r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Tattoomyvagina • 14d ago
Original Creation Liquid Oxygen boiling and evaporating at 45 degrees F
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u/FSM89 14d ago
You spelled -297 wrong
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u/bbcgn 14d ago
I would guess OP ment that the surrounding air is at 45 °F (7.2 °C) .
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u/StingerAE 14d ago
Can't beleive I can this far down to get the conversion to sensible units!
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u/Baltisotan 13d ago
To be fair, F is relatively sensible when you’re talking about comfort. 0 is really freaking cold, 100 is really hot. It’s only usable for that though, when you start bringing science into it it all goes out the window.
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u/Newspeak_Linguist 13d ago
That's only because you're not used to using metric for those measures. You can say the same in metric. 20C is room temp, 25C is a nice day, 30C is a warm day, and 35C is a damn hot day.
0C the snow sticks, -5C is a great ski day, -10C means wear another layer, and -15C is getting cold.
I still think in F when it comes to weather because that's what I've heard all my life, but I think it'd translate to comfort just as well, it'd just take getting used to.
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u/Ferdinandofthedogs 13d ago
It's one of the most used arguments but it's still dumb. If you're used to one system over the other that's the one you'll end up defaulting to. Ultimately it doesn't matter, it's just a different measurement of temperature, and people like being assholes. What's really stupid is the measurements of weight and distance in the Imperial system.
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u/frichyv2 13d ago
Can we all just get together and acknowledge that "stone" is the worst one
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u/Galactic_Nothingness 13d ago
It's not really a dumb measurement though.
It's the ability to accurately recreate measurements with precision.
Sure, it might not seem like a big deal, but having a standardised measurement scale that can be recreated anywhere on Earth... It is vital to almost every facet of our lives.
Freedom units have no place in precision. Every single standards and precision measuring body uses SI.
It's nice being able to calculate how much energy is required to heat water, for example.
Can anyone tell me exactly how much energy it takes to boil a room temperature gallon of water?
Yeah...
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u/Celeste_Praline 13d ago
Thank you for the Celcius translation !
I was wondering how does it feel if I put my hand in it : I suppose now that it's a bad idea...
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u/voxelghost 13d ago
But that would be like showing a picture of pot of boiling water, and saying "here's a pot of water boiling at 71°F "- which would be nonsensical
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u/Narezzz 13d ago
Morbid urge to huff those fumes.
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u/ArkaneArtificer 13d ago
The fumes would be pretty refreshing probably, as long as it’s not tooo close and the air isn’t too cold
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u/spotty15 14d ago
Could you drink this? Would you just burp constantly? Or is it like a gush of wind?
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u/Hep_C_for_me 14d ago
It's like -300 degrees so I guess you could drink it but you're not going to have a good time. I've got a decent amount of experience with it and it always made me nervous.
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u/spotty15 13d ago
That's different from the 45F I was led to believe it was at
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u/wolfgang784 13d ago
45F is the outside temp that day, not the liquids temp. That shit boils at negative several hundred. It got warmed up by the ambient 45F but it aint that hot or itd all be gone instantly.
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u/Outrageous-South-355 13d ago
If you believed that oxygen was boiling at 45° how do you justify people breathing in -45° temps?
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u/spotty15 13d ago
Well, the title says "boiling at 45F". Doesn't say anything about breathing at -45F.
So forgive me for not being a chemist
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u/Outrageous-South-355 13d ago
It's not a chemist thing. it's common sense. If oxygen boils at 45° then it's a liquid below that temperature. Trying to breathe a liquid results in death. It takes like 5 seconds of critical thinking.
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u/spotty15 13d ago
Bruhh, it's 9am and the first thing I saw on Reddit. I'm not a chemist or a scientist by any means, just a curious cat.
45F is fine for a drink. It's not unreasonable to think it'd be drinkable at that temp.
Get off your high horse
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u/The_Killer_of_Joy 13d ago
While I completely understand your actual point (so take this as a bit of a rib than anything serious) - I am not sure thinking Oxygen itself would be in a drinkable form at 45F is considered very reasonable at all lol
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u/spotty15 13d ago
I don't expect to actually drink this (so take this as playful curiosity more than anything serious), but the logic is: oxygen is essential for life --> different form of same element --> still consumable?
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u/The_Killer_of_Joy 13d ago
Hey man, like i said, I am not being serious. And I get your logic about it being drinkable, I was just focusing on the Oxygen being liquid at 45F part as a "fun" nitpick, nothing more.
Have a good one dude!
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u/His_Name_Is_Twitler 13d ago
They have admitted a lot about themselves and what led them to think what they did while waking up in bed pre-coffee. You win. Stop berating them just because they were wrong. I hope you don’t do this to family and friends
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u/The_Killer_of_Joy 13d ago
What about this single comment made you think I was berating someone/trying to win?
Have you ever been around people at a work place in the morning and someone said something in the typical morning brain fog and you lightheartedly give them a bit of crap and then everyone moves on with their day?
That is what (at least my single comment) was intended as. Some seem to be taking it more seriously then others which happens in text conversations, but was not my intention.
Have a good one dude.
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u/Dr-McLuvin 13d ago
Actually you can breathe super oxygenated liquid called perfluorohexane. At least a mouse can I don’t know if a human has ever tried it. It would be dangerous and you would get tired out.
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u/voxelghost 13d ago
Well haven't watched the video, but what you could do, is have machines circulate oxygen dissolved in PFH in the lungs, and CO2/oxygen gas exchange will take place. Our lungs don't have enough power to "breathe" liquids on their own, at least at atmospheric pressure.
And PFH is just a media that dissolves oxygen very well, it doesn't have any oxygen of its own, so in these setups PFH takes the role of Nitrogen, not oxygen, in normal atmospheric breathing.
Partial Liquid Ventilation was explored as a treatment for ARDS in humans , but failed clinical trials.
Total Liquid Ventilation (what you would need for diving) so far has only been tried in animals. So let's assume it's problematic.
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u/Gussie-Ascendent 13d ago
boiling, into a gas, the gas people breath?
it's gotta be pretty cold for oxygen to be liquid, if it's that cold out you died already. even -100 F isn't cold enough for it to be liquid, gotta be -297.3 F11
u/Rimworldjobs 13d ago
That's good though. Electricity makes me nervous because I've seen what it can do. It keeps you alive.
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u/Responsible-Stock-78 13d ago
Horrible time, cold burns from liquid O2 or N2 are no fun, worked in cryogenics for 10 years and always had a healthy fear of the stuff
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u/lutzy89 14d ago
liquid O2 starts boiling at -218C, or -391F, if you drank it you would freeze your throat/stomach, it would not be a good time. i guess it would be a gush of wind because your throat would be frozen open.
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u/Ghostforever7 13d ago
Well seeing that drinking dry ice shots can fuck up people's digestive system at -109.3 degrees Fahrenheit (-78.5 degrees Celsius) and this is -297.3 degrees Fahrenheit (-183 degrees Celsius), it's safe to assume your esophagus and stomach would be toast.
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u/pichael289 13d ago
You can hold a little in your mouth or your hand for a few seconds due to the leidenfrost effect forming a sort of evaporative barrier between it and your skin.
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u/Penguinkeith 13d ago edited 13d ago
You can do anything once lol your mouth and throat would freeze and you would die if it’s in contact for more than a few seconds…
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u/proscriptus 13d ago
The effect on your body would be roughly similar to drinking boiling water. You would definitely die, relatively slowly and not relatively agonizingly.
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 13d ago
It has a nasty habit of randomly exploding on contact with organic materials, like the inside of your mouth. I'd be nervous even standing that close to that much liquid oxygen. And even if you didn't die from an explosion you'd still be killed by it freezing your throat solid
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u/bhavy111 13d ago
oxygen boils at -183°C. It's also extremely flammable in all states of matter.
You can drink it as in you can also drink molten gold.
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u/ReasonablyConfused 12d ago
Someone did this with liquid nitrogen. It took massive reconstructive surgery of their throat for them to survive.
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u/Mobile-Comparison-12 14d ago
Is it really blue or just a reflection?
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u/Aboriginal_landlord 14d ago
Liquid oxygen does have a slight blue tint, many colourless gasses take on faint colours when liquefied. Liquid oxygen is also magnetic.
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u/djdaedalus42 13d ago
Strictly speaking it’s paramagnetic, due to unpaired electrons in the molecule.
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u/Ser_falafel 14d ago
All colors are reflections!
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u/critiqueextension 14d ago
Liquid oxygen's boiling point is approximately -183 °C (90.19 K or -297.33 °F), significantly lower than 45 °F, which means it cannot exist in liquid form at that temperature. This temperature discrepancy highlights the extreme conditions required for liquid oxygen and its potential hazards as a powerful oxidizer.
This is a bot made by [Critique AI](https://critique-labs.ai. If you want vetted information like this on all content you browse, download our extension.)
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u/Electrical-Tea-1882 13d ago
Can a science person tell me what would happen if you drank that? Besides death.
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u/-LsDmThC- 13d ago
Liquid oxygen boils at -183 degrees celsius. It would freeze your mouth/throat nearly instantly.
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u/jim_the-gun-guy 14d ago
For science I kinda wanna pour this on lava to see what would happen. I mean I’d assume a big burst of steam but you know… science.
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u/Squishy-the-Great 14d ago
It would ignite and explode before it even touched the lava.
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u/MetalMonkey667 13d ago
Not quite but close, oxygen itself doesn't burn, it allows other things to burn, so pouring LO2 onto red hot lava would result in the flames flaring up dramatically, possibly looking like an explosion with the speed of it, but it'll only burn as long as there's fuel to burn so the increase in O2 would cause the lava to burn much hotter and fiercer for a while until there's nothing combustible left
Although the liquid O2 suddenly converting to gas on contact with red hot rock, along with the thermal shock the rock receives would almost certainly cause a mess!
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u/a_trane13 13d ago edited 13d ago
The gaseous oxygen evaporating off the liquid here would likely ignite, likely causing the liquid oxygen there to then also evaporate and ignite and maybe explode, probably all within a few seconds.
You’d have to hope there isn’t much flammable stuff in the air or in the lava itself cause then you’re in big trouble. That table sitting there or even the metal container could maybe burn if it gets hot. And there’s probably enough flammable stuff in the lava itself to ignite and make a small explosion and send lava / rock flying.
Steam is water. Liquid oxygen is not water. So very little noticeable steam would be produced.
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u/MrSpaceCool 14d ago
That’s so dangerous… one spark and boom …
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u/alex7071 13d ago
It doesn't explode on it's own, it still needs something as fuel, but it does make existing burnable things much more flammable, like a match, charcoal, cotton, steel wool, etc. People have been burnt in hospitals by oxygen permeating blankets, sheets etc, and set off by a spark.
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u/Adept-Alps-5476 13d ago
It’s actually not all that dangerous specifically because it’s outside / well vented. Having a match around this, while not recommended, generally wouldn’t be an issue. Far easier to give yourself a cold burn than light something on fire. Basically the liquid oxygen is super cold and has a lot of thermal mass, which makes burning hard and you need a surprisingly high energy input to get the reaction started. As an example hitting the container hard enough to punch a hole in it and expose freshly unoxidized metallic surfaces miiiight do the trick, depending on what metal the container is. If you did get it started burning then it’d be bad for sure. Think flying globs of molten metal in all directions.
If you contained the fumes (they will sink to the ground while still cold) and threw a match on that you could light stuff briefly on fire (till the gaseous ox ran out). If this was inside a building / room you’d build up high gasious oxygen content everywhere and that’d be ultra dangerous. and if you put it in a sealed container then it would boil, pressurize and explode.
Source: a decade working with liquid oxygen and other cryogens
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u/ProfessorPetulant 14d ago
No. You need something to burn. Fuel plus oxygen can go boom. Oxygen on its own? You have lots around you already.
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u/Hell_Is_An_Isekai 13d ago
One very interesting bit of chemistry, flammability isn't a fixed value, it depends on the presence of reactive elements. In a pure oxygen environment, all sorts of things become flammable.
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u/DarkSoulsExcedere 13d ago
Steel becomes flammable when liquid oxygen is present. Don't fuck with liquid oxygen.
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u/--Sovereign-- 13d ago
Steel is flammable at normal conditions too, light some fine steel wool up, it'll burn
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u/MrSpaceCool 13d ago
Oxygen in such volatile state can easily be explosive ….. particularly the oxygen vapours
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u/I_W_M_Y 13d ago
Dump some kerosene in it and then flip a match.
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u/Zuli_Muli 13d ago
You could rub your hands together really hard and ignite kerosene in pure oxygen.
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u/zyyntin 14d ago
I was looking for a similar comment. Oxygen is VERY FLAMMABLE!
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u/-Jiras 13d ago
Oxygen is not flammable, it just helps things burn. so the spark itself woulndt do shit, there must be a flame somewhere to really fuck things up
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u/twister121 13d ago
This is also somewhat incorrect. Oxygen isn't simply "helping things burn". It's symbollically/chemically half of the material that results in combustion.
Fuel plus oxygen goes to carbon dioxide and wate. And that takes some energy to kickstart but then produces more energy. If you have that much oxygen pretty much the only limit to our formula is fuel. Which means all available fuel will be spent pretty quickly.
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u/julias-winston 13d ago
Careful with the vapor. You do not want to inhale oxygen!
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u/Adept-Alps-5476 13d ago
The vapor could be cold enough to be mildly damaging, but your pain receptors would likely give you plenty of a heads up to leave. There’s actually no problem with breathing pure oxygen up to about 1-2 days straight. Longer than that and you start increasing the risk of cns (central nervous system) toxicity.
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u/Holiday_Ostrich_1978 13d ago
Can you drown in this stuff?
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u/Master0fAllTrade 13d ago
Yes. Assuming you find a way to deal with the extremely cold temperature, the lungs still wouldn't be able to diffuse it to blood stream because it isn't in a gaseous state.
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u/Lord-Bobster 13d ago
might be a dumb question, but are the vapours safe to breathe in? I get that pure oxygen is flammeable but assuming there was no risk of it lighting on fire, would breathing it be safe?
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u/ChemicalAdmirable984 13d ago
Not straight away with your nose right above it, the boiling point is -183 °C so the vapors are still extremely cold and would freeze your lungs really fast. Given enough time for the vapors to warm up it's safe, pure oxygen environments where used in the Apollo mission and IEVA suits. Pure oxygen is also used in hospitals for lung issues where your breathing capability is reduced so your given 100% oxygen instead the +/- 21% atmospheric levels to help you get the needed oxygen with reduced lung capability.
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u/KentuckyCatMan 13d ago
What kind of workplace has this going on?
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u/Tattoomyvagina 13d ago
We use it for patient care -supplying oxygen to patients while in route to a hospital.
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u/German-Gemini 13d ago
I also use it as an aircraft mechanic for the air force. You fill airplanes with it so that pilots and crews can use it in flight.
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u/garden-wicket-581 13d ago edited 13d ago
The best two uses for liquid oxygen are:
- to show its magnetism
- instantly have your charcoal ready to cook (boy some WWW wayback there .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble )
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u/InterviewFar5034 13d ago
Stupid question, can a breath in the liquid oxygen, and even more specifically, will that result in an untimely demise? If so, why not?
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u/Sir_Newdles_II 13d ago
Honest question: why? It’s on the floor by some utility cart, is this just for funsies?
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u/Parahelious 13d ago
People are really dumb enough to think oxygen is liquid below 45 fahrenheit? Wtf? With what logic are you guys using?
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u/TheBoondoggleSaints 12d ago
Putting aside the fact that it’s cold AF, what would happen to you if you drank an 8oz glass of this?
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u/PepeNoMas 14d ago
can i stick my head inside and breath normally
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u/Foray2x1 13d ago edited 13d ago
You might be able to take one breath before your head, mouth, and lungs freeze
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u/bbcgn 14d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_oxygen