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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today's episode is a

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Speaker 1: classic from our erstwhile host, Christian Sagar. The question of

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Speaker 1: the day, why can't we breathe underwater? Hey, everybody, it's

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Speaker 1: me Christian Sagar, and I am back with another brain

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Speaker 1: Stuff question, why can't we breathe underwater? I haven't met everybody,

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Speaker 1: but everyone that I have met has not been able

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Speaker 1: to breathe underwater, except for aquaman, of course. And it's

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Speaker 1: a good question when you think about it, because water

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Speaker 1: is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, right, well, it

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Speaker 1: goes in the chemicals. There's one thing we need to remember, though,

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Speaker 1: about those chemicals. It's that once they react in certain ways,

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Speaker 1: they form compounds that are often nothing like their original elements.

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Speaker 1: Think of two solo artists from different bands and then

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Speaker 1: they get together and they make an album that sounds

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Speaker 1: nothing like the original music. For example, if you react carbon,

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Speaker 1: hydrogen and oxygen together one way, you get glue close.

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Speaker 1: But if you react them together another way, you get vinegar.

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Speaker 1: And if you react them yet another way, you get fat.

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Speaker 1: And if you react them yet another way, you get

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Speaker 1: ethanol and glue close fat. Ethanol and vinegar are nothing

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Speaker 1: like each other, but they're all made from the same elements.

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Speaker 1: In the case of hydrogen and oxygen gas, if you

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Speaker 1: react them together one way, you get liquid water. And

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Speaker 1: the reason we can't breathe liquid water is because the

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Speaker 1: oxygen used to make the water is bound to two

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Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms, and we can't breathe that resulting liquid. The

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Speaker 1: oxygen that fish breathe is not the oxygen that's in

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Speaker 1: H two O. Instead, the fish are breathing O two

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Speaker 1: oxygen gas, and that's dissolved in that water. Many different

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Speaker 1: gases dissolve in liquids, and we can see an example

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Speaker 1: of this all the time with carbonated beverages. In knees beverages,

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Speaker 1: there's so much carbon dioxide gas dissolved in the water

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Speaker 1: that it rushes out in the form of bubbles. Fish

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Speaker 1: breathe that dissolved oxygen out of the water using their gills,

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Speaker 1: and it turns out that extracting the oxygen isn't that easy.

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Speaker 1: Air has something like twenty times more oxygen in it

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Speaker 1: than the same volume of water. Plus let's remember that

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Speaker 1: water is a lot heavier and thicker than air, so

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Speaker 1: it takes a lot more work to move it around.

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Speaker 1: The main reason that gills work for fish is the

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Speaker 1: fact that fish are cold blooded. This reduces their oxygen

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Speaker 1: demands tremendously. Warm Blooded animals like whales breathe air like

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Speaker 1: people do, because it would be hard to extract oxygen

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Speaker 1: using gills. Human beings can't breathe underwater because our lungs

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Speaker 1: don't have enough surface area to absorb orb enough oxygen

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Speaker 1: from water, and the lining of our lungs is adapted

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Speaker 1: to handle air instead of water. However, there have been

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Speaker 1: experiments with humans breathing other liquids like fluorocarbons. Fluorocarbons can

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Speaker 1: dissolve enough oxygen, and our lungs can draw that oxygen out.

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Speaker 1: It's just that first breath where you suck in the

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Speaker 1: fluorocarbons and they enter your lungs. That is not very pleasant,

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Speaker 1: but it is possible. And look, please, nobody out there

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Speaker 1: try to breathe underwater, because unless you're an extraordinary person

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Speaker 1: or maybe a mutant, you're probably going to drown. Today's

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Speaker 1: episode was written by Ben Bolin and produced by Tyler Clang.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other topics. Is

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Speaker 1: it how stuffworks dot com brain Stuff is production of

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