Climbers using xenon gas to climb Everest
gripped.com
gripped.com
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14099126/?ref_=ttep_ep_3
https://boingboing.net/2021/11/25/hamilton-morris-experience...
The heavier an inert gas is, the lower the pressure threshold. So for nitrogen the pressure threshold is well above atmospheric pressure and it affects only the divers who must breathe air at a pressure equal to their ambient pressure. Lighter inert gases, like helium, can be used up to higher pressures, corresponding to greater depths.
For xenon, the heaviest non-radioactive inert gas, the pressure threshold is much lower, so it can work as a general anesthetic at atmospheric pressure.
However, at the low pressures corresponding to the high altitudes around Everest, perhaps xenon does not have any psychoactive effects, which is actually claimed by the company providing the climbers with it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09992-7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXElfzVgg6M
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15710...
> One session of xenon gas costs $5,000 per person for a 30-minute session.
That may be considered ridiculously expensive, noble, absurd, and or a small fortune to some, but to others it's relatively irrelevant, on the order of supersizing your fast food order.
From another link in the comments: https://tripsitter.substack.com/p/xenon
> Because of its scarcity, xenon is much more expensive than the lighter noble gases—approximate prices for the purchase of small quantities in Europe in 1999 were 10 €/L (=~€1.7/g) for xenon, 1 €/L (=~€0.27/g) for krypton, and 0.20 €/L (=~€0.22/g) for neon,
That price of argon might be per cubic meter, not per liter.
The price of argon is essentially zero for the argon itself, which forms one percent of the air. What you pay is only the energy required to separate it from dioxygen and dinitrogen, e.g. by liquefaction and distillation.
EDIT: Googling now, I see prices for argon around half of dollar per kilogram.
A cubic meter of argon has slightly less than 1.8 kg, so the price of argon is at most 1 $ per cubic meter.
A liter is one thousand times less than a cubic meter, so the price per liter is one tenth of a cent.
(1) For example, a mixture of xenon and fluorine, when exposed to sunlight, makes crystals of xenon difluoride.
Pun intended?
See the Meyer-Overton correlation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaestheti...
The gas itself is under $100 per liter depending on purity.
Not really. The range of prices doesn't change by multiple orders of magnitude. At small quantities the cost of the ancillary equipment might be as much as the gas. I guarantee you they're not buying $5000 of pristine gas per client.
One of the hardest parts of dealing with Xenon is getting the last little bits of Krypton gas out. Very small doses of Krypton gas are inert and not really a health issue. The research grade Xenon has to be higher purity because many experiments rely on it being the only gas present.
> No one is going to go up Everest with anything below medical.
Companies who do Everest expeditions vary greatly. There's a lot of history of bad behavior among companies around Everest. Just because it's expensive and their clientele is wealthy, you shouldn't assume they're operating according to the highest standards. There's a long history of badly behaving companies around Everest.
One reason why it’s not a good idea to use a normal air compressor to breath from (or compress air for cylinders), is precisely because of issues like this.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2023/december/p...
Generally and as an illustration, a chemical may have a 99% "reagent" grade that includes industrial solvents or some other chemicals that are toxic to ingest. So its equivalent "food" grade may have the same 99% purity but the other 1% is something that isn't poisonous.
With the 99% stuff, the laws of physics compells them to use the benzene.
Financial considerations also exert an influence on the process.
Where I am it's called "methylated spirits" and IIRC the boing point of the additive is very close to that of the alcohol so it's not possible to distill it out.
Hopefully the only country with a market for that.
At what temperature and pressure?
While on this topic, one book I really enjoyed is Into Thin Air [1]
I'm chill with a bit of traffic on popular trails, but that also kill the vibe I'd imagine. Hope it was still fun though.
That's an understatement.
It's trendy to downplay climbing Everest now that it's associated with rich people, but it's still an incredibly difficult feat. There isn't any comparison to a day hike in the cascades.
I have several friends who I consider very athletic and trained. Even they had difficulty with smaller, less challenging peaks. You can't climb Everest without a lot of training, motivation, and dedication, even if you have all the money in the world to spend on it.
Rich people are weird.
The mountain has been flooded with rich people paying guides to get them to the top for decades. It’s obviously still a major challenge, but very much a well-monetized one.
There are a lot of delusional people who wish they could pay their way to the top, but they get filtered out by the realities of how hard it is to climb at altitude before they can even get to the point of making an attempt.
It's definitely easier to make a climb today than it was decades ago, but it's not something the average person can pull off. You have to be very fit and motivated to do it even with the aids.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40804827
(fwiw, I don't take any drugs anymore, except for the occasional night drinking. I had some horrifically bad trips that felt like my consciousness was smeared across the entire universe, suffering for eternity. Took me a long time to recover, and the message I took away was "anything you can learn on drugs you can learn in other, safer ways".)
- Yvon Chouinard
From: https://www.tpl.org/resource/conversation-yvon-chouinard-lan...
But Xenon?
> Furtenbach, whose training rides and runs have been 10 percent faster for days after xenon-fuelled climbs...
Something to muse about.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/95-brian-oestrike-ceo-...
Hypoxic training would be detrimental to an untrained athlete. Restricting your oxygen intake would reduce the volume and duration of exercise you could tolerate, which would slow your progress.
So please don't use a hypoxic training mask. It would do the opposite of what you want to achieve.
Even within athletes the benefits of hypoxic training for general performance are questionable once you get away from people with a vested interest in pushing it (like the person interviewed in your podcast).
I'm back at sea level, but when I was living between sea level and the mountains I could feel the lag in my runs when I switched and gained elevation.
Furtenbach is the person selling the $5,000 Xenon sessions.
Keep that in mind when considering the claims.
As always, it's hard to tell if this is really a trend or if the company is just hoping to FOMO their way into paying customers by planting news articles about it being a trend. I'm 99% sure it's the latter.
The source for this article is a .PDF file of an FT.com article that is hosted on the website of the company selling the Xenon-assisted tours : https://www.furtenbachadventures.com/wp-content/uploads/How-...
So color me skeptical.
The topic of oxygen had come up and almost everyone was all in favour of it until one guy explained he wouldn't be alive had he decided to use oxygen. He got cut off between two camps in bad weather, and were he relying on oxygen he would have likely run out; and subsequently passed out and died in the cold. As he was instead properly acclimated, he could ride out the storm as long as he stayed warm, which was relatively easy because he didn't need to worry about oxygen consumption.
Whether his story was true or not, it highlighted that it might be better to "be more" than "have more". The idea has stuck with me since, and whenever I'm faced with the choice between a shortcut past problem using some external resource or taking the longer, slower route of learning it/training properly I always go for the latter. It's not sexy, but has served me pretty well.
It's been an interesting thought-experiment these past few months as the talk around AI has become deafening. I know I'll be on the wrong side of history eventually, but I still prefer to "earn my turns" to borrow a metaphor from backcountry skiing.
Either way, I like the thought experiment! :D
Genetics and training might help for a while but it won't help for long.
this all really doesn't make any sense, the whole point of the pride you get from topping mountains is the actual risks and effort you put in
You can be proud of whatever you want and have fun doing whatever you want, but that doesn't entitle you to anyone else's respect.
I mean, if you want to argue that this is "personal" and you're just proud of it without needing anyone else's respect, then why are you here defending it on Hacker News?
Those two figures show how the number of deaths is less than 5% of the count of those who actually made it to the summit. The death rate would be less than that due to the large number of people that end their attempt partway through.
Few people have enough money to do it. That doesn't mean it's difficult.
I don't see much saying they actually tried it first. It seems rather a dangerous experiment otherwise. The normal trouble with going up without acclimatizing is getting altitude sickness. One time when I was there a film crew at Nepal base camp sent a local guy to Kathmandu to get some film gear which due to delays involved him staying there three weeks, then he returned to base camp in a day and died because the three weeks had been long enough to lose acclimatization even thought the guy was from the area and used to being at altitude.
I mean maybe xenon stops that but I wonder how well they have checked. Flying to base camp is especially iffy. The norm is to fly to Lukla which is at a safe altitude and then walk up. At least that way if you feel bad you can turn around and walk back down, at least in theory.
EDIT - It seems from the FT article that Furtenbach has tried it. - https://archive.ph/1qEGQ
The Dangerous Trend of Xenon-Accelerated Everest Climbs By Anthony David Adams, NOLS Wilderness First Responder
A concerning trend is emerging in high-altitude mountaineering: the proposed use of xenon gas to dramatically shorten Mount Everest climbing expeditions from the traditional 6-8 weeks to just 7 days. As a wilderness first responder, I must emphasize the severe risks this approach poses to climbers.
Understanding Traditional Acclimatization The standard two-month Everest expedition timeline isn't arbitrary - it's a carefully calculated protocol that allows climbers' bodies to make crucial physiological adaptations. During proper acclimatization, the body gradually develops more red blood cells, strengthens respiratory muscles, and creates new blood vessels to cope with extreme altitudes. These changes can't be safely accelerated.
The Xenon Shortcut: A Recipe for Disaster Xenon gas, banned in sports since 2014, artificially stimulates erythropoietin (EPO) production, increasing red blood cell counts. While this might seem like a clever shortcut to altitude adaptation, it creates a perfect storm of potentially fatal complications:
Critical Medical Risks: 1. Severe Altitude Illnesses: Rapid ascent drastically increases the risk of acute mountain sickness (AMS), high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), and high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE) - all of which can be fatal within hours above 8,000 meters.
2. Blood Clotting Dangers: High altitude naturally increases blood viscosity. Adding xenon-induced EPO production creates an unprecedented risk of lethal blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks in an environment where medical evacuation is often impossible.
3. Unpredictable Responses: Individual reactions to xenon-induced EPO can vary dramatically, making it impossible to predict or control blood thickness at extreme altitudes.
Beyond Biology: The Human Factor Technical climbing skills, extreme weather awareness, and high-altitude decision-making abilities cannot be compressed into a week-long timeline. The mountain demands respect and patience - there are no shortcuts to developing the judgment needed for survival in the Death Zone.
A Call to Action As wilderness medical professionals, we have a responsibility to strongly advise against this dangerous trend. Artificial EPO stimulation through xenon use cannot replace the complex physiological adaptations required for safe high-altitude climbing. The promise of a quick summit isn't worth the extreme risks to human life.
The time-tested approach to Everest remains the only responsible path: proper acclimatization, thorough training, and respect for the mountain's demands. No breakthrough in EPO manipulation can safely replace these fundamental requirements for survival at extreme altitude.
A web search says RBCs get replaced approximately every 120 days, so you'd have about 4 months of higher aerobic fitness unless you did something to keep up the need for more RBCs.
Sleeping in a high-altitude tent while at sea level or some equivalent hypoxic stimulus will fool your body into thinking it's at high altitude and pump out more RBCs.
Other supposed methods to increase EPO naturally - https://www.menshealth.com/uk/fitness/a754917/sweat-like-a-v...
There are not, getting a helicopter to the top of everest is a major achievement in its own right, to the point that airbus brag about the models of their helicopters that have achieved it.
There are regular helicopter tours to the base camp, but to the summit? no, that's still a rare special event, and usually only done by a solo pilot since you're way out of the helicopter's maximum ceiling with load.
If you've never climbed a mountain before, you're a beginner mountaineer. If a mountain is climbed by hundreds of beginner mountaineers each year, it's a beginner mountain. These people don't have fitness or skills, they just have money.
There will always be dedicated mountaineers who view it (or K2) as the ultimate personal achievement but that number is joined more and more by the "wealthy instagram crowd".
https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2024/12/16/everest-by-the-n...
The people I've talked to who have summitted Everest, with one exception (a retired sherpa), know literally nothing about how to mountaineer. They don't know how to fix a rope--literally one of the most basic, easy skills. They can't climb 5.6, and in fact don't even know what 5.6 is. They don't know how to analyze snowpack. If these people attempted, for example, a winter ascent of Long's Peak, which is many people's first summit, they would likely die, because they are even less prepared than beginner mountaineers who usually attempt this mountain.
My investment in this is that beginners showing up with money and claiming reputation because they summitted the world's tallest mountain detracts from the reputation of every other practitioner of the sport. It would be like someone claiming to have run a marathon when they actually were pulled by someone else in a rickshaw--and yes, the colonialist metaphor there is intentional. It's an insult to anyone who actually puts in the work to learn and get fit for mountaineering, and their buying their way to the top makes the mountain inaccessible to real mountaineers.
It's a little depressing now because writing formally used to be an incentive to read the details, but now it is a signal that someone had an AI write something out of bullet points.
Yeah, don't do that, please.
If you think it's something people will find useful, you can share the prompt.
If the prompt isn't anything special, then you probably shouldn't bother.
Is it the length?
My notes are often only legible to me personally and fragmented and not well formed. Or they are voice notes.
Edit: my original question conflated EPO with blood doping
I wonder how you'd do that experience now?
Full reveal; they fly around searching for a big enough floe, parachute engineers and equipment in to build an airfield, or rather 2 or more, since invariably the ice cracks. I saw a major crack less than 2-3 yards away from my tent, when I woke up and walked out... erk.
It seems that roughly 1% of people who attempt the summit die in the process; there are hundreds of bodies simply left on the mountain as it's too risky to retrieve them.
There's every chance that this approach will lead to more fatalities as it will increase the proportion of inexperienced, unskilled climbers attempting the summit, with less opportunity for those unsuited for very high altitudes to pull out before dying.
I feel like I've heard of some guys that did a 12 week program to prepare them, but don't recall the outcome. You certainly can't fake a lifetime of strong cardio fitness.
If you build up to climbing Everest more gradually you find this out in places and at altitudes where you can be saved.
That said, Everest is an extremely dangerous place even for experienced mountaineers, though it's not the most dangerous . The second highest peak, K2, is so dangerous that roughly one person dies for every eight or so who reach the summit.
Its not like theyre being forced to go climb mount everest.
They could go do bungie jumping or cliff diving, driving fast, etc.