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The first limit is oxygen toxicity.

Partial pressures of oxygen more than 1 atm are toxic

so breathing air, the limit is 1 atm/20% O2 = 5 atm = 75 psi = water depth of ~ 150 feet

However all you have to do is reduce the concentration of oxygen in whatever gas you are breathing.

The next limit is nitrogen narcosis.

Under high pressure nitrogen acts like nitrous oxide.

Too high a pressure and it will stop your breathing.

Partial pressures more than 10 atm are lethal.

So the limit would be ~ 10 atm = 150 psi = water depth of ~ 300 feet

However all you have to do is reduce the concentration of nitrogen in whatever gas you are breathing

(for example replace it with helium).

Helium-oxygen mixtures have been used to ~1000 foot depth.

(interesting side note, too little nitrogen is also annoying, causes headache and neurological problems

in short we require a bit of nitrogen narcosis in our everyday lives, so a small amount of nitrogen

in the mix significantly improves comfort)

The human body is essentially water and almost incompressible.

In theory helium-oxygen-nitrogen mixtures can be used to the deepest depths of the ocean (~30,000 feet = 1000 atm = 15000 psi).

In practice, mildly annoying things happen at depths > 3000 feet (100 atm, 1500 psi).

1) evaporation slows down, in particular the saliva does not evaporate from your lips and you begin to drool a lot.

2) exceeding 1000 atm, air exceeds the density of water and it starts to become a bit of effort to breath. A practical upper limit

due to air density in the lungs is about 2000 atm = 30,000 psi = 60,000 feet water depth (deeper than any ocean on earth).

A fix for this would be a heart/lung machine to inject oxygen/nitrogen directly into the bloodstream.

PS, a practical application of this would be to have the person connected to the heart/lung machine floating in water.

In this condition they could withstand an incredible 1,000 g! (the upper limit due to sedimentation of cellular organelles),

A final limit is the point in which barochemistry (changing reaction rates due to pressure) become important.

The "chemical energy density" of matter is an equivalent pressure of about 1.5 million atmospheres.

Pressures from 1-10% of this would be expected to alter metabolism significantly. So the absolute upper limit

is somewhere between 15,000 and 150,000 atm.

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