7 ms·

The Bombard Story

74 points by jbergstroem 6y ago

jbergstroem 6y ago
In case the blog (wordpress) should turn unresponsive - here's a direct link to the PDF/book: http://greatestadventurers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/The-Bombard-Story-1953.pdf http://greatestadventurers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Th...
heyitsguay 6y ago
This seems like it'd be easy to test and important if true. Has there been any follow-up?
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think such an experiment would pass an ethics review. Researchers would probably be limited to investigating people who, for whatever reason, were forced to subsist on ocean water.
  - ericmcer 6y ago
    I am pretty confident someone would be a willing test subject. Just attach a world record to it: “longest time surviving on ocean water”
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    It sounds like a job for the military. Those branches for which death at sea is a likely possibility. Perhaps start with what can be achieved with catching fish and work towards seawater intake, very, very carefully. It is quite likely that some forces have already done the research ...
    - qbasic_forever 6y ago
      What's the end goal? To remove the need for naval ships to carry a supply of freshwater? They still have to have enormous supply chain and logistics figured out to keep fuel, ammo, food, medicine, people, etc. at the front lines and out at sea. I'd bet, if anything, the navy would be way more interested in figuring out how to run their ships off of saltwater instead of their people.
      - brazzy 6y ago
        > What's the end goal? To remove the need for naval ships to carry a supply of freshwater? No, to improve the survival chances of shipwrecked sailors.
    - simplicio 6y ago
      Bombard's wikipedia page mentions the French and Taiwanese militaries conducted lost-at-sea exercises that supported Bombard's findings. The page doesn't have much in the way of citations, though, and I couldn't find anything on google about either the French or Taiwanese efforts (though I only spent a minute or two looking). As other posters have mentioned though, the take-away isn't really that you can subsist soley on seawater, but that using seawater to supplement fresh water from rain and liquids from fish can allow one to survive for long periods at sea without an initial store of freshwater.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    This sounds like an experiment that would pass, because there is no real danger to particioant, as long as their vitals are monitired and intervention is avaliable if needed
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Why not? Having volunteers drink saltier and saltier water while controlled for any organ function abnormalities doesn't sound too bad, Mars 500 was way worse.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      To me, at least, it seems like experimenting to see how much poison it takes to hurt or kill someone, except this poison is salt water and not something like cyanide or bleach.
- nraynaud 6y ago
  It is true, mostly because he drank little seawater.
gerdesj 6y ago
"and he also drank juice made from pressed fish he caught along the way." That juice is mostly water, fresh water. I don't know too much about the central thesis of the book ie that you can drink small quantities of sea water and continue to thrive. However I do know that several/many/most? sea predators survive purely on the water they get from their prey. Maintaining a desalination plant is probably quite costly so eating them along with work in progress seems logical. The main idea seems reasonably sound. You need to keep the salts gradients to within parameters that your body can deal with whilst supplying it with enough water to function. It seems fair that if you start off well hydrated and only sip small amounts, regularly then your body might be able to do the job. On balance, I'd concentrate on catching fish and keeping the sea water intake to a minimum.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  There is a story of a Salvadoran fisherman who was at sea for 13 months. The story is not fully confirmed and there are some doubts, but he says he survived by catching fish/turtles/birds and eating them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga
geocrasher 6y ago
Unfortunately I lack a reference but I recall reading that Pacific Islanders have for a long time been accustomed to drinking brackish water when nothing else was available and surviving you just fine. I do believe that there is merit to drinking this water when one is already hydrated rather than waiting until dehydration and throwing the body into a drastic imbalance. I do know that a person can survive without food for a very long time however. Unfortunately I know this first hand as my wife slowly died from malnutrition due to a medical condition that prevented her from being able to eat. (It was not an eaying disorder if anybody is wondering). This occurred over a period of time that most people would not believe if I were to say it. But it was a very long time and it proved to me that the human body is far more resilient than most people give it credit for.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > Unfortunately I know this first hand as my wife slowly died from malnutrition due to a medical condition that prevented her from being able to eat. JFC I am so sorry.
- 1MachineElf 6y ago
  I'm sorry for your painful loss, that is terrible. Recently, I just experienced a similar thing. My Aunt succumbed to Alzheimer's a couple days ago. She had been in hospice care, without any food or water, for two entire weeks. In her case, she had morphine and atropine to keep her comfortable, and I wonder if the lessened distressed contributed to the longer than usual survival time. According to the doctor, a history of excercise and healthy eating might also have been a factor. I had never imagined someone would survive that long in that state.
  - geocrasher 6y ago
    I'm very sorry about your Aunt. Alzheimer's is awful :(
- seunosewa 6y ago
  I think Steve Jobs died basically the same way. He just kept losing weight.
delightful 6y ago
“Human kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking seawater, you have to urinate more water than you drank. Eventually, you die of dehydration even as you become thirstier.” SOURCE: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/drinksw.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/drinksw.html
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  To be honest, I'm pretty skeptical of any information coming from a .gov domain. If you add up all the information disseminated by our government in the last 100 years, I don't think even half of it turned out to be factually correct in the end, meaning less truthful than randomness.
  - wuwuno 6y ago
    why don't you try it out and report back?
  - nradov 6y ago
    "Water, water, everywhere, so let's all have a drink" -Homer Simpson
  - CrazyStat 6y ago
    > I don't think even half of it turned out to be factually correct in the end, meaning less truthful than randomness. This implies a 50% chance that a randomly generated statement is true, which--without getting into the weeds on the generative model--is certainly false. For example, I can generate random statements of the form "I am X years old" for X \in {1, ..., 100}. Far from a 50% chance that the statement is factually correct.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      > without getting into the weeds on the generative model No, that very much depends on the weeds of the generative model. I can generate random statements of the form "I am not X years old" for X \in {1, ..., 100}.
07d046 6y ago
Not just ocean water. From Wikipedia: > However, it appears that Bombard may have been misunderstood in regard to the possibility of survival without fresh water. Bombard has never argued that human survival is possible only by drinking seawater. On the contrary, he indicates that seawater in small quantities can prolong survival if accompanied, if rainwater is not available, by the absorption of liquids present in the bodies of fish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard
- robaato 6y ago
  A link from that is interesting: https://inflatablekayaksandpackrafts.com/2020/12/02/lindemann-and-bombard/ https://inflatablekayaksandpackrafts.com/2020/12/02/lindeman...
nraynaud 6y ago
I think it’s really a wrong take on it. Bombard’s lesson is mostly one of hope: you can survive a very long time on a raft. He felt too many sailors died too early after being lost at sea, while he knew of very long survivals lost at sea in the whaling community. He suspected a lot of deaths were linked to hopelessness. He set his first travel as both an experiment and an inspiration. When he came back he established a list of things to put in a life raft for long term survival. As for the water, his lesson has always been to drink as much fresh water as you can, and mixed with a bit of seawater if you really have to. It’s really not about surviving on seawater, his life raft list includes fresh water.
- Zanni 6y ago
  There's a great quote from the Mamet film The Edge: Most people lost in the wilds die of shame. "What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?" And so they sit there and they ... die.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Afaik, in reality, most people who die lost in the wilds die from exhaustion, injury, cold, heat, lack of water and such. People dying because "shame" kills them are not a thing in reality.
    - Zanni 6y ago
      Of course. Mamet is suggesting that they could have survived the exhaustion, injury, cold, etc., if they hadn't given up. But their embarrassment at their predicament short-circuited their survival instinct. I'm reinforcing nraynaud's comment above about how too many sailors lost at sea die before they should because they give up hope.
aezell 6y ago
One also needs to be able to filter plankton and catch fish. The ocean has increasingly fewer of these resources these days. Maybe you could survive this way 50 years ago. These days, you'd better hope you can press a plastic bottle for "juice."
oriettaxx 6y ago
did you know that, thanks to him, when somebody is lost at sea now, all search and rescue operations must last many more days..... So many people have been rescued thanks to his 'adventure' :)

74 points by jbergstroem 6y ago

In case the blog (wordpress) should turn unresponsive - here's a direct link to the PDF/book: http://greatestadventurers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/The-Bombard-Story-1953.pdf http://greatestadventurers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Th...

heyitsguay 6y ago

This seems like it'd be easy to test and important if true. Has there been any follow-up?

heavyset_go 6y ago
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think such an experiment would pass an ethics review. Researchers would probably be limited to investigating people who, for whatever reason, were forced to subsist on ocean water.
- ericmcer 6y ago
  I am pretty confident someone would be a willing test subject. Just attach a world record to it: “longest time surviving on ocean water”
- gerdesj 6y ago
  It sounds like a job for the military. Those branches for which death at sea is a likely possibility. Perhaps start with what can be achieved with catching fish and work towards seawater intake, very, very carefully. It is quite likely that some forces have already done the research ...
  - qbasic_forever 6y ago
    What's the end goal? To remove the need for naval ships to carry a supply of freshwater? They still have to have enormous supply chain and logistics figured out to keep fuel, ammo, food, medicine, people, etc. at the front lines and out at sea. I'd bet, if anything, the navy would be way more interested in figuring out how to run their ships off of saltwater instead of their people.
    - brazzy 6y ago
      > What's the end goal? To remove the need for naval ships to carry a supply of freshwater? No, to improve the survival chances of shipwrecked sailors.
  - simplicio 6y ago
    Bombard's wikipedia page mentions the French and Taiwanese militaries conducted lost-at-sea exercises that supported Bombard's findings. The page doesn't have much in the way of citations, though, and I couldn't find anything on google about either the French or Taiwanese efforts (though I only spent a minute or two looking). As other posters have mentioned though, the take-away isn't really that you can subsist soley on seawater, but that using seawater to supplement fresh water from rain and liquids from fish can allow one to survive for long periods at sea without an initial store of freshwater.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  This sounds like an experiment that would pass, because there is no real danger to particioant, as long as their vitals are monitired and intervention is avaliable if needed
- jojobas 6y ago
  Why not? Having volunteers drink saltier and saltier water while controlled for any organ function abnormalities doesn't sound too bad, Mars 500 was way worse.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    To me, at least, it seems like experimenting to see how much poison it takes to hurt or kill someone, except this poison is salt water and not something like cyanide or bleach.
nraynaud 6y ago
It is true, mostly because he drank little seawater.

gerdesj 6y ago

"and he also drank juice made from pressed fish he caught along the way." That juice is mostly water, fresh water. I don't know too much about the central thesis of the book ie that you can drink small quantities of sea water and continue to thrive. However I do know that several/many/most? sea predators survive purely on the water they get from their prey. Maintaining a desalination plant is probably quite costly so eating them along with work in progress seems logical. The main idea seems reasonably sound. You need to keep the salts gradients to within parameters that your body can deal with whilst supplying it with enough water to function. It seems fair that if you start off well hydrated and only sip small amounts, regularly then your body might be able to do the job. On balance, I'd concentrate on catching fish and keeping the sea water intake to a minimum.

saberdancer 6y ago
There is a story of a Salvadoran fisherman who was at sea for 13 months. The story is not fully confirmed and there are some doubts, but he says he survived by catching fish/turtles/birds and eating them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga

geocrasher 6y ago

Unfortunately I lack a reference but I recall reading that Pacific Islanders have for a long time been accustomed to drinking brackish water when nothing else was available and surviving you just fine. I do believe that there is merit to drinking this water when one is already hydrated rather than waiting until dehydration and throwing the body into a drastic imbalance. I do know that a person can survive without food for a very long time however. Unfortunately I know this first hand as my wife slowly died from malnutrition due to a medical condition that prevented her from being able to eat. (It was not an eaying disorder if anybody is wondering). This occurred over a period of time that most people would not believe if I were to say it. But it was a very long time and it proved to me that the human body is far more resilient than most people give it credit for.

Judgmentality 6y ago
> Unfortunately I know this first hand as my wife slowly died from malnutrition due to a medical condition that prevented her from being able to eat. JFC I am so sorry.
1MachineElf 6y ago
I'm sorry for your painful loss, that is terrible. Recently, I just experienced a similar thing. My Aunt succumbed to Alzheimer's a couple days ago. She had been in hospice care, without any food or water, for two entire weeks. In her case, she had morphine and atropine to keep her comfortable, and I wonder if the lessened distressed contributed to the longer than usual survival time. According to the doctor, a history of excercise and healthy eating might also have been a factor. I had never imagined someone would survive that long in that state.
- geocrasher 6y ago
  I'm very sorry about your Aunt. Alzheimer's is awful :(
seunosewa 6y ago
I think Steve Jobs died basically the same way. He just kept losing weight.

delightful 6y ago

“Human kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking seawater, you have to urinate more water than you drank. Eventually, you die of dehydration even as you become thirstier.” SOURCE: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/drinksw.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/drinksw.html

forgotmypw17 6y ago
To be honest, I'm pretty skeptical of any information coming from a .gov domain. If you add up all the information disseminated by our government in the last 100 years, I don't think even half of it turned out to be factually correct in the end, meaning less truthful than randomness.
- wuwuno 6y ago
  why don't you try it out and report back?
- nradov 6y ago
  "Water, water, everywhere, so let's all have a drink" -Homer Simpson
- CrazyStat 6y ago
  > I don't think even half of it turned out to be factually correct in the end, meaning less truthful than randomness. This implies a 50% chance that a randomly generated statement is true, which--without getting into the weeds on the generative model--is certainly false. For example, I can generate random statements of the form "I am X years old" for X \in {1, ..., 100}. Far from a 50% chance that the statement is factually correct.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    > without getting into the weeds on the generative model No, that very much depends on the weeds of the generative model. I can generate random statements of the form "I am not X years old" for X \in {1, ..., 100}.

07d046 6y ago

Not just ocean water. From Wikipedia: > However, it appears that Bombard may have been misunderstood in regard to the possibility of survival without fresh water. Bombard has never argued that human survival is possible only by drinking seawater. On the contrary, he indicates that seawater in small quantities can prolong survival if accompanied, if rainwater is not available, by the absorption of liquids present in the bodies of fish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard

robaato 6y ago
A link from that is interesting: https://inflatablekayaksandpackrafts.com/2020/12/02/lindemann-and-bombard/ https://inflatablekayaksandpackrafts.com/2020/12/02/lindeman...

nraynaud 6y ago

I think it’s really a wrong take on it. Bombard’s lesson is mostly one of hope: you can survive a very long time on a raft. He felt too many sailors died too early after being lost at sea, while he knew of very long survivals lost at sea in the whaling community. He suspected a lot of deaths were linked to hopelessness. He set his first travel as both an experiment and an inspiration. When he came back he established a list of things to put in a life raft for long term survival. As for the water, his lesson has always been to drink as much fresh water as you can, and mixed with a bit of seawater if you really have to. It’s really not about surviving on seawater, his life raft list includes fresh water.

Zanni 6y ago
There's a great quote from the Mamet film The Edge: Most people lost in the wilds die of shame. "What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?" And so they sit there and they ... die.
- watwut 6y ago
  Afaik, in reality, most people who die lost in the wilds die from exhaustion, injury, cold, heat, lack of water and such. People dying because "shame" kills them are not a thing in reality.
  - Zanni 6y ago
    Of course. Mamet is suggesting that they could have survived the exhaustion, injury, cold, etc., if they hadn't given up. But their embarrassment at their predicament short-circuited their survival instinct. I'm reinforcing nraynaud's comment above about how too many sailors lost at sea die before they should because they give up hope.

aezell 6y ago

One also needs to be able to filter plankton and catch fish. The ocean has increasingly fewer of these resources these days. Maybe you could survive this way 50 years ago. These days, you'd better hope you can press a plastic bottle for "juice."

oriettaxx 6y ago

did you know that, thanks to him, when somebody is lost at sea now, all search and rescue operations must last many more days..... So many people have been rescued thanks to his 'adventure' :)