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mmmmmmBacon12345 t1_j678emm wrote

You, and most other multicellular creatures, have a heart that pumps blood around your body. This heart is made up of lots of heart cells that can contract when electricity is applied but also make a small amount of their own. A collection of heart cells will sync up and start beating in unison

If electricity flows through your heart it can muck up the signals causing the cells not to beat in the right sequence and either beat erratically or just stop it. This results in no blood flowing around your body and kills you

Small things don't have a heart, they're just a little fluid sack. You could hit them with enough electricity to break down their proteins but you'll have boiled the water inside them first and killed them that way

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frakc t1_j67iwer wrote

And a bit funnier - there are a lot of varios materials in mud water which will start to react with each other if there is enogh current making water toxic and undrinkable

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hyzermofo t1_j684khs wrote

Like, life? Primordial soup, that sort of thing?

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en1mal t1_j6865gd wrote

I think he means electrolysis. Putting a current in a solution (e.g between two metal prongs) makes the negative and positive charged particles flock to their according charge. Or new particles form. Its how the metal industry applies small films of materials to objects.

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_ShakashuriBlowdown t1_j688uhy wrote

There are all these videos (I'll try and edit one in if I find it) of Chinese "water boilers", which are just + and - electrodes that you put into water. The problem is, even in "clean" water, the electrodes themselves begin to electrolyze into the water. The tap water isn't clean either, so all the minerals begin electrolyzing and depositing onto the cathode as well.

EDIT: This is used in a scam to show that one's water is actually impure, and that one should buy the salesman's water filter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASnLL6ebaco

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en1mal t1_j689ne9 wrote

Yeah "water purity" is a grey zone, lots of scams. When I was young I earned some cash as a handyman. The stuff some people wanted me to install in their water system was baffling. Especially since I live in an european country with probably the best tap water quality in the world.

edit: just watched the vid, hillarious, they are just disolving the toxic metal particles in the water holy moly and use distilled non conductive water for the "proof". Yay humanity!

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zebediah49 t1_j68ho0z wrote

> edit: just watched the vid, hillarious, they are just disolving the toxic metal particles in the water holy moly and use distilled non conductive water for the "proof". Yay humanity!

It might not be toxic.

Looked like steel, so you're primarily just producing iron oxide (rust) and dumping that into/onto the water. But also whatever else is alloyed into the steel. And I still wouldn't touch it.

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Juan_Ebolovich t1_j68l9f3 wrote

Yeah, if it's stainless steel for example, you're getting some delicious chromium, which is a Bad Time.

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CulturalIndication1 t1_j692iez wrote

Yeah, fuck chromium. I grew up in a town that had a chrome plating factory and they dumped their waste in the creek that ran alongside two schools. I was born with correctable heart defect but damn there were a lot of kids with cancer.

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Soranic t1_j6av8ti wrote

Jersey City?

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CulturalIndication1 t1_j6avg7d wrote

Nah, Northern California, Willits

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Soranic t1_j6awi2i wrote

Jersey City used to regularly turn some shade of purple because of the factory. Now there's a gated community in place of the factory.

The local wetlands preserve says not to eat the crabs in the water because you'll get cancer.

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_ShakashuriBlowdown t1_j68o3c3 wrote

Been doing some home electrolysis for fun. Everything I read about chromium has me feeling like this.

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calivino1 t1_j68llty wrote

To be fair, pure water doesnt conduct elctricity. So theyre technically correct

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_ShakashuriBlowdown t1_j68oe2q wrote

That's how these scams work though, right? They prey on half-truths, things that "feel" right.

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stupidshinji t1_j6ag0y0 wrote

you’re thinking of electrophoresis (and techniques that apply this phenomenon such as electroplating), not electrolysis

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aberroco t1_j68m24i wrote

Like salt. Even the usual one, NaCl, dissolved in water and electrolyzed, dissipates to NaOH, NaOCl, HCl, H2 and Cl2. HCl, H2 and Cl2 are gaseous, so they bubble out, but NaOH (lye) and NaOCl (bleach) stays in solution.

And that's just one example, there's multitude of other chemicals that's produced by electrolysis, potentially making water toxic.

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Alexis_J_M t1_j68ieax wrote

I don't think this is true. Please cite a source.

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frakc t1_j68ly87 wrote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjoDnJU243M

applying current to water will boil it. Note that the water became relatively darker than it was. Often it is harmless - oxidized iron. Sometimes it forms toxic compounds like sulfuric salts (such compounds do not darken the water and it is indistinguishable from normal water)

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Rakeallday t1_j67evhg wrote

When electricity meets water, it heats up and boils the organism. The problem is it'd take a lot of electricity to kill as much bacteria as we do with other methods that are more energy efficient.

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Kidiri90 t1_j67nw3g wrote

And, you know, it gets turned into hydrogen and oxygen.

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[deleted] t1_j67wnz1 wrote

[deleted]

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Vitztlampaehecatl t1_j680u5c wrote

Moral of the story, don't boil pool water

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[deleted] t1_j6815sg wrote

[deleted]

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Chromotron t1_j68255q wrote

Pure water electrolyses if you try hard enough. It's just silly inefficient.

Table salt is normally not used by people doing electrolysis. Other salts such as sodium/potassium hydroxide, or if nothing better is at hand, sodium (bi)carbonate, are safer, similarly cheap, and also do the job better.

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zebediah49 t1_j68j9is wrote

> Pure water electrolyses if you try hard enough. It's just silly inefficient.

You have to be trying really really hard though. There's a classic demo where you can make water maintain a bridge between two beakers, by putting a decent few kV across it. You need to use extremely pure water to avoid electrolysis, which is pretty successful.

> > Table salt is normally not used by people doing electrolysis. Other salts such as sodium/potassium hydroxide, or if nothing better is at hand, sodium (bi)carbonate, are safer, similarly cheap, and also do the job better.

Well.. It's actually pretty common, but not for when people want to make hydrogen. The Chloralkali process (i.e. NaCl hydrolysis) is the primary industrial method for producing tens of millions of tons of chlorine and sodium hydroxide.

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shinn91 t1_j680thg wrote

Little funfact my chemistry prof once told us. If you use desinfect, like isopropanol, it kills the bacteria by dissolving their shell and their inner parts run out and they die.

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mr_birkenblatt t1_j68df5l wrote

That's why you should still wash your hands even after using hand sanitizer. The dead bodies of the bacteria become food for the next generation

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happykittynipples t1_j694d91 wrote

If I tossed you into a swimming pool and added a few volts it would not pass through you unless you touched a ground, like the metal ladder. Then you would be in trouble. So, you could kill all those tiny bugs but they would need to touch a lot of tiny ladders.

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unimportantthing t1_j689jzj wrote

Electricity is so bad at killing microorganisms in small amounts that in lab sciences we actually use it to introduce new DNA into them through a process called Electroporation. Basically, you send electricity into a solution that contains your microorganism and the new DNA you want it to have, and you zap the solution to cause pores to form in its cell membrane. These holes are big enough to allow the DNA to enter. It’s a very useful technique.

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PigicornNamedHarold t1_j69t4dw wrote

This is incomplete - electroporation relies on large voltages but little to no current to be effective. If there are enough ions (i.e. salt) in your bacterial culture to carry a current, it will kill the bacteria (based on my experience with E. coli).

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hyzermofo t1_j684ozd wrote

What if the lightning you use is greased? Surely then at least the chills would multiply?

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pinkmeanie t1_j68eagw wrote

The problem with that approach is losing control, and then there's nothing left to do. I know that approach is the one that you want, but you'd better take my direction.

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Abacab4 t1_j69dhvr wrote

I’m hopelessly devoted to this methodology.

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Intergalacticdespot t1_j6811q7 wrote

Can we hit co2 with electricity and split it into carbon and oxygen? Seems like that would be a way to reduce CO2 emissions. But not sure how efficient it is or would be. Probably would need some economies of scale to make it viable in the long term. I'm assuming. Both carbon and oxygen have industrial uses so should theoretically count as useful resources. At least at any reasonable scale.

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Chromotron t1_j682dm1 wrote

We could. It would be horribly inefficient, taking way more than other methods, and most importantly, the current methods of power generation would produce way more CO2 than this destroys. And to make it work at all you would need to remove the CO2 from air to get a tank full of it; at which point you could just sequester it, store it underground, or whatever else works and takes much less energy.

Both carbon and oxygen are way easier to get differently, even if energy were free it would not be worth it.

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LowerEntropy t1_j682w1d wrote

You are talking about photosynthesis. That's were all our fossil fuels come from.

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CharsOwnRX-78-2 t1_j685sog wrote

I mean we could do all that.

Or we could just let plants do it for us

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Black_Moons t1_j68dtok wrote

If you take carbon and oxygen, burn them to produce CO2, any process you use to get back carbon and oxygen is by definition going to take as much or more energy then you got from burning it.

Chemical bonds all have a certain energy associated with forming and destroying them that must be paid (or released)

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Busterwasmycat t1_j68m4ql wrote

throw in some water and make sugars. About the same idea as photosynthesis. Of course, electricity-driven reactions don't tend to be all that controlled and there is a lot of competition by other reactions, so costly and inefficient is probably a good description. It is why we don't already do that.

Just making carbon would be a fool's game, because the carbon would want to react back with any free oxygen as soon as it could. generally as a big fire. Sure, we can deal with elemental carbon in lots of ways (it doesn't generally spontaneously combust) but you would have to do something with all that carbon. And, of course, there is the question of how you make the electricity in the first place, ideally not from burning coal or inefficiencies would mean you release more CO2 than you break apart/recover.

But yeah, at least it is an idea. Thinking and coming up with ideas is usually a good thing. Most ideas turn out to have more problems than they solve, but occasionally a good one comes up, so don't stop, don't get discouraged that your idea isn't practical. Hardly alone with that.

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chickenstalker t1_j68fti6 wrote

Plus, electricity is used to genetically modify bacteria via electroporation. Jolting bacterial cell walls will open their pores and allow plasmids to entrr the cell. In nature, plasmids can confer various resistance or virulence genes. So, using electricity might even promote new traits and mutations.

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Buck_Thorn t1_j68glkh wrote

> Small things don't have a heart, they're just a little fluid sack.

Hey, now!

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sysKin t1_j68jvx3 wrote

It is actually a little bit of evolutionary fluke that, in us, the electrical path from one hand to the other hand goes directly through our heart.

As a result, electricity is far more dangerous to us than to life in general.

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Gladianoxa t1_j68kqrp wrote

Is it not possible to electrolyse them? Every cell uses ion pumps and things, to my knowledge.

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thekreeture t1_j68n98m wrote

The science that keeps our heart moving is the same science that keeps their fluid sacks not shriveled or exploding. The concentrations of ions/salts on each side of the membrane creates a difference in voltage across the cell membrane, which creates potential energy. if that goes to equilibrium the cell is dead.

Idk if electricity would kill what’s in the water, but if you do something to the water to make the difference in voltage across their membranes become zero, they are essentially dead. It would be hard to calculate a voltage and duration or whatever to make every singe membrane in your sample go to equilibrium. Idk dammit Jim I’m a dietitian not a mad physics professor.

Also, not everything needs to be living to be dangerous. Many pathogens make things that cause us illness, if that thing is still in the water even after the microbe has died, we still get sick. And there are inorganic things that can make us sick, also. Plus spore-forming bacteria could die but leave tough little spores behind waiting to respawn. So..ya. Now I’m having physiology flashbacks and I’ll probably have nightmares on differentiating calcium channels.

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Traininewe t1_j68rx6t wrote

Like salt. Even the usual one, NaCl, dissolved in water and electrolyzed

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ChronoMonkeyX t1_j69bar3 wrote

I was wondering where you were going with your analogy, thinking "well, the water wouldn't be electrified while you were drinking it!"

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