MovieChat Forums > Air (2015) Discussion > Some Maybe dumb questions about the cryo...

Some Maybe dumb questions about the cryo and the oxygen, but...

posted 9 years ago by El_Guapo_Caballo
5 replies | jump to latest

I had a teacher that used to say the dumbest question is the one you don't ask...

So their plight is that for some form of malfunction their running out of air and they only have one cryogenic chamber and there's two of them, right?
Questions;
-Does the lack of oxygen will not affect the people in the cryo chambers? How does that work? I mean even in stasis the people cryogenized need oxygen, correct?

-What changed from the moment when the air was running out to the end where everybody wakes up and oxygen levels are fine, how did that get fixed?

-And couldn't both of them gotten inside the one chamber? Sure it would have been tight and uncomfortable but it's a matter of life and death...

-Also about the surviving tech having a beard and the guys who are coming out of cryo being clean shaven and having short hair, I get that is explained by the fact that probably the tech woke up weeks or months before the others, but does anybody have an idea how sci fi writers usually justify the lack of hair growth during stasis?

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Btw, I enjoyed the film.

[–] Snabeldyhr 9 years ago

1). The system will obviously provide the needed air for the stasis chambers under all circumstances. They only need very little air after all - the problem is the larger amount of air needed for the technicians that are awake.

2). Nothing was fixed. Time passed - a LOT of it - and the poisonous air outside subsided. See answer #4.

3). The chambers were designed for ONE person only. I'm sure the limited supply of air and possibly other things were only supposed to be dispensed to one person. Had two of them gone in there they would probably both have died from having to share the already limited resources.

4). The people in the cryo chambers came out the way they went in - no time had passed for them - that's what stasis is, but the surviving techguy had probably aged by 90 minutes...but many thousands of times, so his hair and beard would have grown for a loooong time.

[–] El_Guapo_Caballo 9 years ago

Good answers, thank you.
Though complete speculation on my part, don't you think it's kind of curious that since the cryo pods apparently have the function of being able to interrupt the statis every 6 months for a couple of hours and then restart, wouldn't Cartwright be tempted to bring back his wife at least a couple of times during all this years. Or was he so far gone that his wife's 'ghost' was enough for him? Or was Cartwright's cryo pod different from the rest of the pods, thus enabling him this constant resurrection and not the others?

[–] Snabeldyhr 9 years ago

Good answers, thank you.
Though complete speculation on my part, don't you think it's kind of curious that since the cryo pods apparently have the function of being able to interrupt the statis every 6 months for a couple of hours and then restart, wouldn't Cartwright be tempted to bring back his wife at least a couple of times during all this years. Or was he so far gone that his wife's 'ghost' was enough for him? Or was Cartwright's cryo pod different from the rest of the pods, thus enabling him this constant resurrection and not the others?

These things are complete speculation on my part too, but as far as I remember the other stasis pods looked quite different from the ones the techs were in. They might simply not have designed to be an on/off/on/off affair. They were probably designed to only be opened once it was safe to come out and not before. Taking her out of her pod might have killed her.

I also think he was - as you say - a bit...stircrazy from all that isolation, and coupled with the knowledge that his wife would (probably) die if he took her out of stasis, he knew not to take her out ...so he settled for his imaginary version of her to help himself through the ordeal (and probably wasn't 100% rationally thinking anyway).

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] gallifreyent 9 years ago

Good questions and answers...thanks for this thread. I also liked the film.

My thought on the oxygen/air supply is that the silo system probably included an oxygen generator and "super" air filter that was able to build up a couple of hours of air every six months for each unit. To maximize resources, the minimum needed was available for scheduled maintenance and sleepers. This system might have triggered the awakening process based on how hard it had to work to provide clean air, compared to the readings outside...both, because using only one would provide a single point of failure. This system surely would have lots of redundancy included, such as having two techs plus procedure manuals.

I wonder if the 100+ sleepers in the ABC unit were also duplicates of the people in the successful unit, or other unique experts.

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