(classical music)
- Remember that time
in Battlestar Galactica
when that one character was blown
out an air lot into outer
space without a suit?
No?
Well, what about when it happened in 2001?
Or Guardians of the Galaxy?
Or Sunshine?
Yes, we all dream about
travelling in space.
But if movies are any indication,
we spend almost as much time thinking
about flying around up
there without a suit on.
So let's answer this
question once and for all.
What would space actually
do to a human body?
Well, here's the good news.
You wouldn't die instantly.
How do we know?
Because somebody tested it out.
On dogs.
In 1965, researchers at
Brooks Air Force Base in Texas
exposed several dogs to a near vacuum.
The dogs survived up to 90 seconds
but if they went two minutes or more,
they died when repressurized.
If your first thought is,
they did this to dogs,
I'm right there with you.
Researchers at NASA did the same thing
to chimpanzees in the late 1960s
and found out they could last up to
three and a half minutes.
And then there's been a few accidents
where people got de and then repressurized
like a technician at Johnson Space Center
who lost consciousness after 12 seconds.
This was just before the moisture
on his tongue began to boil.
See, without air pressure to keep
your precious bodily fluids
in their liquid state,
they would rapidly lose heat energy
before they froze and
then evaporated totally.
And this isn't the worst thing
the lack of pressure can do to you either.
The gases inside you would expand
causing you to swell up like
Violet Beauregarde in Willy
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
This includes air and gas bubbles
formed from your boiling body fluids.
That effect is called ebullism
which can block your
bloodstream with these bubbles.
And that would cause you to pass out
in about 15 seconds from the lack
of blood flowing to your brain.
Your skin's blood vessels would burst.
Your internal organs would also swell
and likely tear but you wouldn't
explode like in Total Recall.
You'd just stretch painfully.
Until you died.
Keep in mind, so far we've only
been talking about the effects
to a body in a vacuum.
In actual space, there are even more
hazards to deal with.
Depending on your location,
you could either be exposed to a star's
thermal radiation at
around 120 degrees Celsius
or your own body heat could radiate away
in the shade at around minus 100 degrees.
Finally, there's the
obvious lack of oxygen.
Normally, you could hold your
breath for several minutes
but remember, without pressure,
that whole boiling effect would
diffuse the oxygen from your blood.
So again, after about 15
seconds, you'd pass out.
And don't try to hold your breath, either.
It would just expand with the other gases,
rupturing your lungs.
All in all, these things would probably
kill you in less than a minute.
So, tell me in the comments
what's your survival
plan if you're in space
and something goes horribly wrong?
And the next time someone wants you
to open the pod bay
doors to space, just say,
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm
afraid I can't do that."
