The communications officer, Harvey, died when he missed the airlock and floated into space. The movie shows him freezing to death. Wouldn’t his lungs have imploded (or exploded) first, because he was in a vacuum? Would his body really have frozen that quickly in space?
22KE
I seem to recall in high school we were told the blood would briefly boil before freezing due to the vacuum, but that was high school. I’m sure the connection with reality is partial at best.
To answer the second point first - no, you would not freeze, nor “boil” due to heat. A vacuum is not cold, nor is it hot. To be cold, you have to have some conductive matter - usually air or water - to take heat energy away from your atoms. No matter, no heat loss, no “cold”. Think of a vacuum thermos - your soup stays hot because there’s very little connection to conductive matter, not because the thermos itself is heated. Your body heat will actually stay higher longer post-mortem in a vacuum than in atmosphere.
The first question is, to biology geeks like me, really interesting. Yes, the gas in your lungs will expand rapidly, but they don’t “explode”. Rather, they bubble and swell. If you breathe out sharply upon decompression (say, by screaming in panic!), you can alleviate much of that problem. But without positive air pressure, oxygen is pushed out of cells, instead of into them, which causes “the bends”. This is made worse when the lack of air pressure causes the water in your tissues (lungs, but also muscles and eyeballs and everything else) to turn to water vapor, causing more swelling. Your capillaries will also break from the pressure of expanding gasses and evaporating water, so you’ll turn into a blue bloated bruised body. After about a minute, you’ll be blind from the lack of oxygen, but that’s okay, because you’ll be unconscious anyway. But your brain will still be functioning for another 30 seconds or so, and if you’re rescued, you’ll probably make a full recovery. After about 90 seconds from decompression, however, you’re toast. Not from explosion, but from hypoxia, or lack of oxygen. Death from hypoxia is much quicker in a vacuum because the lack of air pressure pushes out oxygen from your cells much more quickly than your cells use it up under normal earth conditions.
So I’m guessing that the scene where his frozen body shatters after it hits part of the space ship would not happen?
Nope. But I bet it looked cool!
There was a Straight Dope column on this very topic. Can’t dig it out for you right now. Maybe some other kind soul will.
Here’s the Straight Dope column. Basic gist: no exploding bodies.