The problem is the lungs are an incredible network of tunnels. If you spread out the surface area of your lungs, they would cover a tennis court (something I heard a long time ago, likely not exactly correct but generally right).

You could get UV light to the large bronchi but you couldn't get UV light into all the million little aveoli.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lung, Estimates of the total surface area of lungs vary from 50 to 75 square metres (540 to 810 sq ft);[28][29] roughly the same area as one side of a tennis court. They then offer two references for this.

So you're off by a factor of 2 but are basically correct.

In the documentary movie Blade II, they show how UV light can go around corners if you make your light grenade strong enough.

UV light can go through the corners, and walls, if you make it strong enough. It could easily get into the smallest of aveoli. You may not have much of a lung left after that, though.

How about the patient breaths dilute Argon, and then excite it with a magnetic field so it lights up and create UV from inside the lungs? I think Argon is non toxic, and I think we’re only aiming for weak UV exposure.

And also, if you are intubating the person, they are probably pretty close to death. And then on top of that you paralyze them (with a medication, temporarily). So you are stopping their breathing. You have a few seconds in these people to get their lungs connected to mechanical ventilation. From what I've seen, if you don't, the outcomes are very bad.

This may be somewhat different from the typical intubation case, for example prior to surgery. Where its a generally more healthy person who has not been hypoxic for hours or days and is not at the last of their reserves...

Claims about the surface area of fractals are almost always true if generally interpreted. If you went down to the atomic scale you could probably calculate that the surface area of your lungs would cover the Earth. :)

The fractal structure of the lung ends with relatively smooth tissue after a finite amount of branching. So the usual arguments about fractals notwithstanding, there actually is a finite area to discuss that makes sense.

Sure, but if you look closer you will see that all of the cells have holes for stuff to go in and out, and the proteins sticking up from the surface have shapes, and so on. That's why I said "the atomic scale" not "the microscopic scale."

Any claim about surface area that relies on the examination at the atomic scale is no longer due to the fractal nature of the lung's branches. Such claims would be equality true (or false) of non-fractal organs.

On the atomic scale surfaces are not continuous so they don’t really have a surface area. You can’t infinitely zoom in like you can in a real fractal.

That assumes the fractal nature continues at all scales, which won't hold here I suspect (i.e. it's not enough for the structure to exist on those scales, the scaling properties have to continue for the geometry to be "fractal")

You wouldn't have lung tissue at that point. You'd have atoms that came from lung tissue.

If you blast a bright enough light it has the potential to penetrate extremely deeply. It would be a balancing act of maximizing luminosity while minimizing human tissue damage.

Are the internal structures of the lung all opaque to UVA light?