How long could you survive exposure to space?
March 23rd, 2008
I’ve no idea how accurate this is, but this website purports to tell you how long you could survive the desolate emptiness of space without the comfort of a spacesuit. For the record, Frances Ashcroft describes the effects in her excellent book ‘Life At The Extremes‘:
Step into the vacuum of space and you would perish in a few brief agonising moments. The air would rush out of your lungs; the dissolved gases in your blood and bodily fluids would vaporise, forcing apart your cells and forming bubbles in your capillaries, so that no oxygen would reach your brain; air trapped in your internal organs would expand, rupturing your gut and eardrums; and the intense cold would cause instant freezing. you would be unconscious within fifteen seconds.
Which is a relief, as I’m told I’d live for a minute longer than that.
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2 Comments
1. spayced | March 24th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Hmm I’m not quite so sure it’s that dramatic. First, you won’t freeze instantly. Thermal conductivity takes heat away from you, and there aren’t many molecules in space to do that. You would certainly expand a bit, but not rupture. We don’t rely solely on air to keep us from exploding daily. Your body is actually actively trying to keep you together. Ear drum rupturing, I’ll buy that one. We’ve done plenty of research by throwing monkeys into space and vacuums, read up on that ghastly research for the real answers. Based on those, I’d say death in two minutes (assuming someone saves you). These people are just guessing.
2. systmh | April 21st, 2008 at 1:25 am
spayced brings up a valid point; i often tire of people claiming that you’d instantly become a block of ice in space. a dramatic lowering in temperature at such a high rate requires a material with a huge specific heat and a correspondingly low temperature.
space is very cold, granted. but the specific heat of a vacuum, is, well… zero. therefore it has no capacity to remove heat from an isolated body via conductance or convection. even in the frigid climate of space, your body would only lose heat through radiation, as in the slow emission of infra-red from your body. it would take a long, long time to freeze in the depths of space.
the boiling of nitrogen and other soluble gasses from bodily fluids would cause pain and serious injury, but it would be only marginally worse than that of a bad case of the bends. obviously, the human body is not held together by atmospheric pressure alone. bruising, rupturing of the capillaries and temporary blindness would occur, but it’s nothing that the body can’t naturally heal… assuming the subject is moved into a pressurized and oxygenated environment before the subject asphyxiates.
someone tossed into the vacuum certainly wouldn’t ‘pop’ like a balloon. like i said, atmospheric pressure alone is not what holds the body together, and the tensile strength of skin and tissue is enough to hold the modest inner pressure of bodily fluids safely inside one’s torso.
radiation in space is certainly fierce, depending on location (the van allen belts would make radiation negligible in low earth orbit). but radiation takes time to kill. the first thing to end one’s life would most certainly be the brain starving for oxygen.
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