Could just use the helium and skip the gun, spare yourself the hassle
Was that the plot of “Up”? It’s been a while…
This was an episode of CSI
Yeah, let’s not only disturb the people around you, but also leave them a puzzle…
Hmmmm, do a Luigi, but with the balloons taking the gun while you take the Citibike?
>get strong and sharp metal wire
>get glue
>make noose from wire
>put head trough noose
>glue hands to hair
>kick chair awayYour friends and family will find you with your head being held in your hands as if you ripped it off yourself.
is it failproof?
I have yet to try but will report back once new information arises.
Survives but it hurts and it’s painful as hell, I want to finish it but the gun flew away.
Just like 15 meters though where it got caught in a tree and the wind made it go off again, shooting me in the balls.
Directed by Robert B. Weide.
This actually happened…
Of course it’s Florida man.
On the morning of Jan. 25 he left his $900,000 home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., for that walk
What a weird fucking detail to start the article with
Everything in the USA is a competition and a flex on other people.
That struck me as strange as well
“Pity this poor rich man, because even though he was rich, he still had problems 🥺🥺🥺”
reality is stranger than fiction
or more likely, anon was inspired
Look at the date on the article as opposed to the greentext. I think it might have been Florida Man who was inspired lol
Damn. Went from funny to oh shit.
It seems likely but doesn’t explain the lack of a casing
Maybe a revolver?
Up and Soul have a weird crossover sequel
>buy Helium
>around 10,000 balloon
>gun
>attach balloons filled with helium to self
>shoot yourself
>let the corpse fly away
>no one will ever know
Thank me later
That’s so many fewer balloons than I thought you’d need, wow.
On the other hand, I found an article with a picture, and even that many is a huge mass:
That was a fascinating story, did he not check the weather at all?
If i recall correctly, he didn’t know how to use the gps. It was a pre smartphone era
One day, ballons deflate
Corpse comes raining down out of the sky
No one will know what the fuck is going on
Thank me later
I’d like to thank you now.
Thank you.
Anon can’t follow simple instructions.
Do not do this. Helium is a scarce resource and those balloons create pollution and kill animals when they come down.
There are a couple viable alternatives to helium for this particular application. Hydrogen and methane are both adequate lifting gasses.
You better commit suicide in an environmentally friendly way!
Exactly. For example you can take off all your clothes and drown yourself. Preferably in a place with a lot of carrion eaters like crabs.
Your dead body still gives off methane. If you aren’t hermetically sealing your body prior to death you might as well be an oil executive.
If it’s eten before it rots, the emissions are lower than they would be if you’d stay alive. I’d call that a win.
Yeah but also make sure to minimize your emissions in how to hermetically seal yourself
Solar power that vacuum sealer lol
Yeah, use hydrogen for quadruple the lifting power! Send that gun to space!
or even better, fill the balloon with vacuum so that it has the least weight possible, meaning it’ll float anywhere!
I’ll just shoot myself with a gun made of ice instead
We already have ice that can kill you on a hair trigger, it’s called yelling at snowy mountains
Smart. We just need a 3d printer that can print ice
I was just gonna make a mold of a gun I already have and freeze some water in it
Make it even more inexplicable. Ice guillotine.
Helium is no longer all that scarce but balloons definitely create pollution and kill animals
It’s not?
We’ve just been relying on helium deposits that are running dry and have to use other methods of extracting it that are less economical
The problem with helium is that once we’re out, we’re out. It’s the second-most abundant atom, yes, but it doesn’t react with anything, can’t freeze, and escapes the planet when exposed to open air.
The only source we have of it is radioactive decay, and it’s not something we can manufacture in any volume. I think the only way to make it would be in a supercollider one atom at a time.
Radioactive decay is the source, yes, which means we won’t be out of it until the earth is out of all of the radioactive isotopes that are undergoing alpha decay.
By the time that happens, Bussard collectors will probably escape from the realm of fiction.
Yes, but right now it’s “cheap” because it’s a byproduct of natural gas mining. As we transition off fossil fuels it won’t be so easy to acquire.
One of the reasons the shortage was alleviated was the expansion of gas mining and the subsequent discovery of a bunch in Tanzenia.
Also a monkey could get their hands on the gun and kill even more animals.
IIRC, we get a ton of helium from methane extraction now, which we’re increasingly relying on. We have more helium than we know what to do with at the moment I’m pretty sure. Now, once we stop using methane for power, then sure, it’s limited. Currently it’s a byproduct that there isn’t enough use for compared to what’s produced.
Since Iran blew up one of the major refineries in the middle east which removed a third of the world’s production there’s a shortage, can’t buy helium here since it’s only sold to critical infrastructure now.
The helium thing are my exact first thoughts
The gun is going to come down somewhere. Gravity is a bitch like that. So, coastline, and make sure the winds are out to sea. Not just the surface winds, but also the winds aloft. When the gun does eventually come down, it is still going to be connected to the balloons, and will be floating at the surface for days. A balloon mass this large could attract attention. You’ll want some kind of water soluble string to drop the gun and ensure it sinks.
As it ascends, the balloon cluster is going to show up on doorbell cameras. The noise of the gunshot is going to draw witnesses with phone cameras. At the very least, you need a moonless night. Fog bank and low ceilings can help. Definitely don’t want to try this during the day.
I wonder if there is a level of elaboration in suicide planning where you stop being suicidal, because now you have a lot of interests and leafs of motivation are now so far from the original trunk, that you now have will to live.
Now you like walks near the shore, checking weather patterns and how they form so you could notice them with your naked eye. Now you picked up balooning hobby, maybe you got in contact with other people on a forum, maybe you read a book. Now you got interested in materials science and chemistry, you organized a little lab somewhere and got sucked up by this fascinating subject. Later on you could start thinking about marine life and if it would be affected by your actions. That would be another rabbit hole. Maybe someone asked on the ballooning forum about glues and it was something you have recently read from a chemistry book and you recommend against said glue, because it could be harmful for marine life.
The suicide is just the constraint. It’s the device that drives the plot. The central thesis is the mystery. How is the mystery preserved beyond the magician’s provably final act?
We haven’t broached the logistics of filling a large quantity of balloons with a lifting gas, without leaving clues to that fact. Do we have gas cylinders lying around? If not, did someone see us disposing of them shortly before the coroner’s estimated TOD? Some balloons are likely to pop during the process; do a few scraps of latex give away the plot?
Well, not quite the same, but there’s the story of the guy who decided to spend a whole bunch of money on drugs and hookers and then kill himself, went to Mexico iirc, and had such a great time that he gained the will to live.
This guy balloon guns
Mary Glockkins
Thinking about it, you could really fuck with local authorities.
Drench yourself in the water at the shore, wear clothes with tags torn out, and have a notebook in your pocket with pages after pages of random numbers. Police and intelligence agency staff will work all-nighters to figure out who was the spy they found and who shot them.
It would help to have a page from a book of poetry in your pocket too
Some guy at a lake bear me once killed himself. He had a cgest wound but they found no gun. Suicide wasn’t really on the table because it’s weird to shoot youself in tge chest, and then where is the gun? Did he throw it in the lake with hia last breath? Non of it made sense, the bullet hole was weird, they found gunpowder residu that wasn’t common from gunfire. At his home they found a sort of contraption that no one cared about, because it seemed unrelated. But then they found a similar one next to the body and it was a string and some branch and a little rock or whatever he used. He was swinging that rock around to hit the bullet at the right location to fire it. They suspected it took him hours. Later they found out that people saw him for weeks, sitting there playimg with some rock branch toy or whatever.
What an absolute insane way to die.
I guess the real question is, did he even intend to hit himself?
Advanced singleplayer Russian roulette
Finally a game where you can only win
Elite balloon knowledge
deleted by creator
Nevermind, I read this and thought it was accurate lol: https://lemmy.world/comment/26804286
Or just don’t do it next to beach front housing
Anon: “Haha I bet they cant solve this case!”
Detective after investigating for 5 minutes: “Alright pack it up, boys. Natural Causes. He had a pre-existing condition of lead poisoning. Anyways, anyone wanna go get a donut with me?”
Either that or they just peg it on the relative or random black person, fabricate evidence and testimony, and then send an innocent to jail.
Js people go missing hiking all the time its much simpler to just hike out into the wilderness and do it there. They’re not gonna find you.
As someone who’s underpaid to work in a nature preserve, please don’t do this. So many of my coworkers have ptsd from finding / cleaning up bodies.
Do you know if those are this phenomenon vs just like people dying by accident out there? I imagine a lot of people just die by accident on hikes too.
In my experience, police are tipped by the family of missing people that the victim was a frequent visitor of the preserve. The police ask for access, but aren’t really equipped to survey / don’t have maps, so we join in person. I get the vibe that as folks contemplate killing themselves in a natural area, they visit it more frequently leading up to the event, so it’s kind of obvious. I mean, humans don’t disappear. If it’s a normal person, hiding somewhere, they are either at a friend’s house, the bar, or in the woods.
The other category of people are the ones who just kill themselves in the parking lot or guest areas. Truly, these people can fuck right off. Its a horrible thing to come to work and find a dead body hanging off the observation tower.
We manage less than 100k acres, the longest public trails here are probably only 15 miles long, and we have maybe 3 million people nearby. So, people don’t usually die by accident on ours, at leat not in mysterious ways. Distressed hikers are usually found by other hikers before dying. Most accidental deaths I’ve seen have been drowning due to swimming in undesignated areas.
Reflecting on this response, our police might just be better funded than more rural land management areas. Like, the last search i was involved in was extensive and prolonged. On BLM land way out there, maybe people do disappear, but working in environmental lands management has taught me that truly empty natural land doesn’t really exist in most places with reasonably sized populations. Chances are, if you walked out there, someone else will too, at least in public lands.
Oh, yeah. What your descrbing isn’t what I meant at all by the wilderness. I was talking like, actual wilderness. Not even managed necessarily. If you don’t want to be found there shouldn’t be a parking lot or a visitor center to the area you go. That should be obvious. I’m talking like literally just drive out into the middle of a national forest until the roads end and then just start walking. If there are trails your in the wrong area.
If you are curious about the disappearances tho you should look into Missing 411 (fair warning there are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding it). The missing people are real, but people get weird about it if you look at the wrong corners of the internet lol.
At the risk of being a contrarian, even that scenario of driving into a national park until you can’t drive and then walking is probably a guarantee of you being found. National parks are managed land and they’re pretty popular. You’re also leaving your car behind, either on a designated access road or a fire lane which makes finding you more of an inevitability than anything else.
Part of what I do for work are wildlife surveys. People tend to steal the cameras or the SD cards. Something I’ve noticed is that when I look for places to put cameras, specifically to avoid capturing humans, I still get humans on them, or the cameras are sometimes tampered with. I think this is a sort of confirmation bias. Anywhere you or I go, someone else is likely to go. Even if we’re trying to hide, we still have shared common biases.
The least likely places for humans to go are the ones selected at random via GIS on a map. I select 10 random points in the management unit then i rule out the obvious bad ones that intersect with an access road or some kind of facility. The trouble with these points is that they tend to be really hard to access.
But you know what? I do think this is kind of splitting hairs. Obviously there are always remote areas, and a determined person could hike for many hundreds of miles.
I think the bigger factor in “disappearing”, whether it’s for some nefarious reason such as suicide or not, is how well known you are. Are there people who are motivated to find you? Are the local police well funded? Are there land management staff here willing to look for you? How many years will your spouse, parent, child look for closure? I think for most affluent people, enough of these factors align to make them easy to find. Those most capable of disappearing are those who have nobody. Unprivileged people, who don’t have the support structure that they need. This sort of person can disappear even in a well populated area. Where I live, there are many road signs warning of human trafficking. I suppose human trafficking is probably the leading cause of true disappearance, since the victims often fall into that category of person who has nobody.
Yeah I guess my perspective is scewed by being one of those people. I pretty much have no one that knows what I do day to day. There are people who might wonder where I went and call the cops when I don’t show up to certain places but they’d have literally 0 leads unless I was stupid enough to leave a digital paper trail or something.
Really? I mean, not to pry, that’s a difficult situation to be in. Are you completely estranged from your family?
Your asking a lot of a depressed person. I don’t think I could ever be in the mood to kill myself after hiking out a couple of miles, but I love nature. Maybe it would work for someone else.
Isn’t that a good thing then? They won’t kill themselves because they’ll change their mind on the hike. Problem solved.
Other than the next hiker who you are traumatizing
You don’t do it on the trail dude. Do you know how many people go missing and are never found in national parks every year? Look up Missing 411. If you think somoene is just gonna stumble across you then you have no concept of how vast these lands are. We’re talking about pure wilderness that is hundreds of miles across.
That legitimately doesn’t exist where I live :( My best attempt to not get found would probably be either breaking into one of the old unused mines in the mountains that are kind of near me or off myself at sea and hope that my corpse wouldn’t get swept to the coast.
Gun sticks on thumb, potentially leaving a festive corpse.
Or, more fun, balloons hit basement ceiling, mystery solved.
