why can you breath pure gases other than oxygen and be fine?
In: Biology
Air is a mix of gases, it’s not just oxygen. Noble gases are almost completely non reactive so there is no toxic or caustic effect from them. Now if you only breath in a noble gas you will eventually suffocate, but a single breath is essentially harmless.
It isn’t safe, there is risk involved. Noble gases are mostly inert, meaning that they do not interact chemically with anything (except in extreme cases). Which means they’re probably not going to interfere with any biochemical processes.
But anything you are breathing that isn’t oxygen, well, isn’t oxygen, and this does poses a non-zero amount of risk. Clearly if you fail to breath oxygen for long enough you will die and people have indeed died this way (a couple entered a large tent-like balloon that was being inflated with helium. It’s interior was almost entirely helium – no oxygen – and they passed out and died).
It should be thought of as slightly riskier than holding your breath for the same amount of time. If it is in short periods, not much risk. I say riskier because holding your breath for too long triggers physiological responses that force you to start breathing which wouldn’t happen here.
>I was watching hamilton’s pharmacopeia and he was inhaling xenon and seemed to think it was pretty safe. As a layman, my intuition tells me inhaling anything besides oxygen is not safe. Why can you breath pure gases other than oxygen and be fine?
Breathing in most noble gasses is fine in the same way as it is fine to breathe nitrogen – they’re inert and won’t interfere with bodily functions or irritate your breathing apparatus.
You still need oxygen though. If you breathe an inert gas **instead** of oxygen, not in addition, you will lose consciousness and die.
Noble gases don’t react. The only real issue is that it takes up lung space where there could be oxygen.
You can breathe in helium to do a funny voice, but make sure your next couple breaths are normal air.
It’s not that they are “safe” Nobel gasses are inert and displace oxygen., If you inhale enough of it you will die from inert gas asphyxiation. The reason it’s safe to inhale in general is due to these being gasses diluted in the oxygen you breathe anyways.
Air is around 21% oxygen, the rest is mostly nitrogen and small amounts of the other gasses including the noble ones so your breathing tiny ammounts of this stuff all the time.
Every unit of volume of air in your lungs is 20% oxygen and ~79% an inert form of nitrogen. Replace the nitrogen by any other inert gas and nothing bad happens. Multiply the density of air at the altitud you live and the volume of your lungs and you obtain that you have a couple of grams of oxygen in your lungs at all times. As long as you have that amount of oxygen in your lungs, you’re fine no matter what inert gas is mixed with it, but after O2 goes into your blood and gets replaced by CO2, you need to inhale air again to replace it. Too much of any gas in your lungs and you get asfixia because there will be no room for O2.
It’s not…
To be clear, it’s not really safe to breath anything besides air. However, that really depends on the concentration and amount of oxygen in the air. For example, at high altitudes oxygen still makes up around 20% of the air, there’s just less air and therefore a lower total amount of oxygen going into your lungs.
For the Noble gases, you actually breath small amounts in with every breath with argon being the most abundant in the atmosphere (just under 1%). The thing is, if the gas is more dense than oxygen or nitrogen, it might not be exhaled completely, may build up in your lungs, and eventually you may suffocate. A good example is argon. You have to invert yourself (bend over) to completely evacuate it from your lungs if you breath in too much of it.
So, although they won’t chemically react with your lung tissue or blood, breathing in any inert gas isn’t really safe. Stick with air.
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