[SOLVED] Speculative Long-Term Offset of Skin Maceration

Okay, there are gonna be a lot of wild and fantastical elements here, and I really need everyone to ignore the parts that I need y’all to ignore, and accept these parts as functional black-boxes for the duration of this post.

For this scenario, I present you a living human body. It has been heavily modified in a number of ways, but one modification that was deemed “too extreme” was replacing all the skin with a layer of artificial polymer.

This body spends up to 10 years in a chamber, completely submerged in some kind of incompressible fluid.


Things to ignore for this scenario:

  1. The body will always maintain the correct temperature, no matter what the temperature of the outside fluid is.
  2. The body will never suffer diminished blood flow of any kind for any reason. Blood will always arrive to the places it needs to go, regardless of any pressures on the body or temperature changes.
  3. This body has no eyes. The ocular nerves have been sealed away.
  4. This body has no nose. The olfactory nerve has been destroyed and sealed away.
  5. This body has no ears. The holes at the sides of the head are nowhere to be found.
  6. This body has no lungs or trachea. It is supplied oxygen and cleared of carbon dioxide through a black-box method.
  7. All psychological effects of this existence are outside the scope of this scenario. This body has the psychology of a simple computer program, and experiences no desire and no boredom.
  8. The body’s nutritional needs are always met.
  9. Any waste material from the body mysteriously vanishes without flowing out of any part of the body. The body still produces sweat, however.

One of the major challenges I have discovered for this scenario is something called “skin maceration”, where skin contact with moisture causes the skin to lose plasticity, soften, rupture, and become prone to infection. This can happen very quickly, too. Some sources say 12 hours.

One paper suggest dropping the temperature of the water will reduce the consequences, but I’m also wondering about some other solutions, too.

Some questions to promote brainstorming:

  1. If blood flow is guaranteed to be maintained, and body temperature is guaranteed to be maintained, would an extremely-frigid fluid be preferable?
  2. If this fluid is something like saline, would it help if the fluid were continuously sterilized and filtered, as it is pumped through the containing chamber?
  3. Is there an incompressible fluid that would not cause skin maceration, if we assume the fluid is continuously sterilized?

Goals:

  1. The body must be intact after 10 years of being submerged. Any changes during this time should be easy to undo.
  2. The body must not suffer a wound which causes bleeding.
  3. The body is still capable of infection, and must not contract a bacterial, fungal, viral, or amoeba disease during the full 10 years.
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Would a thin coating of some hydrophobic substance be plausible, or is it necessary for the skin to maintain direct contact with the fluid? (This assuming it’s water-based to begin with…)

(disclaimer: I am very not a scientist)

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Ok, wait. Are you asking us what we think the most plausible situation is? Or what’s the situation that leads to the lowest level of skin maceration?

(Also, I have zero knowledge on this whatsoever and so I could be saying complete rubbish, but would a non-newtonian fluid at high pressure be any better? Or maybe worse?)

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If a coating is available which:

  1. protects the skin against the incompressible fluid
  2. avoids any long-term damage from coating the skin
  3. can avoid being washed away by the incompressible fluid
  4. avoids skin maceration from active sweat glands

then yes that is a solution, if we are able to think of a combo of incompressible fluid and coating which would meet these requirements. :grin:

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I’m asking for info on what incompressible fluid (at what temperature) could be used to prevent damage and/or infection from skin maceration.

Alternatively, I’m also looking for:

  1. Any solutions that make the fluid irrelevant (like a coating).
  2. Incompressible fluids that somehow do not cause skin maceration.
  3. Ways of making skin maceration a non-issue (sterilization of the fluid, and a simple healing procedure after finally being moved out of the chamber).
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This is a fascinatingly bizarre scenario. I’ve been imagining this poor character as a fleshy orb, which is a little disturbing, and pretty interesting to think about in terms of the biological implications at hand.

I’m not sure where one would begin with this task, necessarily, but I thought that it would be useful to dig into some of the existent research on a population that sort of lines up: divers, and the skin complications they can experience. I hunted down some PDFs for you that should be free to read:

This is a brief from Wounds Canada (a charity) that breaks down the best practice recommendations for prevention and management of moisture associated wound damage- it links to the full article at the beginning, but this one is more accessible to a non-clinician.

This article (was oddly difficult to track down, as it has been removed in many places, and the Wayback Machine didn’t capture the figures, thankfully, PubMed has) examines a strange presentation for a skin condition associated with decompression sickness, as a result of their weird equipment layout (they tried to stay warm by doubling up on wetsuits).

This is a more modern article going into some of the numbers and associated dive profiles and damage that comes with the same skin condition seen in decompression sickness on divers.

And here is an older NASA brief following observations of the same afflicted population (divers). This includes a description of what the ailment is, and follows some Air Force personnel’s progression.

This review article (second in a series) delves into skin presentations of venous disease, and talks about the underlying vascular networks and different classification of possible skin damage, with a really good comparison chart based off of pathology, underlying conditions, morphology, distribution, etc. Lots of pictures in this one.

Very brief case study of a diver with pictures of his skin injury- it’s commonly referred to as the ‘skin bends.’

This is a comprehensive overview of decompression illness (recent, this year) from a joint collaboration between the journal of the South Pacific Underwater Medicine Society and the European Underwater and Baromedical Society. Has a great table comparing the impact of these diving injuries on different bodily systems. It also discusses that cold temperatures during decompression can increase the risk of damage, as you touched upon the possibility of making the goop frigid. There’s some mention of interesting ‘pre-conditioning’ that divers can do to avoid risks of decompression illness.

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@Hituro provided a clever solution in the Neo Discord server of using silica amorphous gel:

Something like Silica Amorphous Gel might be right then
Here’s a study that says it doens’t get absorbed
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378427423002369

And then @pinkunz pointed out some of my math might be very wrong, so we’ll see if the core premise survives some error-checking…

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UPDATE: Fixed the math (thank you, @pinkunz ) and the plot problems are fixed, and the premise is intact!

Also, @Hituro’s solution works even better now! :grin:

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Several orders less gruesome than my initial suggestion as well.

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