On Cadmium and Oxygen

[QafianSage]

So, the Coppermind page for feruchemical cadmium seems to imply that cadmium stores oxygen from the blood, which can then be put back into it later. What I'm wondering is, if you were to store cadmium, and then tap it later, while tapping would you be able to do something like, say, talk constantly without taking breaths? Because that's dealing with physical air coming out of your lungs and through your vocal cords, not the oxygenation of your blood.

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

This is kind of a bummer in my mind.  Breathing is driven by the need to get rid of CO2 not necessarily the need for oxygenation. The idea that all your storing is the pressure of O2 in the blood means you would still need to breathe or die anyways... at least continually be exhaling while tapping.  In which case F gold is just so much more superior than cadmium.  

Plus it ruins my hopes and dreams of seeing a cadmium compounder get a hold of breath or stormlight and store those. 

I would say even if you were tapping as much as you can the parts of air are far more than just O2 and CO2.   Without inhaling more room air and adding mass to it you likely wouldn't be able to metabolize enough O2 to make a dense enough gas mixture to vibrate the vocal cords in the first place.   

But feruchemy breaks laws where it needs to to drive the magic so I am sure there is something cool that a cadmium ferring can do that simply healing through not being able to breathe would help. 

Maybe deep sea diving where you can have a need to use O2 constantly and the luxury of still being able to breathe.  

[+Oltux72]

6 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

This is kind of a bummer in my mind.  Breathing is driven by the need to get rid of CO2 not necessarily the need for oxygenation. The idea that all your storing is the pressure of O2 in the blood means you would still need to breathe or die anyways... at least continually be exhaling while tapping.  In which case F gold is just so much more superior than cadmium.  

That would not work, as the gas in your lungs would get saturated with CO2 to the level of your blood and you'd die from your blood chemistry getting out of whack.

Even if you kept breathing you still could not do well without oxygen in your air. Your lungs would reverse and oxygenate the air. I am afraid we have to resort to something more complex.

(Sel)

Spoiler

Feruchemy works like Forgery. Specifically Cadmium feruchemy continously forges your body into the state it had as you breathed the air you used for charging your metalmind.

 

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

3 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

That would not work, as the gas in your lungs would get saturated with CO2 to the level of your blood and you'd die from your blood chemistry getting out of whack.

Even if you kept breathing you still could not do well without oxygen in your air. Your lungs would reverse and oxygenate the air. I am afraid we have to resort to something more complex.

(Sel)

  Hide contents

Feruchemy works like Forgery. Specifically Cadmium feruchemy continously forges your body into the state it had as you breathed the air you used for charging your metalmind.

 

Hence why I mentioned a need for continuous exhale.  If all that was stored was the blood oxygen saturation then tapping it would, in my mind, increase said blood oxygen saturation.  So long as you are exhaling off the CO2 you wouldn't have need for breathing in... 

Well sort of.  You would develop atelectasis without the nitrogen from normal air to hold your lungs open.  

The "treats your body as if it has been breathing normally" would serve a much better explanation to cadmium than "stores oxygen from the blood".   If it stores your normal physiological breathing then it is far and away more useful than just storing oxygen.   There is just way to much going on with each breath we take in the body to break it down to simply storing blood oxygen saturation.  

[Quantus]

Personally, I do think it can Store and release actual gaseous mass, mostly because I expect it to develop into an Ettmetal based life support system for a spaceship. Alternatively it would be kinda funny if a more scientifically advanced Scadrial realized that it is literally just stripping the carbon off the Co2 in the lungs, continuously refreshing it to o2 that way.  

I also dont think it works at the blood/nutrient level since that seems to be the realm of Bendalloy, which can do both nutrients and hydration.  

[CryoZenith]

I think you're underestimating how much blood oxygenation can achieve on its own.

While it is true that breathing does more than simply maintain blood oxygenation, and having steady blood oxygenation is not enough to remove the need for breathing, it *severely* reduces it.

Just look at regular, non-Invested, real life Earth humans. We can hold our breath for only about 5 minutes in the normal case, but that shoots up to an impressive 20+ minutes if we breathe in pure oxygen before we start apnea. A literal 300 to 400% boost.

[Quantus]

58 minutes ago, CryoZenith said:

I think you're underestimating how much blood oxygenation can achieve on its own.

While it is true that breathing does more than simply maintain blood oxygenation, and having steady blood oxygenation is not enough to remove the need for breathing, it *severely* reduces it.

Just look at regular, non-Invested, real life Earth humans. We can hold our breath for only about 5 minutes in the normal case, but that shoots up to an impressive 20+ minutes if we breathe in pure oxygen before we start apnea. A literal 300 to 400% boost.

I feel like the main sticking point that's getting people is the fact that breathing is as much about expelling waste carbon as it is obtaining new O2.  There is a similar issue with long-term used of Bendalloy, but the WOB below has long made me think the metal is capable of it with the correct Intent, in the same way it can store Nutrients OR Hydration but not both (in the same metalminds). 

I suspect that once their Science advances enough to understand the chemistry of breathing, they'll be able to similarly conceptualize a Cadmium metalminds to store away CO2 (as Investiture) as well. 

Im less certain but still pretty sure that they could also store more Pure gasses that way, and currently they just default to the standard Air mixture because they dont know any better.  But if that's the case they should indeed be able to store Pure o2, Co2, or even N2, which would actually be a pretty damn efficient way to separate gasses (which by normal mechanical means is pretty tough and inefficient.  

 

Quote

 

angwilwileth

Since there's a Feruchemical metal that stores calories, is there one that stores the need to eliminate waste?

Brandon Sanderson

Not yet.

/r/books AMA 2015 (July 30, 2015)

 

 

[cometaryorbit]

"Not yet" doesn't necessarily mean they don't know how to use it that way yet, it could mean the metal itself doesn't yet exist - ie probably a god-metal alloy of bendalloy. But we really have no basis to speculate from there, since we don't know even malatium's Feruchemical effect...

[Quantus]

37 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

"Not yet" doesn't necessarily mean they don't know how to use it that way yet, it could mean the metal itself doesn't yet exist - ie probably a god-metal alloy of bendalloy. But we really have no basis to speculate from there, since we don't know even malatium's Feruchemical effect...

I was assuming it would be a mundane metal and so need to be one of the 16, but your point about Godmetals and alloys is a good one.  Not my preference since Im really looking forward to a scientific complexity of metalic arts gizmo's comparable to Fabrial's

[cometaryorbit]

Oh that's quite possible too... just to me the most natural reading of "is there a metal that does X?" "Not yet" is an actual new metal. But WoBs can't necessarily be read that closely.

I do think Metallic Arts machines will end up quite complex, but I would think they'd still be based on the same one power per metal per magic system rules. Now you can do stuff like store senses other than the normal five in a tinmind, if you have those senses, but treating "I need to go to the bathroom" as a form of "nutrition" or "breath" or other known Feruchemical powers seems a much more radical change in what the metal does.

EDIT: plus, that seems like the kind of effect I'd expect a godmetal alloy of bendalloy to have, anyway. With maybe 48 godmetal alloys to explore, I'd expect them to be fairly logically based on the effect of the base metal.

Edited January 25, 2022 by cometaryorbit

[Quantus]

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

Oh that's quite possible too... just to me the most natural reading of "is there a metal that does X?" "Not yet" is an actual new metal. But WoBs can't necessarily be read that closely.

I do think Metallic Arts machines will end up quite complex, but I would think they'd still be based on the same one power per metal per magic system rules. Now you can do stuff like store senses other than the normal five in a tinmind, if you have those senses, but treating "I need to go to the bathroom" as a form of "nutrition" or "breath" or other known Feruchemical powers seems a much more radical change in what the metal does.

EDIT: plus, that seems like the kind of effect I'd expect a godmetal alloy of bendalloy to have, anyway. With maybe 48 godmetal alloys to explore, I'd expect them to be fairly logically based on the effect of the base metal.

It all depends on how you frame it, especially when you are talking about magics that specifically require understanding and Intent.  In the case of Cadmium and Bendalloy, I would consider it entirely consistent for them to originally think it stores just "Food" or "Water" as the most basic physical requirement but era3 scientist learn that it's just a Blood Compound interface that can store general Nutrition and hydration but also specific dietary vitamins and minerals, maybe extract poisons, Platelets. etc. And that Bendalloy specifically targets metabolic processes over nutritional stores but the average person only understands the one.  If the last one is correct, for example (and also a very bad understanding of biology) maybe one of them would be able to Store the biologic process that is a Tan.  

 

But then, as a COMPLETELY different interpretation, I could also see the explanation for Cadmium having nothing at all to do with blood oxygen levels or chemistry and is in fact just a Temporal effect that specifically adjusts the rate at which your body uses up oxygen relative to its energy output.  

 

EDIT, and those are just examples off the top of my head, but really all this comes down to me thinking that many of the metals will eventually have their functions defined in more specific and Scientific/Realmic terms than the early industrial societies so far, and once that happens they will com up with a whole lot of weird single uses and combination uses that would have previously been thought impossible.  

Edited January 25, 2022 by Quantus

[+Oltux72]

4 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Hence why I mentioned a need for continuous exhale.  If all that was stored was the blood oxygen saturation then tapping it would, in my mind, increase said blood oxygen saturation.  So long as you are exhaling off the CO2 you wouldn't have need for breathing in... 

But you would not exhale. This needs a bit of physical chemistry and anatomy. Your lungs work passively by diffusion, because you are a mammal. Your blood flows around little sacks of air until the concentration of those gases in your blood are equal to the partial pressure in your lungs divided by solubility.

Theoretically your body could add so much CO2 to your body fluids that you generate bubbles, but you'd be dead a long time before that.

4 hours ago, Quantus said:

Personally, I do think it can Store and release actual gaseous mass, mostly because I expect it to develop into an Ettmetal based life support system for a spaceship. Alternatively it would be kinda funny if a more scientifically advanced Scadrial realized that it is literally just stripping the carbon off the Co2 in the lungs, continuously refreshing it to o2 that way.  

That will not work. We need to go into organic chemistry. Oxidation of a molecule of sugar:
C6H12O6 + 6 O2 -> 6 CO2 + 6 H2O All good, so far, as get as many moecules of carbon dioxide as you put in molecules of oxygen
But now lets go to a fatty acid:

C18H36O2 + 35 O2 -> 18 CO2 + 18 H2O
Not good at all. Each cycle just about halves the amount of oxygen available.

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

1 hour ago, Oltux72 said:

But you would not exhale. This needs a bit of physical chemistry and anatomy. Your lungs work passively by diffusion, because you are a mammal. Your blood flows around little sacks of air until the concentration of those gases in your blood are equal to the partial pressure in your lungs divided by solubility.

Theoretically your body could add so much CO2 to your body fluids that you generate bubbles, but you'd be dead a long time before that.

I agree that your lungs work through diffusion and that the CO2 would pool over back and forth as would the O2 levels.  The need for constant exhale is simply that you need to be moving that CO2 out of your lungs so that you can get adequate diffusion of CO2 out of your blood stream.  pH balance is essential and CO2 climbing up will eventually kill you.  If cadmium were to only store pressure of O2 in the blood (or on hemoglobin) then you would be able to tap it all day long to oxygenate tissue without the act of breathing... you would just metabolize all of the O2 and not offload an appropriate amount of CO2 without exhaling thus become acidic and die.  Unless somehow your kidneys get kicked into hyperdrive and they create enough HCO3 to balance the pH but then when you finally do start breathing again your body will have to deal with all of that excess HCO3 before you become alkalotic enough to die as well. 

That exhale I was mentioning was a very simple thought on how to offload the CO2 only.  Your next problems would come in the form of inevitably washing out all of the nitrogen which is what helps the lungs stay open.  Those alveoli don't like lower pressures and will collapse down on themselves when that pressure changes too much.  This is why keeping people on 100% oxygen all the time usually requires some amount of positive pressure to help it anyways.  Sometimes thinning out the air is a good thing hence the use of Heliox to bump O2 sats in patients with acute airway obstructions, however in this case when talking about the feruchemy only changing that one pressure source of oxygen in the blood we don't want to thin out the air in our lungs... but we have to. 

Without a way to refresh the nitrogen in your lungs while blowing off all of the CO2 then when you stop tapping your metalmind you would be left with 2 very very collapsed lungs that wouldn't function normally anyway.  Not to mention when you have atelectasis the alveolar capillary membrane has thickened up making the simple diffusion needed for respiration even harder.  

Without the act of exhalation you would end up with a bunch of true blue CO2 retaining COPDers.  Normal physiology has your drive to breathe based upon your need to expel CO2 and maintain that pH balance.  When you're unable to offload that CO2 because of chronic obstruction then your kidneys make up for it with bicarb production.  Eventually if you are far enough into the disease process this switch changes and your drive to breathe isn't based on your need to offload CO2 anymore but instead you breathe based on O2 need specifically.  That is why the struggle is real convincing COPDers on O2 that their sweet spot for SpO2 is 88-94%.  Nothing worse than coding an old COPD patient who was just sating 100% on their oxygen but is found with an ABG reading 6.8pH 130PaCO2 and a PaO2 of 300.... sure you made sure they weren't alarming low O2 but now they are dead because even though their blood oxygen was great they weren't exhaling off the acidic CO2.

If cadmium does work off of just the partial pressure of O2 in the blood stream or even the O2 bound to the hemoglobin then magic wands must appear to keep the user alive.  That said feruchemy actually does this all the time (waving magic wands to allow your body to not kill itself when tapped) and I wouldn't be against that as the answer.  There would be a lot less wand waving if every breath you store you are storing all of the parts of that breath (both ventilation and respiration) and tapping it simply allowed your body to do all of the respiratory process without the need to ventilate.  It is the issue of adding in a bunch of just oxygen and ignoring the fact that there is nothing getting rid of the other stuff that is being created as that oxygen is being tossed in there.  

[cometaryorbit]

It may not work on the chemistry level quite that directly. It might be more of a Realmatic thing, where the magic has a goal it needs to get to and changes the Physical to be whatever it needs to be to get there.

I think probably tapping breath just makes your lungs, blood chemistry, etc. stay at the same state they would be if you were breathing normally. And storing makes you need to breathe more than you normally would, but that extra breathing has no physiological effect- you don't get more oxygen, remove more CO2, etc.

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

It may not work on the chemistry level quite that directly. It might be more of a Realmatic thing, where the magic has a goal it needs to get to and changes the Physical to be whatever it needs to be to get there.

I think probably tapping breath just makes your lungs, blood chemistry, etc. stay at the same state they would be if you were breathing normally. And storing makes you need to breathe more than you normally would, but that extra breathing has no physiological effect- you don't get more oxygen, remove more CO2, etc.

For sure I think you are definately right.  Feruchemy usually has a way to protect its users from itself anyways so I have little doubt that cadmium burners are not killing themselves by holding their breath.  We also have to remember that soooo much of what we have on how the magics work is provided from the point of view of a person alive in those periods of time who would be interested to figure it out or speculate.  

Knowing you need oxygen to stay alive and without oxygen your body dies makes the idea that blood oxygen levels being stored is a good simple explanation of where era 2 scadrial characters might be at.   And I believe there will be a time for every single feruchemical power where those same scholars in scadrial will have to accept that the investiture is breaking some rules and the explanations for how certain powers work may never be satisfactory.  

[+Oltux72]

Apparently I was talking in part to a physician. If my explanations were a bit on the ridiculous level and unneeded, my apologies. I approached them from a chemical view point and tried to simplify them as much as I could.

I think that at least all of the metals in the temporal quadrant are there for a good reason. They are in a way temporal manipulation. You undo a part of the present while you store; the part then being having breathed, eaten or drunk or being healthy, which you then use again to do a limited and partial manipulation of the timeline when you tap.

But, that feruchemical cadmium usually stores indeed full acts of breathing, does not preclude that a skilled feruchemist could tap it in a more restricted manner to only oxygenate his blood and/or remove carbon dioxide without physically moving gas in and out of his lungs, thus avoiding other side effects of breathing, like a loss of water.

 

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

5 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Apparently I was talking in part to a physician. If my explanations were a bit on the ridiculous level and unneeded, my apologies. I approached them from a chemical view point and tried to simplify them as much as I could.

I think that at least all of the metals in the temporal quadrant are there for a good reason. They are in a way temporal manipulation. You undo a part of the present while you store; the part then being having breathed, eaten or drunk or being healthy, which you then use again to do a limited and partial manipulation of the timeline when you tap.

But, that feruchemical cadmium usually stores indeed full acts of breathing, does not preclude that a skilled feruchemist could tap it in a more restricted manner to only oxygenate his blood and/or remove carbon dioxide without physically moving gas in and out of his lungs, thus avoiding other side effects of breathing, like a loss of water.

 

I truly am fine with a magic wand solution.  I think you explain cadmium being a great explanation.  I was only speaking towards the OPs question of if while tapping just blood oxygenation would allow you to speak and continue functioning.   I explained the physiology of the need to continue physical gasses to work the vocal cords and how exhaling was needed for that plus the want to stay alive.  I think the explanation of diffusion was great for how that barrier works but that a deeper dive was necessary to explain why, without magical feruchemical protection from one's self, the explanation of just storing and tapping one part of it would seriously throw off the bodies ability to maintain homeostasis, and in fact hinder the ability to speak or function.  

I like that feruchemy fixes issues that the magic creates.  It is not as hard of a system as allomancy and that makes it fun to read about.  Just trying to clear up why the magic arm waving is necessary if it works as described on the wiki.  Not trying to offend 

[Quantus]

On 1/26/2022 at 3:48 AM, Oltux72 said:

Apparently I was talking in part to a physician. If my explanations were a bit on the ridiculous level and unneeded, my apologies. I approached them from a chemical view point and tried to simplify them as much as I could.

I think that at least all of the metals in the temporal quadrant are there for a good reason. They are in a way temporal manipulation. You undo a part of the present while you store; the part then being having breathed, eaten or drunk or being healthy, which you then use again to do a limited and partial manipulation of the timeline when you tap.

But, that feruchemical cadmium usually stores indeed full acts of breathing, does not preclude that a skilled feruchemist could tap it in a more restricted manner to only oxygenate his blood and/or remove carbon dioxide without physically moving gas in and out of his lungs, thus avoiding other side effects of breathing, like a loss of water.

 

As a part that wasnt a physician or chemist, the explanation was FASCINATING!  So thank you and @Tamriel Wolfsbaine for showing the complexities involved, it was definitely helpful to me.  Now there is a part of me that really wants to derail this into "Would The Abyss oxygen fluid actually work?" but that's probably a topic for another time. 

For Cadmium, a Magic Wand is probably inevitable somewhere (it is magic after all) but where it lands in the process will decide what else it can narratively do later on.  One way or the other I assume it will be used for Space Age Life Support, but that could look a lot of different ways and operate on different principles. 

I think these are the general Possibilities (I think in decending order of Hand-wavinss), what do you all think?

• Spiritual "Support".  This is the most hand-wavey because it just directly supplements you're Spiriweb's "need" for Breathing and handwaves the physical layer entirely, kinda like Spiritual Healing does.
• Temporal Manipulation: It literally Rewinds vs Accelerates some specified metabolic process via selective temporal manipulation, with Breathing being the most immediate default. I like this because of the metal quadrant involved, it would have pleasing symmetry with the allomantic function.  
• Blood chemistry manipulation: The idea is that Storing and Tapping operate via converting Matter into Investiture and recovering it in a different more useful form.  This has some interesting options if we can assume that Breathing is just most instinctively understood chemical process, and that the Metalmind could manipulated other more specific compounds or processes once they were understood enough to provide the requisite Intent.
• Internal "Lung Field":  This version is manipulating the molecules inside your lungs to continuously Refresh the o2 available by converting the appropriate ratios of Co2, O2, N2, H2O, etc.  This introduces some gas volume (and related thermodynamic) questions.  This makes it pretty specific (and thus limited) in purpose and function, but will get them to the stars.  

[cometaryorbit]

I kind of see it (and storing wakefulness and maybe nutrition, etc.) as being between the first and second options - closer to the second.

I don't think "need to breathe" is really a Spiritual thing, but I see it as more of a realmatic edit to the Feruchemist's physical state/body. When storing, every other breath (or whatever) has zero physical effect on the body, it's treated like it didn't happen. When tapping, the body is treated like it is breathing, even when it's not.

But I don't think it's overtly Temporal in the sense that time itself is altered. More like editing the body's current state.

It might be kind of a "programming language" thing, where the Feruchemy works at a higher level than the "binary code" of individual chemical reactions and molecules (if that analogy makes any sense).