Hydrogen won't I don't think, unless under REALLY high pressure, read some studies once ages ago pertaining to the development of nitrogen narcosis, where the depth was explored by means of hyperbaric chamber and different gas mixtures, read it because I've done some diving myself (loved it, absolutely some of the most amazing experiences of my life, not counting doing my dive training to get my NAUI license in a flooded quarry in the freezing middle of winter, with visibility about as far as it would be had I been diving in liquid cement and with duct tape over my eyes. The specific instructor we had, I think was seriously, and dangerously irresponsible for taking ANYBODY down there at that time, I am actually surprised there weren't more casualties than there were (I and at least one other had to be assisted to get out of the water due to hypothermia. I actually turned grey-blue, and had to be helped out, because I could hardly move my muscles, on my own, I might not have made it out, for the water temperature, while I didn't measure it was so cold I am surprised it hadn't frozen over. Dangerous, very very stupid to take inexperienced divers down there for TRAINING exams. I still got my license though even after being unable to complete the training, Wouldn't be too surprised if the instructor in question (and not to mention questionABLE!) just granted it me because he'd possibly lose his job if I'd have spilled the beans on him. I should have really, because that was more than stupid, it could have got people killed, especially if those dives, wearing only wetsuits, not dry suits went wrong and someone got stuck down there, finding them in that visibility, wouldn't happen save out of sheer luck, if their buddy copped it too. Damn quarry was full of weeds, rocks, tangles of all sorts of shit, even a submerged , while visibility was so poor you couldn't see your air and pressure gauges, shit was about as clear as frozen dog shit.
But on the other hand, my first ever dive, didn't have any training, but a very good instructor, while on holiday in turkey, near kusadasi (sp?), in lovely warm water, that was as almost glasslike in clarity, and the environment utterly beautiful. I've still got an empty sea snail shell I took as a keepsake, and its HUGE, thing is about a bit bigger than the size of a truly monster size pomelo (shaddock) fruit (if you have never eaten one, just think grapefruit on arnold schwartzenegger-esque steroid-boosted hench-as-fuck workouts. Massive snail that must have been. Got another far smaller one, somewhere still, that at one point played home to one of the imfamous cone snails, that actively hunt fish and invertebrates by means of firing a tethered dart, that comes from modified radular teeth, that can be loaded into an extensible and highly flexible proboscis whilst the critter stealthily sneaks up closer to its prey to get in range, then
fires its tethered harpoon, connected to a venom gland, and made out of little calcium carbonate teeth, like regular slugs and snails used to eat with using the radula, their tongues basically, only in cone shells they are heavily modified teeth to be capable of a dousing in venom, to have a tether cable and the venom is incredibly complex throughout the genus Conus in which the snails are mostly located, each species having its own mixture of conotoxin peptides.
One of the omega-conotoxins has been developed as a human painkiller, thats nonaddictive, forms little or no tolerance, although it must be given intraspinally via an infusion pump, but its thousands and thousands of times more potent a painkiller than morphine, the gold standard painkiller. Works via voltage gated calcium channels and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors iirc, and iirc, the species is either Conus magnus or C.marmoreus (or is it C.marmoratus?) Too bad its a peptide and needs an implanted infusion pump. Although in one way perhaps fortunate in that we still use opioids, something tells me, the way medics behave towards opioid users, even ones who are simply prescribed opioids by their regular doctor, if the hospital medics could fob people off with uberstrong but totally un-recreational analgesics that presumably don't also have the trait (a very useful one in severe pain I might add) of not only dulling pain but taking the patients MINDS off it as well, by means of leaving the patient floating on cloud 9, wrapped in a big warm blanket of smack. Theres a lot to be said for that effect, if your miserable, hungry, in pain and bored and stuck in hospital, then simply magically reaching out with the finger of God Him Self, so to speak, and saying 'let the pain be gone, and it was done, and god saw that it was good...but decided it wasn't anything like as bloody good as distracting and cheering up the patient, and letting them rest easy and sleep well too'....god saw that it was kinda second-rate and halfarsed even though it was bloody effective analgesia.
So to speak.
And I think H2 would make a VERY poor, if active whatsoever NMDA antagonist, the smaller the gas molecule the worse it seems to bind NMDArs, thats one reason why helium is used at extreme pressures in trimix, heliox and other such specialist gas mixtures because it lacks narcotizing effects even at great pressure. As well as having less tendency to result in divers getting the bends. Chances are with hydrogen, I'd be completely unsurprised if the pressures required would be lethal before hydrogen could be respired and produce narcosis. And besides would you really want either to be filling, storing or transporting oxyhydrogen gas mixture in tanks? theres a good reason that blimp aircraft
now use helium even though its a rare and precious gas of limited supply, after what happened to the hindenburg which was full of cheap and infinitely more available and less limited, squanderable resource H2.
Result? one fucking big mess and a lot of pink mist created for a very short time before it too turned into ashes.
H2, you'd collapse your lungs before narcosis occurred I think.
I'd be curious to experiment under lesser, healthier pressures with the other noble gases, radon of course not getting a look in for fairly obvious reasons
Apparently argon is used in certain very rare cases for very shallow depth diving mixes, although fuck me in the ass diagonally with a red hot brick and call me fucking well allah if I know why. Apparently it can't be used below some 10-20 meters or so I forget if its 10 or 20, before narcosis occurs.
There is an NMDAr antagonist in the white (I think its the white, it may be black, so one would check first) mulberry, I can sort of recall the name of it but for the life of me cannot spell it, its a helluva mouthful to pronounce let alone type (and thats saying something in my case, given that I've been a life-long chemistry addict (by that I mean, literally, addicted to chemiSTRY, rather than chemicALS, even before I was old enough to practice the subject and own my own lab, which even then, I did as a child, in a simpler form than my setup now by far, but ever since I COULD, financially, from going door to door selling bunches of cherry blossom, picking up change dropped in the street and keeping it in a jar
earmarked as my chemical and equipment piggy-bank [I sold my actual piggy banks, which were worth a few notes a piece to buy chemicals and glass, because at the age I was at the time I was only allowed the price of a beano comic and mars bar a WEEK in allowance
, so I went out door to door, selling picked flowers, and offering to wash cars for a couple of pounds a go. Often got more than I asked for too, since people, although I didn't understand this at the time, must have just wanted to be generous to a youngster who was working his arse off, every day after school and at weekends, unless I'd raised enough for a synth, or experiment, or buying some more reagents or precursors of reagents to actually go and USE the things I'd worked so hard to afford, with a big fat shiteater grin on my face in pure unamitigated delight
at say, managing to score a pot of iodine crystals, some bromine, or get hold of some fuming sulfuric acid, find some thionyl chloride batteries searching for copper and lead in a derelict industrial building, there were a treasure trove of those wonderful battery pack manna-from-heaven in the security systems, powering things like alarms. or to have saved enough red phosphorus, and have saved enough money to buy myself a welder's disposable argon tank and buy myself the then absolutely wonderful beyond measure self-gift of a portable disposable-cylinder type welders torch and start distilling said red P, under inert gas to obtain some actual real white phosphorus, at little me's opinion then, my quest for what at the time was the holy grail of holy grails, even more than the alkali metals other than Li and Na (not counting trying for PCl3 and PCl5, although never very successful in obtaining a great quantity of what to kiddy-me may as well have been the blood of christ himself, coming from the grail, every single DROP of PCl3 I DID manage to obtain, was rationed out with a mix of the greatest of care and the greatest of unwillingness to actually let go of it, for had I had any gold, it would have been infinitely less precious and less to out-scrooge scrooge over=
)
Thats what I mean by I've always been a chemistry addict. I don't think I COULD stop if I tried, not that I have the slightest intention of ever, ever doing anything of the sort. I'd about as willingly gouge out my eyeballs with a rusty melon baller full of frozen piss before I ever lay down my gas mask and tongs, stick the Kipp on ebay and relegate my dessicator and autoclave to cooking TV dinners.
Hell if I ever got that far, I'd sooner shoot myself, for something must have gone seriously, seriously wrong, and be hopeless of recovery, health wise before I ever set my glass down and power down my stirplates for good [for 'good' being a figure of speech only, for living hell would likely be more accurate]
Ugh, WHY did I even have to THINK about that, its a mental picture I don't need at the best of times, but before bedtime? thats nightmare-fuel if ever there was any *shivers*
Better keep pinching myself to make sure I didn't just have one to begin with, to have formed such an abhorrent mental image. Ew.
