scirpaceus

In the case of Herbert Nitsch's accident, he went so deep that even the short bottom time was sufficient to cause DCS on the ascent with just the standard air he was carrying. N2 diffusion is a function of both time spent at depth and the partial pressure of N2 from depth itself, and in his case, time was short but depth was extraordinary. In hindsight, his attempt would have qualified for a deco stop, had he had the lung capacity to do one on the way up.

This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock.

Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them.

Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

It's true, though, and in fact 30% is a conservative estimate. The percentage of English words that come from French varies from 29% to 45% depending on whether you count derivatives of those words.

A very non-exhaustive overview of this is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...

> It's thought that you can avoid this by subbing out the helium for hydrogen, but nobody so far has been insane enough to try.

It's reportedly been done very recently using a rebreather (https://gue.com/blog/n1-the-inside-story-of-the-first-ever-h...).

Prior to that, in 1992, there was the French COMEX-sponsored HYDRA 10 experiment that saw Théo Mavrostomos dry-dive in a chamber to 701 meters (71.1 bars) - the world's absolute saturation dive depth record. Though that experiment used "only" 20% H2 (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618493-000-technolo...).

And conversely, nobody loses to cancer. It's a draw at best, considering that the cancer dies with the host.