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If you had to, would you burn or freeze to death?
The severity of either could change your mind I guess. If it was extremely cold and you froze instantly it wouldn't be that bad, nor if an inferno was so hot that you died instantly.
So I'll go with slowly burn or freeze...
| Burn | 26 | |
| Freeze | 110 |
Deifinately freeze.. people who are burned are obviously in so much pain and distress o.O You've never seen anyone freeze to death while running around and screaming have you?
I would prefer to freeze.
I've heard that being burned alive is one of the most painful ways to die. However freezing to death just slows everything down and you would become unconscious first.
But the two extremes should be somewhat equal. Either instant on both ends of the spectrum, or slow. Otherwise you're asking if you want to die quick and painful, or slow and uncomfortable.
Actually it's the dead opposite.
Freezing "seems" better but is far worse, and much slower.
When you burn however, the nerve endings are destroyed very quickly. So you stop feeling pain and go completely into shock. Only if you survive being burnt is there going to be a lot of pain, in recovery.
It's the image (burning is more gruesome) in ones head that makes them choose freezing, not their logic.
I disagree that it's worse, although we can only speculate based on evidence.
If we're to assume they occur over equal time, then slowly freezing is preferable to slowly burning.
Slowly freezing is comparatively painless, it's thawing that is excruciating - and if you're dead, that bit doesn't matter. Slowly burning, on the other hand, would involve constant pain until you either pass out or die - there are a lot of nerve endings to burn away and if the process is slow, the pain will be sustained. Also, the sheer terror as you burn to death would be horrendous. With freezing to death, your brain is reduced to a crawl, you end up delusional, often unaware or apathetic to your situation, you hallucinate, you forget what is happening - I'd choose that over constant terror and pain.
This is a great article / short story about freezing, very well written. It gives you an insight into a typical experience for someone caught in lethally cold conditions:
<a href="http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/As-Freezing-Persons-Recollect-the-Snow--First-Chill--Then-Stupor--Then-the-Letting-Go.html?page=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/...</a>
The link messed up, here it is again:
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/As-Freezing-Persons-Recollect-the-Snow--First-Chill--Then-Stupor--Then-the-Letting-Go.html
It does destroy the nerves quickly, stopping pain. It's not speculation, it's fact lol.
I'm not saying fire doesn't destroy nerves quickly, I'm saying there are a lot of nerves to destroy, and if you are SLOWLY burning to death, that means it'll take a long time before you cease to feel excruciating pain. Compare that to freezing, where there isn't a great deal of pain involved and it's probably far less psychologically traumatic, I think there's a clear winner.
And I'm sure the many who have both frozen AND burned to death can confirm this.
Well in the case of a fatality freezing seems more desirable (if you can call it that!) However, if you were to survive, I would choose burning. For this question - freezing.
burning is more painful but freezing takes longer but people who were about to die from freezing say that after a while right before you are about to die you feel very warm and comfortable and peaceful and that sound nicer than burning since even little burns are excruciating!
The are more pros with freezing to death... However, if you survive you'd be severely frostbitten and that could result in many limbs being amputated.
Well it's one of my biggest fears burning to death. That must be a horrific way to go, fair comment the "grip reaper" will get my one way or another, but if there way only 2 ways to go either burning and freezing then I'd choose freezing. Ideally though I'd like to go peacefully in my sleep. xx
If you freeze, you're still alive, but in the future, when you're ufrozen, you'll be the same age and still look the same.
Just depends on the temperature!
I would much rather 'freeze to death', since a person usually loses consciousness when the core body temperature decreases below tolerable limits (hypothermic shock).
It all depends on the extremes of temperature, however. If a person were dipped into a vat of liquid nitrogen, for instance, death would be almost instantaneous (flash freezing).
On the other extreme, a person could be instantaneously vaporized, such as in a nuclear detonation or pyroclastic flow. Dying in an event that causes first or second degree burns would be extremely painful.
I'm actually going to go with burn. Freezing no matter how cold can still take a while and there is a lower limit to how cold you can make it. With heat, however, you can achieve a temperature where you can be instantly incinerated. No pain whatsoever. Also nerve endings would be the first to go in the flames.
Freeze.
When you burn, you actually suffocate on the smoke and die from inhalation rather than the actual fire. I have quite a big fear of not being able to breathe or any sort of suffocation so I wouldn't want to go through that.
Read this great article on "The cold hard facts of freezing to death", very well written and entertaining (in a morbid sort of way):
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/As-Freezing-Persons-Recollect-the-Snow--First-Chill--Then-Stupor--Then-the-Letting-Go.html?page=all%5C