this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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If you were in a room with enough of these, could it asphyxiate you?
Yes. In fact this is a notable problem in cargo ships. The holds can be 100% devoid of oxygen as rust creation removed it all. Thing is, you don't get the warning of the lack of oxygen as that warning in your brain is tied to there being too much carbon dioxide. But there isn't too much carbon dioxide, there is simply no oxygen. So you just pass out and asphyxiate.
Many people have died this way, sometimes chains of people as they go to investigate why the first person didn't come back.
Edit: Smarter Every Day did a video on pilots losing oxygen and what that does to your thought process. In that video, he goes into a ~~nitrogen~~ hypobaric gas chamber and is unable to even put on a mask to save his life, all while being 100% certain at the time he was fine.
I've been in a similar chamber (Hypobaric instead of nitrogen). I remember everything because I was a chicken and put my mask back on at the very first sign something was off. One of the other participants couldn't /wouldn't put their own mask back on. It's interesting to witness.
Yes. I’ll do the math:
I'll assume iron-based absorbers. 1 300cc absorber packet is enough to absorb 99.9% of the oxygen in one gallon volume of air. So, ( this is going to be fun with US measurements). A 10x10x10 foot room is 1,000 cu ft, that's 7,480.5 gallons. 7480.5x300cc = 2,244,150cc, which is 592.84 US gal, or 79.25 cu ft of absorber to absorb most all the oxygen. So about a 9.5" thick layer of absorber over the 10'x10' floor.
At sea level pressure you would feel off after the oxygen dropped to 19.5%, be impaired down to 16%, hypoxic at 14%, life threatening hypoxia at 12%, below 10% loss of consciousness and death.
It would take about 4-ish days, given adequate surface area, for the absorbers to take up most of the oxygen. But wait, we have to include respiration, and we use about 4.5% of the oxygen we breathe at about 390 cu ft a day, so that increases the rate of consumption. You'd feel crappy on the first day pretty quick, second day hypoxic and probably dead before the end of the day. If you increased the airflow over the absorber and accessible surface area you'd probably run out of survivable oxygen on the first day.
I probably screwed something up in the math going from cc to liters to cu ft to inches or whatever, but I tied to keep it sane.