I’ve never seen a clear answer on what would happen to a human being if, say, he took off his helmet in space.
Would he implode or explode–or what? How long would it take? Also would this hold true in a vacuum chamber on earth, or just in space? Could the temperature of space have any bearing on it?
I’m also curious about the opposite.: if for some reason at, say, the depth of the Titanic (2-odd miles), the submersible’s hatch suddenly were to open, what would happen to the occupants? I’ve heard that at that depth a gas canister was crushed to the size of a marble. Would you suddenly be squeezed into a shape the size of a small stuffed toy?
Not that I’m volunteering for either experiment, mind you, but I was wondering if perhaps research had been done on small mammals to show what would happen in either case.
In space:
My guess is that you’ll start sweating blood and and maybe burst since your body pushes outwards at the force that is equal to what used to be pushing on it in a normal atmosphere. (Which is 4 pounds per square inch. its just a guess at the pounds, i’m probably very wrong)
In deep sea:
I guess you’ll probably implode with every ounce of non-water material compressed into donno what.
Oh yar, your blood will vaporize in space due to the low pressure lowering its boiling point(hence more likely to burst). But if its in deep cold space…not sure…maybe burst and immediately freeze as tiny little pieces?
there have been human experiments in vacuum. Typically if I remember correctly the surface blood vessels in the eyes and skin tend to swell and may burst, eardrums tend to blow out because of high internal pressure against such a thin membrane. A need to void both the bladder and the rectum becomes very strong or overpowering depending on how full or in the case of the rectum/colon how much gas is retained. there really is not enough internal pressure in the head to cause it to burst as shown in a lot of movies, though some sinus damage can occur. Damage to the lungs is probably the single largest concern, while the air in your lungs would be forced out pretty quickly, trying to hold your breath, or very full lungs as you enter the vacuum can cause serious damage. After only a few seconds the gases in the blood will try to seperate and the “boiling” effect shown in high altitude flights will occur.
Horseflesh is right, atmospheric pressure at sea level is nominally 14.7 pounds per square inch. You don’t have to be anywhere near 2 miles deep to get crushed, at least not if you’re wearing a diving helmet and suit. This arrangement supplies you with continuous air through a rubber hose attached to the helmet, and the suit is completely sealed against the sea, giving the diver a dry environment to work in. If the air supply gets blocked or otherwise fails, you can be crushed to death by as little as 30 feet of sea water. The suit is flexible and the helmet is rigid, and the pressure of the water will attempt to force your body up into the helmet unless there is air pressure preventing this.
The words “explode” and “implode” don’t quite apply here. The human body isn’t a bag of air. It’s mostly water, which is not compressible. You won’t get crushed into a tiny ball under the sea, and you won’t blow up into pieces when exposed to vacuum.
Of course there is air in your lungs so if you suddenly found yourself on the ocean floor, the pressure will force the air out. But if you pump air into your mouth at a great pressure (namely the same pressure as the surrounding water), you will be able to breathe. That’s how scuba gear works.
Hmm . . . many answers but not quite the ones I was looking for. Yet, perhaps that is the reality. I (fantasize) think that such simplistic definitions do not apply.
My theory is that in space, the temperature would render you unconscious in a fraction of a second, even before you could “expand like a balloon released from its compression.” I imagine that, although all the air would be forced from your lungs immediately, you would not explode, nor anything approaching it, since you are not a bag of air, but water, which would freeze before it had a chance to explode. Therefore, you would be a wheezing block of ice more or less holding your pre-dead state, perhaps trailing small whiffs of still-gaseous vapors as you condensed into a permanent freeze-dried condition.
My imagination of what would happen down below is that you would be rendered unconscious (then die) in a fraction of a second but that your body would condense into a form so compressed to your skeleton (which would only minimally compress, due to its cells lacking fluids) that you’d practically only have two or three millimeters of what used to be musculature/internal organs on top of bone.
Not a pleasant thought, but then again, you wouldn’t be around to contemplate it.
Next thought: not two miles, but just 1000 feet down/5 miles up?
You don’t explode in space, and you don’t lose conscioness immediately. Vacuum has no temperature, for one thing - it’s a pretty good insulator. From experiments done with animals in vacuum chambers and the unfortunate example of the Soyuz 11 crew whose capsul depressurized on the way back to earth, it apears that you remain alive and aware for some time less than a minute upon depressurization, before lack of oxygen kills you.
You are looking for the truth, right? If you just want someone to agree with you, you came to the wrong board.
The body does not cool in vacuum in “a fraction of a second.” In space the only way to lose heat is through evaporation and radiation; there is no air to carry away the heat via convection. You will die of asphyxiation long before your body freezes solid. Actually it may never freeze solid if it’s in orbit around the earth and/or in sunlight. (The earth, being warm, emits a lot of infrared radiation.)
As for down below, as I said earlier the human body is mostly water which does not compress very well. To squeeze water out of your body, you need to apply differential pressure - for example, if a car falls on your belly then your blood may get squeezed out of that section. But a uniform pressure will not squash things. Uniform pressure only shrinks gas and other compressible material. So you can dive as deep as you want, as long as you have a supply of compressed air to pump into your mouth. The only limit is the change in chemical reactions that result from breathing air at too high a pressure. Switching to special gas mixtures you can extend the range a bit. The current record depth is around 2300 ft. That’s a pressure of about 70 atmospheres, if I’m not mistaken.
I think you might be a little off here. I’ve dived to below 100ft with a wet suit and only pressurized air to inhale and, IIRC, I didn’t inmplode. Also, I think free divers routinely go below 30 ft w/o imploding and they don’t even have pressurized air to breathe.
Joe Mahma is talking about the old diving suits with the roughly spherical metal helmet that enclosed the whole head. This is quite different from the diving you describe, PosterChild.
ok, I guess I just didn’t understand how 30 feet of water would crush you if you were in one of those suits, but not if you were out of it. I sort of figured that that pressure around you would be the same at 30 feet down whether or not you wore a suit with a helmet or not. Is there a vacuum if the air supply gets cut off that increases the pressure difference somehow? Now that I think of it, I thought the main purpose of those suits now is to allow longer dives and AFAIK only the rigid constant-volume suits that look like space suits actually go to depths that would be dangerous without the suit (not counting cold and lack of O[sub]2[/sub]:)).
You are looking for the truth, right? If you just want someone to agree with you, you came to the wrong board.
What I meant from the comment “many answers, but not the one I was looking for” was just that I was looking for an answer that seemed to make sense; as in, explained logically and scientifically, coincidentally exactly in the manner you proceeded to post
I was trying to puzzle the problem through and voicing my (no doubt quite ill-informed) hypotheses so that others could expand or contract upon my theories. Which makes perfect sense, given the subject matter:)
However, it appears that there is no unified answer on what happens in either circumstance. This is good, I guess, since the only way we would know for sure would mean that something would have to die.
Too hasty a reply. After reading the links provided above I see that there are concrete answers to my question. It’s kind of reassuring to know that one does not explode like a ripe banana with inserted firecracker, but just fades away amicably, eyeballs intact (who researched Total Recall, anyway?)
