Poll of the Day > Fire vs. Ice vs. Water

(+) Yeah! (+)

BURNING
Pros: Smoke inhalation will kill you first and will likely disorient you before you fall unconscious.
Cons: Very painful and frightening. You'll watch your body melt and fall apart before you die.

FREEZING
Pros: There's a chance you can be resuscitated afterwards.
Cons: Painful and takes the longest. You will feel yourself slowly shutting down.

DROWNING
Pros: Lack of oxygen will render you unconscious relatively quickly if you are completely submerged.
Cons: Very frightening. Our instincts make us dread this type of death and panic unbelievably.

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... I mean... how much time would each one take? If they all take the same amount of time, freezing seems like the least awful one.

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As for me, I'd rather burn to death. The thing is that it is really painful, but at some point your nerves would be killed, if you're in a situation hot enough to cause 4th degree burns. And what kills people in a fire is actually the smoke inhalation. It'll suffocate you before you ever just have to feel your body melt.

With freezing, your nerves stay alive for much longer. It is incredibly painful and it is actually a pretty slow way to go. They say it's painless but it is not. There is a chance you may be able to be brought back to life afterwards, however -- but if I'm dead I'm dead, and I'd rather have it be done faster.

Drowning is literally the way I want to die the least. If you're fully submerged and not struggling at a violent surface, then it does not take as long as burning or freezing to death just because you will be unconscious before you ever die. But personally, I REALLY hate the feeling of holding my breath, having the pressure build up in my chest... It's awful. And if I'm suffocating in a fire due to the smoke, at least I don't have to feel my body at some point take an involuntary gasp and have water fill up my lungs. No thanks. Oh yeah, and it takes longer to drown in salt-water than it does in fresh water. Crazy stuff.

Honestly, I don't care how I go as long as I don't drown or get hung. Fuck that.

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Flappers posted...

get hung

Some of us already are

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Far-Queue posted...

Some of us already are

nice

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And I'm just going to put this here, if you're in the ocean then sharks are the least of your worries.

With the other crap that's in there, plus the drowning itself, you'd be better off praying that a great-white comes to put you out of your misery -- but they won't.


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I heard burning to death is the most painful thing a person could experience, not sure if it's true but it does seem like it would be the most painful of the 3 even if it is probably the quickest

Freezing to death seems like it would take the longest by far and would be the most drawn out torture

I would have to say drowning

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Muscles posted...

I heard burning to death is the most painful thing a person could experience, not sure if it's true but it does seem like it would be the most painful of the 3 even if it is probably the quickest

Freezing to death seems like it would take the longest by far and would be the most drawn out torture

I would have to say drowning

Drowning is not as fast as movies make it out to be. It can take up to 15 minutes or even longer for a person to die from suffocation. This is especially true if you are struggling at the surface or against waves in the ocean or currents in a river. If one is completely submerged, then it will not take as long...

It takes about 5 to 20 minutes to drown in fresh water -- but it can take up to half an hour to drown in the ocean. This is because of the salinity content. It actually draws water from your body towards it, so you drown in your own fluids alongside the seawater. With fresh water, the water content will actually diffuse from your lungs into your cells and overhydrate them, causing them to burst.

So it's not as quick as you may think, but unconsciousness occurs much quicker, so you will not have to feel yourself dying for as long. But it causes a primal type panic. Victims of drowning are found as corpses still clutching tightly onto sticks or rocks or anything they could grab onto in desperate hope that they it could save them. They also cause other people to meet the same fate. If you try to help a drowning person then they will grab onto you uncontrollably and often bring you to a watery grave alongside them. This is how multiple drownings happen and it's why it's so important that life-guards use floating equipment like boards or life-savers when rescuing somebody.

Even if it's lights out quicker than the other options, what you feel before you're granted the mercy of unconsciousness, and eventually death, is what makes it the least desirable option for me. But that's just me.

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Freeze to death doesnt sound as terrible. Drowning would be awful but after the panic forces you to inhale water in your lungs its all over. Burning to death would obviously be a nightmarish level of suffering.

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Drowning is incredibly painful. People don't use it as a torture method for no reason.

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Gonna go with freezing. Too many nightmares already of drowning and burning is way too painful a way to go.

I'd probably even tolerate it better if I could still game while doing so.

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Asphyxiation by smoke isn't the same thing as burning to death (aka immolation). Asphyxiation by smoke can actually happen when you're sleeping, whereas drowning you'd be awake for.

Flappers posted...

Cons: Very painful and frightening. You'll watch your body melt and fall apart before you die.

Bodies don't "melt", at least not at that heat.

Far-Queue posted...

Some of us already are

*starts slow clap* then realize MrMelodramatic will somehow claim that clapping is a white supremacist symbol and make a topic about it. Goddamn Melo.

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^ Yup, a fire needs to be unbelievably hot to kill before smoke does. People think it's easy to just burn a body but it's actually really hard. Why do you think cremation needs to be done in a special furnace?

However, you can still get second or third degree burn in a fire if it's bad enough. Our purposes on this hypothetical question is meant to reflect this. I should have said cooked.

Even though the smoke inhalation will kill you first, in a really bad fire it will be excruciating before that happens. First thing that happens is that your clothes will melt into your flesh. It sucks...

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Flappers posted...

^ Yup, a fire needs to be unbelievably hot to kill before smoke does. People think it's easy to just burn a body but it's actually really hard. Why do you think cremation needs to be done in a special furnace?

Well, that's not actually true. If you catch on fire, the fire will likely kill you before the smoke. However, you can easily die from asphyxiation or heat stroke before the fire gets to you.

There was the case of a tram breaking down in a sloped tunnel where the only people who survived were the guys who walked back to where the first was and proceeded down the tunnel. Everybody who went up in the tunnel away from the fire was killed by the fumes or heat.

Flappers posted...

First thing that happens is that your clothes will melt into your flesh.

Again, melt really isn't the right word.

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Zeus posted...

There was the case of a tram breaking down in a sloped tunnel where the only people who survived were the guys who walked back to where the first was and proceeded down the tunnel. Everybody who went up in the tunnel away from the fire was killed by the fumes or heat.

That sound terrible! It's true that the heat itself can kill you before the fire cooks you. If anyone actually falls into a volcano they'd be dead long before the hit the lava. And once they did, they wouldn't sink like in the movies. They'd actually likely skitter around on the surface like water on a hot skillet due to the leidenfrost effect. Actually, that seems a lot more disturbing than the slow sinking into lava Hollywood portrays.

Again, melt really isn't the right word.

Actually, this time it really is. You can look it up. Most clothes melt before they burn due to the fabrics that are used, like polyester. I know this as a fact because one time a shirt of mine got misplaced by a candle. It never caught aflame, the fabric just melted everywhere...

You were right about flesh melting, I misspoke, I may have been thinking about how clothes melt into your flesh but who the Hell know. But yeah, having your clothes melt into you sounds like an unbelievably painful experience. It's no wonder they have burn wards. Such injuries require specific treatments if the person is to make a full recovery. And burns are some of the most painful wounds even long after they were caused. Fourth degree burns, however (that sometimes penetrate to the bone), I've heard are not painful because at that point it completely kills the nerves. I've even seen a video of a monkey with fourth degree burns on its arms from an electric line. The middle parts of its forearm was nothing but burnt flesh and the clear bones. You could see through the gap between the radius and ulna. But the monkey didn't act bothered at all because it felt no pain. That's awful enough, I can only imagine what living through that would be like for a person...

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But man, I'm surprised how many people are voting for freezing to death. It is by far the longest way to die of all the options presented. It may not be as painful as burning, but it can take hours if we're just talking about a cold winter day. And before dying you'd get unbearable frostbite on your extremities. I think people often underestimate how painful that is.

But if it's extremely cold, like -20 or in freezing water, it can take only 10 minutes for the shock from hypothermia to set in and end your life. It's by no means pleasant.

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Also, pro-tip:
If you're ever walking on a frozen body of water and you fall through the ice, don't try to pull yourself onto land then stand on your two feet get out because you'll just continue to fall through. Cold water really pulls the life out of you, so you'll exhaust and perish. Instead, keep your stomach to the ice and crawl on your belly until you reach solid ground. Pretend you're a seal. This displaces your weight more evenly and lessens the chances of falling through.

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Flappers posted...

But man, I'm surprised how many people are voting for freezing to death.

I think it depends on how cold it is? In really cold weather, you could die in minutes, and I'd think if it went even colder it'd be near instantaneous. Compare that to drowning where it's always going to take something like 3-7 minutes, not counting when you're trying to hold your breath.

And keep in mind you can freeze to death in your sleep a lot easier than you sleep through a fire (because, if the carbon monoxide doesn't get you, you'll likely wake up) and you can't through drowning.

Flappers posted...

but it can take hours if we're just talking about a cold winter day.

Again, depends on how cold that winter day is.

Flappers posted...

But if it's extremely cold, like -20 or in freezing water, it can take only 10 minutes for the shock from hypothermia to set in and end your life. It's by no means pleasant.

It actually gets a lot colder than that in some places >_>

https://wgntv.com/weather/weather-blog/severe-weather-updates/records-set-wind-chills-in-the-negative-50s-chicago-area-wide-this-wednesday-morning/


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Zeus posted...

I think it depends on how cold it is? In really cold weather, you could die in minutes, and I'd think if it went even colder it'd be near instantaneous. Compare that to drowning where it's always going to take something like 3-7 minutes, not counting when you're trying to hold your breath.

And keep in mind you can freeze to death in your sleep a lot easier than you sleep through a fire (because, if the carbon monoxide doesn't get you, you'll likely wake up) and you can't through drowning.

That's true, it depends. Everything depends.

It can take longer to drown if you are able to get above the surface every now and then.

I think it'd be pretty damn hard to stay asleep if it was that cold, unless the sleep was caused by trauma or alcohol, the latter of which causes you to freeze faster because it makes it more difficult for your body to regulate its temperature, and a good number of people do actually die that way, unfortunately...

Again, depends on how cold that winter day is.

I'm talking about an average Winter day, but I guess that does change depending on where you live. What I mean is a moderate cold, not like an Arctic cold.

It actually gets a lot colder than that in some places >_>

Obviously.
But I wasn't strictly talking about those places, was I? I said -20 and that's what I meant for the example I gave. >_>

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Freezing for me

I'm coming.. Nintendo.. Wii

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freezing seems like the one I could do the most about. burning, you're permanently damaged right at the beginning. drowning you have a few moments to fight and then it's over. freezing, just struggling by itself could defeat the effect (well, unless we're talking about being submerged in liquid nitrogen or something).

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You'd think a human brain would be smart enough to know that pain isn't going to do anything in those situations. Makes ya wonder if it's just a whole lot of stupid pretending to be smart.

Redfeather posted...

You'd think a human brain would be smart enough to know that pain isn't going to do anything in those situations. Makes ya wonder if it's just a whole lot of stupid pretending to be smart.

I think some people go into shock

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Redfeather posted...

You'd think a human brain would be smart enough to know that pain isn't going to do anything in those situations.

believing that escape is impossible makes it impossible. believing that escape is possible and fighting for it can allow you to escape when you otherwise wouldn't have. at no point is the message "get out of this situation now" necessarily useless. the "brain" is only concerned with survival at any cost.

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