The most humane way of killing: Nitrogen or Helium Asphyxia

The most humane way of killing: Nitrogen or Helium Asphyxia

The reason why I say this is humane is because the human lungs are kinda stupid. They don’t detect lack of oxygen but only carbon dioxide.

By making the subject breath helium or nitrogen, we can fool the lungs into thinking it’s breathing oxygen, when in reality, the body is being suffocated. All that would happen to the subject is that they would become tired, fall asleep, become unconscious, and eventually die. The subject wouldn’t even notice. This is quite a fast method and is completely painless, thus making it a highly humane execution method.

You're just breathing normally and then everything goes black, that's how it's supposed to look like.

In practice however, body does react to loss of oxygen. I have some experience with this, I worked on an experiment involving mice. It was tumor research, mice were given an ugly tumor on the side of the body, experimental treatment was applied, stuff measured and at the end of it all, the animal was sacrificed.

The setup was such that the mouse was put under and breathed through a tube a mixture of breathable anaesthetic, nitrogen and oxygen. Electrodes were put in, results measured and when you were done you shut off the oxygen valve and wait for mouse to expire. It took a while and the animal squirmed, spasmed and made noise on occasion.

It probably didn't hurt, the mouse was unconscious from the anaesthetic already, the lack of oxygen just added to that. The movements were involuntary, surely. Then again it wasn't completely without symptoms either and the only way to be sure is to experience it yourself. Coming back from an execution to tell the tale only happened once in recorded history and not everyone believe that (it's a basis of beliefs of about 1.8 billion people though). I’d be wary of saying it certainly isn't excruciating. It shouldn't be, but there's no way to tell for sure.

I don't see why we wouldn't add anaesthetic to people we’re executing though. It's dirt cheap. The worst thing you can do is an overdose and that's kind of the point anyway.

As for the least humane ways. Well……