all kidding aside, if you have to go, this is the easiest way to go.
It appears that this pod used nitrogen to displace the oxygen and CO2 to almost zero percent which causes the inhabitant to peacefully fade away.
Nitschke told SwissInfo how the pod works: “The person will get into the capsule and lie down. It’s very comfortable. They will be asked a number of questions and when they have answered, they may press the button inside the capsule activating the mechanism in their own time. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds. Death takes place through hypoxia and hypocapnia, oxygen and carbon dioxide deprivation, respectively. There is no panic, no choking feeling.”
I had to go thru a flight physiology course in the USAF prior to getting put on flight status. One of the things they taught was how deadly hypoxia is because the victim is not usually aware it is happening before they lose consciousness before passing away from oxygen depravation. In fact you experience a feeling of well being and eurphoria at the onset of hypoxia which carries over until you are unconscious.
We were taught that everyone has different symptoms of hypoxia and to let us learn what our symptoms were they put us into an altitude chamber which is basically a reinforced steel room that is a vacuum chamber. They have us start off with our oxygen masks on they take us to the equivalent of 25,000 feet and have us remove out masks, then we are asked to solve simple tasks on a written piece of paper (basic math, write your name, connect the dots). The instructors are present and on oxygen as they watch us struggle with the problems and assist people in putting their masks back on before they pass out. My symptoms were a narrowing of my vision until it was tunnel vision and I recall feeling very pleasant, with no pain or lack of air. An instructor had to tell me several times to put my mask back on if I wanted to live. At that point I could have cared less what happened to me so he slapped the mask over my face and in 2 to 3 breaths of 100% oxygen I was back to normal and I could see how poorly I did on the written exercise they had us do.
It was eye opening to see how hypoxia can creep up on you and we were told to always be monitoring ourselves when airborne to be alert for the symptoms that are unique to us regarding hypoxia. We typically flew 34,000 to 38,000 feet and were told that in that environment hypoxia will affect you much faster than it did when we were at 25,000 feet in the chamber.
