Breathe in space, with or without a suit?

I've been wracking my brain about a world I'm writing in, how to make some group of regular people able to survive in space for extended periods with or without a suit. I can reduce the amount of time they'll spend via a deus ex machina, but I'd prefer to really drive certain points home by allowing inter-planetary travel.

The characters have the ability to alter the physical properties of the world around them, but they can run out of energy or lose concentration and will be at the mercy of the elements (in this case, space!). This is accomplished by some technology that converts their knowledge of physics into phenomena, and just about anything is within their ability to affect.

I'd like to be able to figure out a way to have them travel without a suit at all. Because they have power over the physical world, they can pressurize a bubble around themselves. My concern is how long, realistically, could a character with infinite energy and a machine to convert that energy with infinite efficiency last? Can they reclaim large amounts of breathable air from their waste (breath) or from water?

From my own research:

Earth's air - 20% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 2% carbon dioxide/other

Diver's Mix - Oxygen/helium (squeaky voice side effect :))

Other - 5% oxygen/any (read that oxygen and nothing poisonous is enough for us)

I'm guessing that the obvious thing to do would say that the character can break up the CO₂ he breathes out back into oxygen and expel the carbon, but the reclamation of that, I assume, would be very small, but I really don't have a good frame of reference for how to measure parts of gases.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could have the characters explain what they are doing to survive?

posted almost 10 years ago

C Bauer‭

1 reputation 1 0 0 0