Buried alive how do you die

In the classic buried alive scenario, asphyxiation is most likely to be the cause of death. If, despite being pretty stressed out, the grounded party manages to breathe like an average resting adult, their body will convert oxygen at a rate of about L per day day, or 23 L an hour.

That means someone in a coffin has seven hours to make a move. As carbon dioxide replaces the last sips of life-bringing oxygen, blackout and coma ensue. The heart stop beatings not too long after. But as the gravedigger was dispersing the last shovelsful of dirt onto the grave, he heard a knocking from below. Reversing his process and now removing the earth as quickly as possible, the gravedigger found the shoemaker moving inside his coffin.

Over the course of three days, resuscitation attempts were made, but all efforts were fruitless. The shoemaker was declared dead once more and laid to rest for a second and final time. In , a year-old South Carolinian named Essie Dunbar suffered a fatal attack of epilepsy—or so everyone thought. The moment your oxygen supply is gone spells the end. Swimmers or marathon runners with excellent lung capacity might gain an extra minute by holding their breaths.

Let's say the average casket measures 84 by 28 by 23 inches , so its total volume is We'll use that as the internal volume too, to give you a few extra minutes of life. And the average volume of a human body is 66 liters. That leaves liters of air, one-fifth of which liters is oxygen.

If a trapped person consumes 0. Once you're in there, you're in there," says Alan R. Leff, professor emeritus at University of Chicago in the pulmonary and critical care department. But while the tests may show that you are technically alive, your new status may be small comfort to you and your kin. I must decide whether to pull the plug. Not true! Not only have you lost all the upper brain functions that create your memories and behaviors and allow you to think and talk, but you have also lost all the involuntary stuff your lower brain does to keep you alive, like controlling your heart, respiration, nervous system, temperature and reflexes.

If you are brain-dead, these functions are being performed by hospital equipment like ventilators and catheters. You cannot recover from brain death. If you are in a coma, on the other hand, you are legally very much alive. In a coma, you still have brain function, which doctors can measure by observing electrical activity and your reactions to external stimuli. In other words, your body continues to breathe, your heart beats, etc. Even better, you can, potentially, recover from a coma and regain consciousness.

We now have a whole battery of scientific tests to confirm that someone is really, truly brain-dead. Okay, but what if I fall into a deep, deep coma? Will someone eventually pull the plug and send me off to the mortuary?