Interesting, but has problems with helium supply, even at smaller scales.
Breathing tanks are problematic. If you carry a breathing tank, the simplest approach involves venting a lot of helium. Scrubbers, recycling, and O2 replenishment carries nontrivial risk of death without warning. Capturing the exhaled helium requires heavy, power-hungry compressors.
Building present nontrivial air-quality engineering problems, and need more than airlocks retrofitted on to make them airtight.
Also, it’s far from obvious that 20% is the optimum O2 content, though I think it’s quite well supported to say that 100% is too much.
My own belief is that before we start trying to get rid of nitrogen with helium or hydrogen, we ought to check first that increasing oxygen doesn’t deliver some or all the benefits.
Well, you can’t increase it too far. The fire hazard gets insane pretty quick. 30% O2 is probably OK, but does have a substantial fire risk increase; 40% probably isn’t. Also, increased oxygen has long-term health impacts (I don’t remember details; I could look them up if you’re curious), but I don’t think we know what level those start at to any precision.
I suppose fire risk isn’t a huge deal if you’re using portable breathing tanks, but you do still need to investigate health impacts. They’re long-term enough that you could ignore them for initial study of the cognitive effects, though.
I suppose fire risk isn’t a huge deal if you’re using portable breathing tanks, but you do still need to investigate health impacts.
Yeah, I’m well-aware of the dangers of oxygen fire (from learning about the Apollo program); oxygen tanks are probably how this would be implemented. Of course, I’m not sure that the benefit could possibly justify the expense of oxygen tanks but just the result would be interesting. (Perhaps one could justify some sort of oxygen alarm.)
Actually, I don’t think oxygen tanks are that expensive relative to the potential gain. Assuming that the first result I found for a refillable oxygen tank system is a reasonable price, and conservatively assuming that it completely breaks down after 5 years, that’s only $550 a year, which puts it within the range of “probably worthwhile for any office worker in the US” (assuming an average salary of $43k) if it confers a performance benefit greater than around 1.2% on average.
These tanks supposedly hold 90% pure oxygen, and are designed to be used with a little breathing lasso thing that ends up with you breathing around 30% oxygen (depending on the flow rate of course).
Oh, that is interesting. I was sort of assuming that you would have to pay for each refill and that a recharger wouldn’t be just <$3k.
Also, interesting links. Connecting psychometric tasks to actual monetary value is always tricky, but those studies certainly suggest there might be meaningful benefit (but the benefit will be weaker at 30% oxygen—the links seem to all be at 40%).
One big problem there is that $3k is a lot to pay up front. But on the upside, if you can change the flow rate, I suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to blind the oxygen content...
Interesting, but has problems with helium supply, even at smaller scales.
Breathing tanks are problematic. If you carry a breathing tank, the simplest approach involves venting a lot of helium. Scrubbers, recycling, and O2 replenishment carries nontrivial risk of death without warning. Capturing the exhaled helium requires heavy, power-hungry compressors.
Building present nontrivial air-quality engineering problems, and need more than airlocks retrofitted on to make them airtight.
Also, it’s far from obvious that 20% is the optimum O2 content, though I think it’s quite well supported to say that 100% is too much.
My own belief is that before we start trying to get rid of nitrogen with helium or hydrogen, we ought to check first that increasing oxygen doesn’t deliver some or all the benefits.
Well, you can’t increase it too far. The fire hazard gets insane pretty quick. 30% O2 is probably OK, but does have a substantial fire risk increase; 40% probably isn’t. Also, increased oxygen has long-term health impacts (I don’t remember details; I could look them up if you’re curious), but I don’t think we know what level those start at to any precision.
I suppose fire risk isn’t a huge deal if you’re using portable breathing tanks, but you do still need to investigate health impacts. They’re long-term enough that you could ignore them for initial study of the cognitive effects, though.
Yeah, I’m well-aware of the dangers of oxygen fire (from learning about the Apollo program); oxygen tanks are probably how this would be implemented. Of course, I’m not sure that the benefit could possibly justify the expense of oxygen tanks but just the result would be interesting. (Perhaps one could justify some sort of oxygen alarm.)
Actually, I don’t think oxygen tanks are that expensive relative to the potential gain. Assuming that the first result I found for a refillable oxygen tank system is a reasonable price, and conservatively assuming that it completely breaks down after 5 years, that’s only $550 a year, which puts it within the range of “probably worthwhile for any office worker in the US” (assuming an average salary of $43k) if it confers a performance benefit greater than around 1.2% on average.
These tanks supposedly hold 90% pure oxygen, and are designed to be used with a little breathing lasso thing that ends up with you breathing around 30% oxygen (depending on the flow rate of course).
Since 30-40% oxygen concentrations seem to increase word recall by a factor of 30-50% and reduce reaction time by ~30%, improve 2-back performance by ~15%, and improve mental arithmetic accuracy by ~20% for 3-digit numbers, it seems pretty likely that the overall benefit of oxygen supplementation while working could be greater than breakeven.
Oh, that is interesting. I was sort of assuming that you would have to pay for each refill and that a recharger wouldn’t be just <$3k.
Also, interesting links. Connecting psychometric tasks to actual monetary value is always tricky, but those studies certainly suggest there might be meaningful benefit (but the benefit will be weaker at 30% oxygen—the links seem to all be at 40%).
One big problem there is that $3k is a lot to pay up front. But on the upside, if you can change the flow rate, I suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to blind the oxygen content...
Doesn’t breathing too much oxygen make you age faster?