| ▲ | mikewarot 4 days ago |
| >Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic! There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1] Despite intensive medical care and offers from numerous volunteers to donate blood for transfusions, Slotin's condition was incurable.[2] He called his parents and they were flown at Army expense from Winnipeg to be with him. They arrived on the fourth day after the incident, and by the fifth day his condition started to deteriorate rapidly.
Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene. He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Slotin's_death |
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| ▲ | fluoridation 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| It was instant in that his fate was sealed in an instant. This is unlike basically every other form of death. If you're bleeding out there's a chance you can be patched up and transfused. If a cancer is killing you it could get treated. But Slotin was a dead man walking the moment his hand slipped; there was nothing anyone could do about it. |
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| ▲ | anon84873628 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Exactly. I figured my meaning was assumed in the earlier comment. But the details also adds to the magical element. It's not just being reckless, but being reckless with a horrible, excruciating, protracted, torture curse. A story of using a screwdriver to fiddle with a loaded gun while the muzzle is pointed at you wouldn't have the same appeal, because the consequence is so much more direct and mundane. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It was a form of death that was extremely novel, considering the entire history of humanity. He wrecked his entire body at the molecular level in a way that takes days to fully take effect. Before nuclear research the only ways to kill you comparably were either very violent and immediate, dosing with some chemical aggressor (e.g. venom, fungal toxin), or rabies. Radiation poisoning works at the physical level, like getting punched really hard in every covalent bond in your body. Death by a trillion cuts. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > or rabies Rabies is actually a great comparison. It has similar magical/horrifying feel to it. Like with the screwdriver slip-up, catching rabies can look like a total non-event; here, it doesn't kill you yet, merely starts the timer on a bomb. The countdown can be anything between days and years, and when it runs out - when the first symptoms start showing - you're already dead. Then the dying happens, which... relative to radiation sickness, I'm really not sure which is better. To add an insult to injury, rabies is very much curable before the symptoms show - but you have to realize you may have been exposed in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | Scarblac 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It also reminds me of the horrible stories that exist on the Internet about people committing suicide by means of a paracetamol overdose (usually with a lot of alcohol as well). They are found, rushed to the hospital, they wake up and feel better, everybody can meet them and see them alive and know of their attempt -- but they're walking dead, their liver is incurably damaged and they die in a few days. | | |
| ▲ | dctoedt 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > suicide by means of a paracetamol overdose (usually with a lot of alcohol as well) In his final days, my dad, dying from leukemia in home hospice care, had been getting his calories entirely from a cocktail of beer and V-8 juice — and taking a lot of acetaminophen (aka paracetamol, the generic of Tylenol) for the pain. As I brought him his latest "meal," I warned him that too much alcohol and acetaminophen would wreck his liver and kill him. He brightened and asked whether that'd be a way for him to end it. I said I didn't know the details but that as far as I knew it'd take days and be even worse than what he was experiencing. (He died the next day, 15 years ago yesterday.) | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's also exactly how some poisonous mushrooms kill you, which I mentioned earlier. You become seriously ill for a bit and you recover, but your liver is already destroyed and you die a few days later. The only way to save you is for someone to think to test for that and to get you a transplant before then, so practically impossible. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Amanitin#Symptoms_of_po... |
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| ▲ | snowwrestler 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But actually there are tons of visual jokes about people looking down the barrels of loaded guns, cannon, even lightsabers: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/1hy7fu/never_look... I didn’t think of it this way before, but yeah, the demon core memes are absolutely cousins of this type of loaded weapon humor. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | What they said is that it wouldn't have the same appeal, which is true. Someone shooting themselves by looking into the barrel of a gun as a joke is funny because it's a really obviously stupid thing to do. Luke lightsabering himself in the eye is funny first due to shock value, and second as a form of observational humor by pointing out how even though lightsabers are so obviously dangerous, there's not a single mishap where someone maims themselves with their own weapon in the movies. Someone playing with a screwdriver and a few pieces of various metals is funny because its danger is unintuitive. It's so strange that someone can mishandle such seemingly innocuous objects and then die a few days later because of it, that it's comical. It's a non sequitur. | | |
| ▲ | thrw42A8N 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Weren't the Jedis actual wizards, and others were forbidden from wielding that weapon exactly because someone would get maimed? The weapon is tech but the reason they don't damage themselves is clearly spelled out magic. | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Well, Luke wasn't a Jedi when he was first handling it, and Obi Wan didn't seem to mind at all giving such a dangerous object to a completely untrained person. Hell, he didn't even tell him which side to point away from himself. | | |
| ▲ | thrw42A8N 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Obi Wan knew who is it. He said "It's your father's" when he handed it to him. |
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| ▲ | chuckadams 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Reminds me of "Do not look into laser with remaining eye" |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > This is unlike basically every other form of death. It's unlike many deaths. But there are plenty more that share that quality. > Wetterhahn would recall that she had spilled several drops of dimethylmercury from the tip of a pipette onto her latex-gloved hand. > Approximately three months after the initial accident Wetterhahn began experiencing brief episodes of abdominal discomfort and noticed significant weight loss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn That onset reminds me of a children's book about postwar Japan, in which a little girl is running around on the playground and falls down. This extremely ordinary event is treated as an emergency, and it turns out to be one. |
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| ▲ | glhaynes 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Replace "instant death" with "certain doom" then! Even more fantastical! |
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| ▲ | DiggyJohnson 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Of course there was, that’s not even pedantically correct. Death came instantly, only dying took awhile. |
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| ▲ | l3x4ur1n 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I mean, if this should happen to me, I want to undergo euthanasia as soon as possible. If I am already dead, I don't want to unnecessarily suffer. So my question is, did he not want the euthanasia or was it not "accepted" or why he had to suffer so much? |
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| ▲ | fwip 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The first person the demon core killed, Harry Daghlian, notably allowed the doctors to study and record information about his deterioration due to radiation. I believe Slotin had a similar motivation - that at least, even this slow, painful death could provide valuable information to doctors and scientists. | |
| ▲ | rob74 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This was the United States in the mid 1940s, I doubt euthanasia (or even assisted suicide) was much of a thing back then. Plus, as someone else mentioned, there was also the scientifical aspect of being able to study the effects of irradiation. |
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