Now an inventor in the United States believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like fish.
Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.
The idea immediately conjures up the terrifying spectre of drowning but our lungs are more than capable of taking oxygen from a solution.
“The first trick you would have to learn is overcoming the gag reflex,” explains Lande, a 79-year-old inventor from St Louis, Missouri. “But once that oxygenated liquid is inside your lungs it would feel just like breathing air.”
Lande envisages a scuba suit that would allow divers to inhale highly-oxygenated perfluorocarbons (PFCs) – a type of liquid that can dissolve enormous quantities of gas. The liquid would be contained in an enclosed helmet that would replace all the air in the lungs, nose and ear cavities.
The CO2 that would normally exit our body when we breathe out would be “scrubbed” from our blood by attaching a mechanical gill to the femoral vein in the leg.
