Ask Science

xkforce , in How long will the Great Lakes last?

At the current rate of sediment accumulation in lake Erie, it would accumulate enough fine grained material
to fill its volume
in less than 70,000 years.

This assumes a lot i.e that we wouldnt dredge material, that something else doesnt wipe them out first etc.

h3mlocke , in How long will the Great Lakes last?
@h3mlocke@lemm.ee avatar

So you mean like if the ocean dissapears?

morphballganon , in How long will the Great Lakes last?

Last?

Are they going away?

theywilleatthestars OP ,

I mean most things do eventually

nickwitha_k , in How long will the Great Lakes last?

Until they become the Alright Lakes.

nis ,

This is askscience. We need a standardized scale for this.

Great should obviosly be near the top. But is Ok above or below Alright?

nickwitha_k ,

Point taken. I'd suggest something along the lines of this scale:

great > good > alright > ok > adequate > meh > fair > subpar > unfortunate > abysmal

myrrh ,

feeble < poor < typical < good < excellent < remarkable < incredible < amazing < monstrous < unearthly

...based upon how my elementary school teachers used to grade assignments, great is just above excellent, so they'll diminish to excellent lakes first, then good lakes, then typical lakes...

AstridWipenaugh , in How long will the Great Lakes last?

42

slazer2au ,

Seconds? Years? Decades? Meters? AU?

Care to give a unit?

MisterChief ,

It's a joke. It's a reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the answer to the ultimate question is 42. It's designed to not make sense.

slazer2au ,

Yep. Which is why I said time and distance units.

MisterChief ,

Well woosh on me.

Everythingispenguins ,

The unit is 42

slazer2au ,

Oh, the unit is the universe.

Everythingispenguins ,

And the number too, much more efficient

stalker , in Is it possible to receive an electric shock when you *stop* touching something?

I am not expert, but seems plausable. Shock comes from high voltage electric charge jumping from metal to skin. If you press it, you are part of the electric charge. If you are far away, charge cannot jump. Problem is only when you are couple of centimeters close to it. AFAIK, this is not current, but electric discharge, I think it cannot kill you (it is just very unpleasant), but maybe someone else knows better?

TotallyHuman OP ,

Thing that confuses me is that when you let go, you should have the same charge as the generator. No charge difference, no arc. Unless I'm wrong about something, which I probably am (hence my confusion).

catloaf ,

The generator is generating a difference. Even if you have the same potential when you're holding it, as soon as you let go, that ends.

TotallyHuman OP ,

Does the human body rapidly discharge into air or something?

catloaf ,

Enough for a change in potential to cause arcing, as we can see. I'm sure you could find relevant experimental studies, or even conduct them on yourself with a proper transformer and voltmeter.

Kalkaline , in Is it possible to receive an electric shock when you *stop* touching something?
@Kalkaline@leminal.space avatar

Yeah, if you move your hand around on those things you'll get a static shock, it's going to hurt, but it won't kill you. If you watch those demonstrations they have a pole they ground the generator out with.

cygnosis , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?

It wouldn't delay your death. But it would make it more pleasant. You would most likely pass out from low blood pressure pretty quickly and then you wouldn't have to worry about starving any more.

southsamurai , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works avatar

You can never, ever get a net gain from self cannibalism of any kind. Digesting takes energy, and you're also having to heal/replace whatever it is you're eating.

Besides, the amount of blood that will come from a pulled tooth isn't enough to do anything useful. You wouldn't even gain minutes from it if the source was external.

MisterCurtis , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?

Something to consider is that your body relies on blood glucose as its primary energy source. During starvation, glucose levels are severely depleted. This triggers your body to start using stored fatty acids. All remaining glucose is reserved for the brain to use.

By removing blood from your body and moving it to your stomach, you're essentially moving that precious energy to an organ that can't as readily make it available to the tissues that need it.

Thanks to the thermic effect, it also takes energy to digest and metabolize food. You'd be expending extra energy to digest the blood that was already in your body, where it was perfectly content carrying usable energy where it was needed.

h3ndrik , (edited ) in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?

I thought you can't digest more than a little bit of blood because of the amount of iron in it. And you're likely to start vomiting.

And if you lose too much blood, it'll kill you much more quickly anyways.

And of course if you lose blood and have to replenish it... That takes a good amount of extra energy to produce all the blood cells etc. And digestion also costs energy.

over_clox , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?

I've read a story of a 3 year old that had to have his tonsils removed. The poor child didn't understand that it's not good to swallow so much blood, didn't know enough to tell his parents what was up, and he unfortunately passed away, with a belly full of blood ☹️

Fal ,
@Fal@yiffit.net avatar

This seems like an urban legend

southsamurai ,
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works avatar

Absolutely not true. Wherever you read it is full of malarkey. I would go so far as to say it is impossible, since your be vomiting unless you were still drugged. It would take sedatives to keep you under long enough to swallow that much, and you can still vomit while sedated.

You also don't die from a full belly by itself.

Then, there's the fact that the stomach takes up some degree of water during digestion, and is breaking down any solids that it can break down along the way. You'd have to literally chug the blood to get enough in at once to distend the stomach, and no tonsillectomy produces that much blood.

Almost every single modern procedure uses some kind of cautery to stop bleeding, and the few that don't still take steps to do so.

Anyone, especially a small child, bleeding enough to die from swallowing it, would never be sent home. That's a sign of a major problem apart from the surgery.

And that's ignoring how much blood loss that would be. Even if swallowed, the amount needed to cause death wouldn't fill the stomach in a small child. Even in a bigger child, the stomach is bigger too, so you run into issues with realism there.

Tonsilectomies are done all around the world, and have been for ages. While complications can happen, this simply isn't one of them.

over_clox ,

Here's one documented case of an 8 year old girl from last year, and it took about 6 days of bleeding before she was pronounced brain dead...

https://www.wbir.com/article/news/health/child-faces-fatal-health-issues-after-simple-procedure/51-d9385f6b-f3f8-4c22-b0d4-72c2130f1d62

I can't quite find the much older story of the 3 year old toddler though, but it was essentially the same thing, and took about a week of health decline before he passed. Nobody knew the toddler was swallowing the blood until the autopsy ☹️

morphballganon OP ,

The poor child didn't understand that it's not good to swallow so much blood

It sounds like the swallowing wasn't the problem, the bleeding was. The swallowing just masked the true symptom, the bleeding, from being observed by others.

over_clox ,

Exactly

PorradaVFR , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?

That would be akin to running a hose out of your car's gas tank and back in. You'd use some gas for the pumping and add none back in the process.

Hobbes_Dent , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?

If you have calories in your blood, you should leave them in there to get used instead of taking them out and back in. You wouldn’t be adding usable energy, you already had it.

You have energy stored in fat and muscle, but your body already is going to try and consume those without all that added stress of eating yourself from the outside.

Apytele , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?

Takes nutrients to both digest things and make more blood and you won't be able to use all of it the second time around so no you'd be netting negative calories.

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