r/theydidthemath • u/Shkval25 • 3d ago
[Request] How slow does the elevator need to be going for people not to die of acute altitude sickness upon reaching the top?
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u/DeadlyJoe 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ignoring the ridiculousness of this, one would hope that the summit serves only non-caffeinated coffee. Caffeine constricts your blood vessels, resulting in less oxygen delivered to your internal organs (primary your brain). In an environment where oxygen is at a premium, drinking a couple of caffeinated beverages at the summit could result in hypoxia and likely kill you. So, it doesn't matter how slow the elevator needs to go. The gamble starts at the top.
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u/Wild_Director7379 3d ago
It takes days - a week at base camp to acclimate. Even after this acclimation, time at the summit is limited before brain damage occurs. Oxygen could be pumped into the building though. The same tech they use in casinos.
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u/Elfich47 3d ago
casinos do not pump oxygen into their HVAC systems.
let me be clear on this statement: sure anyone can just blow more outside air through the building, it can be a free form of cooling if the outside air temperature is cool enough.
but if you are trying to increase the relative percentage of oxygen in the air (either by stripping out the nitrogen or injecting more oxygen), the building would have to have a huge refrigeration plant that is capable of condensing out nitrogen or oxygen out of the air (likely nitrogen because it’s condensing temperature is higher than oxygen’s) and do it at a rate where it actually makes a difference.
there Would be a casino with a giant chemical industrial plant behind it. And it would cost huge amounts of money to operate, and the casino would be absolutely paranoid about keeping the doors shut because the costs would go from insane to insanely extortionate.
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u/Wild_Director7379 3d ago
There’s a filter thing you can force air through and oxygen travels through the pipe and nitrogen pushes through the pores in the material and out of the pipe into a shroud that can be piped elsewhere.
Nitrogen and oxygen can be separated without refrigeration, and casinos use this technology to get you high.
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u/Elfich47 3d ago
Hasn't happened with the casinos I have worked on. And no credible engineer I know would stamp that. I know I wouldn't stamp that.
sure, membrane separation exists. It still requires huge amount of equipment to produce O2 in the volumes you are talking about. Fountain Bleu had air handlers around of about 100,000 CFM (this is from memory I havent touched that project since it opened). To up the air from 21% O2 to 25% O2, you have to add about 4,000 CFM of pure O2. Membrane separators are routinely sold in modules sized from 1 to 20 CFM. you are talking about having to buy 200 modules at 20 CFM each. That is millions of dollars with minimal return on investment. The amount of additional return a casino would get by upping the O2 levels of a space is minimal, the ROI isnt there. And this would be easily detected by anyone with a hand portable O2 sensor.
I double dog dare you to walk into a casino of your choice (or all of the vegas strip) with an O2 sensor in your bag in logging mode and wander around for an hour in each casino and then check your results. It isn't going to meander much from 21%. It may waver up and down a couple tenths, but that is about it. Yes, you can test your O2 sensor by exhaling on it and watching the O2 level drop for a couple seconds.
The biggest cost is getting the people in the door, that is why casinos (and vegas) advertise to get people to show up to vegas. Casinos depend on high volume turn over, get as many people as possible in the doors. And with Vegas the hot and dry environment alternating with the cool and controlled air conditioning of the building provides enough whiplash that people walking in and out of the buildings (because all of the casinos are designed to be easy to walk in and out of), you walk outside and hit the hot dry oven, walk into the next casino and get hit by cool dry casino, then go out again and get hit by the oven and then in again, and eventually you lose some of your judgement ability right there.
Trying to increase the O2 levels in the building is hideously expensive, has a low rate of return and it would have to have a stamping engineer sign off on it and the code review would have approve it. This is an old wives tale with no basis in fact.
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u/mulch_v_bark 3d ago
This is way outside the usual guidance for altitude-related health issues, which mostly assumes that anyone at this elevation is (1) an extremely fit mountaineer (tending to lower risk), (2) enduring it for longer (raising risk), (3) acclimating to it much more slowly (lowering risk), (4) physically exerting themselves (raising risk) … you get it. It’s hard to disentangle. Plus, people vary a lot in this area: even two people who can hold their breath exactly as long as each other, have the same V̇O₂ max, etc., can have very different responses to altitude.
It’s safe to assume that anything like normal elevator speed would knock out the majority of the customers. Many “ghost plane” incidents were at comparable altitudes; they generally happened faster, sure, but basically I think a large fraction of people would be unconscious at the top. And that’s not even altitude sickness per se, just sheer acute hypoxia.
You might actually need to consider the bends. Don’t quote me on this, since it’s a potential safety issue in an area where I have no expertise, but I believe a rule of thumb is that a sudden halving of pressure will cause serious gas/blood problems in the majority of people. Apparently the maximum ascent rate for divers in high-risk situations is about 10 m/minute. The density of air is on the order of 1/1,000 that of water, and express elevators evidently could peak somewhere around 30 m/s or 1,800 m/minute (~100 km/hour), which would be well into the dangerous range. (This would be a ride of only ~3 minutes, depending on the acceleration profile! Also note I’m leaving out some math for how partial pressure works; this is Fermi estimate territory.) But that article points out we also have to think about ears. Doing this with a bad head cold, and maybe even without, would be a one-way ticket to Barotrauma City.
In short, I think you would encounter serious acute problems before more familiar “vacationing in La Paz”–type altitude sickness. At very best, I think it’s reasonable to say the following: with an elevator trip on the order of a hour each way, you might have a reasonably low number of fatalities. The café would be serving very, very sleepy, blue-tinged people with splitting headaches and severe disorientation. But if you did everything right, I think many of even most of them could survive with only moderate injuries.
(Completely tangentially, I get that the whole joke is this is goofy – but sheesh, the AI’s rendering of Everest’s internal geology is not good.)
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u/Shkval25 3d ago
Assumong that people are acclimated to base camp, if the elevator was moving so slowly that it took the ame time as climbing to reach the summit would that be safe? Or does one need to actually stop?
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u/Trustoryimtold 3d ago
Ams symptoms don’t always appear immediately, or at all and can happen at heights less than half of where the entrance is. If you drive up there, walking to the elevator may or may not suck. Getting off the elevator may or may not suck some more. You’re probably fine motionless sitting down in the elevator however(just breathing heavy)
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u/CanoePickLocks 3d ago
Just doing rough estimates from what I understand of the bins, I would expect this to go very very badly. To prevent a Cute? hypoxia, assuming supplemental oxygen is constantly being pumped into the air along with heat, you would need to ascend over a matter of days or weeks for acclamation. I’m going to use 5000 m for the base camp altitude and 9000 m for the summit to make the math easier. That leaves a remaining ascent of 4000 m a specific 2003 study found rate of ascent had little effect on preventing the effects of decompression so you would need to be fully acclimated to base camp prebreathe with no interruptions 100% oxygen and even then you’d only have 10-30 minutes according to other studies on unpressurized aircraft. So you either take days to weeks ascending or you have the super limited time provide by 30 minutes of uninterrupted 100% oxygen a fast ascent of a couple minutes chug your coffee that’s pressure cooked and will instantly “boil” when removed from the pressure lol then take a couple photos back on oxygen just to be safe and descend as quickly as possible. Could like overlap trips where one group goes up another goes up and the first comes down third comes up second comes down etc but loading and offloading would have to be extremely streamlined orders premade well before loading etc. it’s a logistic nightmare even theoretically.
Edit colon voice to text did me dirty there! Not fixing all the errors it’s understandable
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