In Guardians of the galaxy the main character has a device which covers his face and somehow provides air for him to breath. My question is since the rest of his body is exposed to space how would his body behave in that situation?
Depends on how the mythology of the story line rationalizes the characters physical abilities.
Sorry to start with that, but it has to come up at some point in any thread such as this one.
Briefly, space is cold. Really cold. But without an atmosphere, interior heat can’t leave as efficiently. So vacuum exposure isn’t an instant freeze.
Exposure to vacuum, with pressure compensation for interior pressure, is a bad idea. But its not instant expansion explosion. Made worse by the peculiar physiology of Guardians of The Galaxy. You’re not talking about Groot – the sentient tree, right? Nor, from the comics, Cosmo Dog, correct?
This is a common meme in neo-hard-scifi. You can survive in space for short bursts. But not really. Its just shocking to lean on the “deep space instant death” meme. Ever since Han and Leia walked around in the asteroid monster’s moth with just a rebreather.
I haven’t seen the movie, but if your body was exposed to vacuum, and you pumped enough oxygen into your lungs to survive, I think your lungs may rupture from the pressure. You need about 1.5 psi of pure oxygen (equiv. to partial pressure of oxygen at 18,000 ft).
Sorry let me be more clear the reference to the movie is just helpful in illustrating the situation I am trying to describe. Basically you have a normal human with technology that covers his face and allows him to breathe in outer space however he wears normal clothing on the rest of his body. My question is what would such exposure do to a human.
He’s not full human. (In the film) his father is mentioned as an alien.
My answer still stands. If you are in vacuum, you can’t just suck air out of a mask - unless the mask is sealed against your face, with a strong enough seal that the mask can pump oxygen into your lungs at a couple of PSI. I’m not sure how one would do that - maybe a helmet with a strong rubber seal around your neck? It would have to cover your ears as well, I think.
In any case, this will cause your lungs will expand painfully (if not fatally). Breathing OUT will be impossible - the apparatus will need to do the breathing for you, alternately inflating and deflating your lungs.
I think your next problem will be the rapid loss of water vapor through all your mucous membranes and (to a lesser extent) through your skin. Which will rapidly cool down those surfaces.
As the OP says, he’s asking about an actual human not the character in the film, so this is irrelevant for the purpose of this thread.
At this point, I would say I need coffee this early except I don’t drink coffee.
:smack::smack::smack::smack:
OK. So, as has been said, (not very effectively by me, but better by everyone else,) you can’t breathe in the vacuum of space without a pressure suit. Chest muscles and diaphragm are just not strong enough.
As has appeared in a number of sci-fi sources, brief skin exposure to the vacuum of space, isn’t a death sentence.
This is also part of a movie series in which people can be turned into indestructable green rage monsters that grow to enormous size just by being exposed to gamma radiation, create phenomenally strong and fast ‘supersoldiers’ through some mysterious, pre-genetic enegineering serum and ‘Vita-Rays’, and fly around in metal suits at supersonic speed smashing into things without being turned to mush. Physics and physiology don’t really play much into the story lines.
To answer the question of the o.p., with the sinuses and eyes contained within the helmet there isn’t much in the way of exposed mucus membranes, save the genital openings and anus. The loss of external pressure is not the kind of problem shown in many movies with exploding bodies; it will cause some surface bruising and likely evacuation of the bowels, but even ‘exposive’ decompression is unlikely to cause gross rupture, and human skin is reasonably tough compared to normal atmospheric pressure. Breathing will become more labored as it will take more deliberate effort to exhale, but absent of damage of the pleural cavity there shouldn’t be an immediate loss of integrity to the lungs, provided the air being supplied is some reasonable fraction of atmospheric and with the correct partial pressure of oxygen.
The bigger problem is going to be the vacuum, which will immediately draw off all surface water and cause exposed skin to become flash-frozen by evaporative cooling. The very outer layer of skin is dead cells than can be excised, but right below that is living tissue that cannot survive exposure to the frigid cold. Worse yet, if in direct sunlight it will see unfiltered ultraviolet radiation unlike anything experienced on Earth, rapidly degrading the elasticity of the skin itself, as well as thermal damage from infrared and absorbable visible spectrum; the combination of flash-freezing and intense radiation will likely cause degradation and cracking, exposing underlying layers of skin and subjecting them to further evaporation. This would probably be transiently extremely painful, although nerve endings are going to freeze and stop functioning pretty quickly as they do with deep, intensive burns. (The ‘good part’ is that this will limit the loss of blood to extremeties, at least until the person was recovered into a normally pressurized volume.)
Eventually muscles and fascia are going to start becoming damaged, rendering the person effectively paralyzed, dying from the outside in. It would be expected that an embolism or some other internal damage will kill the person if they don’t die from shock or metabolic stress. I could only hazard a guess at how long someone could survive such exposure, but it is probably in the span of a few minutes at most.
Star-Lord, of course, is only “half-human” (your guess at how that works is as good as mine), and has survived having sex with an A’skavarian, as well as being in close proximity to a nuclear explosion and briefly holding an Infinity Stone, so he is clearly physically more robust than an ordinary Terran, and one can only speculate at the astonishing physiology of the other alien species (and modifications of Gamara), so their ability to survive exposure to space can be hand/paw/branch/tentical-waved away, but realistically no creature made of normal organic materials and mostly filled with liquid water is going to be able to survive in the vacuum and radiation conditions of space for very long, or be very functional while it is.
Stranger
For real humans, brief exposure to a vacuum isn’t usually fatal. In 1966, a guy named Jim LeBlanc was testing a space suit for NASA when a hose broke and his suit instantly depressurized. You can watch a video of the actual incident here:
The video has commentary by several people who were involved in the incident, including LeBlanc himself. He described feeling the saliva boiling off of his tongue just before he blacked out. He had about 10 seconds of consciousness and he was out. They re-pressurized the chamber in less than a minute (something that under normal circumstances required 30 minutes). LeBlanc says his ears ached afterwards from the rapid pressure changes, but otherwise he suffered no harm from the incident.
In animal tests, if the test subject was re-pressurized in about 90 seconds or so, the animal usually survived and was fine, although there were some cases of fatal fibrillation occurring in under a minute. After 90 seconds the heart would often stop, and those cases were always fatal.
In common sci-fi tropes, the victim’s blood sometimes boils and the victim sometimes freezes instantly. Neither of these happens. The blood won’t boil because the elasticity of the blood vessels is enough to maintain enough pressure to prevent boiling from occurring (as noted above though your saliva will boil off of your tongue). Heat leaves your body through conduction, convection, and radiation, and in the vacuum of space, the only one you have is radiation. You’ll lose heat very slowly, so slowly that thermos-type bottles often use vacuum as an insulator to keep your drink warm or cold.
As noted upthread, breathing isn’t going to work. Holding some kind of oxygen mask near your mouth isn’t going to work either.
That’s the real world GQ answer. For fictional space aliens, or half aliens or whatever, the lore is whatever the fiction writer decides it should be.
Once you accept the talking raccoon, even a gesture toward space requiring breathing assistance should be welcome.
I like to imagine that Star-Lord has a mechanical counterpressure suit on under his jacket; maybe they all wear them. Maybe some of the Guardians have natural organic versions of this technology under their skin - this might even include the half alien Quill.
Of course we are a long way from making a workable counterpressure suit, and it would be inconvenience when they go to the bathroom- but you cant have everything.
Why does the seal need to be around his whole head? Why can he not just seal his lips around a breathing apparatus? If air at normal pressure would cause his lungs to burst, then what about very low pressure with higher a concentration of oxygen? Exhaling could be through a valve in the mouth piece that allows him to breath out.
And would it really cause his lungs to burst if the lungs were at normal pressure? I thought the danger to sudden exposure to space with air in the lungs was the rapid expulsion of the air as it leaves an opened mouth. I understand the best thing to do would be to exhale prior to such exposure. What if the lungs were full of air and the person kept his mouth and nose closed. Would that positive pressure in his lungs be enough to actually cause severe damage? Is the flesh of the body not resilient enough to withstand this small pressure?
The mouthpiece would have to evacuate the gas from the lungs - the wearer certainly wouldn’t be able to exhale with near zero pressure on the outside of the chest.
But I think it would not be possible to provide sufficient partial pressure of oxygen, even if it was pure oxygen, without providing enough pressure to cause damage.
Why? Is exhalation a completely passive process? Is a relaxing diaphragm and external pressure the only method we have of exhaling? How do we blow up balloons, or breath out harder than normal? Or cough? Are we really not capable of exhaling without the help of external pressure? If the diaphragm is only capable of contracting in one direction, can none of the intercostal or accessory muscles force the air out? I’m really curious about the physics of blowing up a balloon, now.
I’m going to look for some studies on this. I’m sure (I hope) someone will come along with the math shortly.
Based on records of human exposure to extremely low pressures, you’re going to get significant swelling. Joseph Kittinger lost a glove on his parachute jump from 102,000 feet and his hand swelled considerably. I once read an account of a pilot that bailed out at very high altitude who experienced considerable abdominal swelling on the way down, and he wasn’t even as high as Kittinger.
At the very least you’re going to have the most epic fart of your life, with the very real possibly of uncontrollably shitting your shorts as the pressure in your intestines attempt to exit through the available opening.
Explosive decompression can occur, but it takes a greater pressure differential than between normal sea level and vacuum. See Byford Dolphin diving accident.
You neglected to mention the possibly of bends-like syndrome due to various gasses in the blood coming out of solution. High altitude pilots and astronauts avoid this by pre-breathing pure oxygen prior to activities at extreme low pressures to reduce the level of things like nitrogen in the blood and lower the risk of such symptoms, which can cause permanent damage or even be fatal.
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Based on animal models and a few incidents with humans, probably want to limit your exposure to space vacuum to under a minute.
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Of course, he wasn’t exposed to extreme cold or unfiltered starlight/radiation during that incident, which might have caused other damage.
Actually… it could. As mentioned, the current practice is to pre-breathe oxygen prior to spacewalks or extreme high altitude flights. A rapid drop in pressure from normal sea level to nearly notion can, as I mentioned, result is the bends due to things like dissolved nitrogen coming out of the blood.
Your mouth/lips isn’t capable of forming a good enough seal to keep the air in during vacuum exposure.
Up to a point, increasing the percentage of oxygen in the mix will compensate, but at a certain point the gas pressure in your body will exceed that outside your body so your body will lose more gas than it takes in. This doesn’t even require a vacuum - U2 pilots wore what was essentially a space suit because at the altitudes they flew at there wasn’t sufficient pressure, even with 100% oxygen, to drive the oxygen into their bloodstreams and cells. The human respiratory requires a certain minimum pressure to operate at all.
Well, not literally explode out of the body, but yes, pressure differentials can (and do) cause lung injury. It’s an issue in medicine with the use of mechanical ventilation. Lung ruptures can, and have, occurred in scuba divers who hold their breath while ascending.
Yes, it would, and not, it’s not. You can’t hold your breathe when suddenly going from 1 atmosphere pressure to zero - if nothing else, it’s going to exit your nose - but you can hold it just long enough to cause serious or even fatal damage. Yes, definitely exhale.
As has been partially covered, a human suddenly exposed to vacuum will probably remain conscious about 12 seconds. He will not flash freeze, explode or rupture. If returned to a normal environment within 60 sec, he will probably survive without permanent injury.
The vacuum exposure scene in the movie 2001 lasted 11 seconds. Assuming the astronaut in the space pod was breathing a low-pressure pure O2 environment similar to Apollo, he’d probably have limited “barotrauma” from the pressure release. While just a movie, the scene could be roughly accurate.
Re the Guardians movie, his body was not “exposed to space”, but he had some apparel. The question is what type. USAF high-altitude pilots in the 1950s and 1960s used “partial pressure” suits which if covered by a flight suit were indistinguishable from normal clothing. The most refined partial pressure suits would enable the pilot to survive in a near vacuum for considerable periods – on the order of 1 hr – and this was tested many times in vacuum chambers with human subjects. When covered with a flight suit as was the common practice, it looked nothing like a space suit.
Here is test pilot Pete Everest wearing a David Clark T1 partial pressure suit in front the the experimental X-2, which reached a peak altitude of 126,000 ft (38 km). The suit was designed to protect him at that altitude: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-LVVJmnp/0/O/i-LVVJmnp.jpg
Here is a U-2 pilot wearing a similar MC-3 partial pressure suit, with a looser coverall on top. This was worn to keep the pressure suit capstans and laces from getting snagged on something. In our fictional scenario, he could have just as easily been wearing street clothes over this: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-Jx2RXns/0/O/i-Jx2RXns.jpg
Those partial pressure suits were primitive and bulky relative to more refined mechanical counter pressure suits which have been since studied. Here is NASA scientist Dava Newman in a prototype mechanical counter pressure suit. You could obviously wear other clothing over this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/cd/de/14/cdde140cf2779260cbad82a68e2f7c2d.jpg
In a science fiction scenario you have to assume there has been some progress in various fields (including material science and biology) otherwise how could the characters be there in the first place. It is not much of a stretch to accept characters wearing some kind of advanced mechanical counter pressure suit under other clothing.
There is a very detailed book on the history of various types of altitude suits called “Dressing for Altitude”, by Dennis R. Jenkins. It is available free at this NASA site: Dressing for Altitude, U.S. Aviation Pressure Suits-Wiley Post to Space Shuttle - NASA
The Guardians of the Galaxy is set in a fictional galactic milieu with arbitrarily advanced technology. They could all be wearing smart, active mechanical counterpressure suits, incorporating fibres that compress the chest whenever you need to breathe out, and maintain a constant pressure on the skin the rest of the time. Certain individuals would have this sort of system built into their bodies.
I would hope and expect that humans will develop this technology sometime in the next few hundred years; it would certainly make exploring Mars more comfortable.
I’m not suggesting that the human lungs are not capable of producing any pressure at all - I think we can blow about 2 PSI.