If I were in outer space, and my skin were exposed to the vacuum, what would it feel like? (Assuming I am around the area of Earth’s orbit…)
Extremely cold from the vacuum of space? Extremely hot from the radiation of the sun? Something else entirely? Nothing at all?
-Kris
Stick a plastic cup over your mouth so it forms a seal against your face and suck all the air out of the cup. You’ve just created a near vacuum over your lips! Now imagine that sensation over your entire body.
Somebody else will have to field the hot/cold issue.
If you’re in direct sunlight, expect to get really warm - nothing is shading you from solar radiation in space. On Earth, the atmosphere does a good job of keeping us from frying. No such pity in space. At least you’ll get a really good tan before you die.
If you’re in shadow, expect to get really cold. There’s nothing to help hold the heat in - you’ll just radiate your heat out and eventually, you’ll sink to whatever the surroundings are - in shadow, maybe under 10 degress Kelvin. Chilly.
The vacuum will cause your blood to boil - literally. Do you ever wonder about the high altitude directions in boxes of macaroni? At lower pressures, the boiling point gets lower and lower - in a vacuum, it’s really low. So low that your body temperature will do the job fairly quickly. I’d also expect the boiling blood to rupture various soft tissues in the body. Are you holding your breath? Then the alveoli in the lungs will most likely all burst.
All in all, not a pleasant way to go out - I’d stay in the ship if I were you.
If you’re in direct sunlight, expect to get really warm - nothing is shading you from solar radiation in space. On Earth, the atmosphere does a good job of keeping us from frying. No such pity in space. At least you’ll get a really good tan before you die.
If you’re in shadow, expect to get really cold. There’s nothing to help hold the heat in - you’ll just radiate your heat out and eventually, you’ll sink to whatever the surroundings are - in shadow, maybe under 10 degress Kelvin. Chilly.
The vacuum will cause your blood to boil - literally. Do you ever wonder about the high altitude directions in boxes of macaroni? At lower pressures, the boiling point gets lower and lower - in a vacuum, it’s really low. So low that your body temperature will do the job fairly quickly. I’d also expect the boiling blood to rupture various soft tissues in the body. Are you holding your breath? Then the alveoli in the lungs will most likely all burst.
All in all, not a pleasant way to go out - I’d stay in the ship if I were you.
I actually wrote about this for a newspaper. Try here, and scroll down to “Lost in Space”. It ain’t pretty.
Not true. With the cup there will be a pressure gradient between the low pressure part and any high pressure regions elsewhere. People can “feel suction”, since they’re really feeling the pressure gradient.
If you stepped out into a vacuum, you would not feel “suction” over your whole body, since there’s no pressure gradient like there would be when you’re “sucking” a cup onto your face.
Try putting a hot dog into a vacuum chamber for a brief time. The main thing that occurs is that the surface gets ice cold because of rapid evaporation. Stepping out into a vacuum is like pouring alcohol all over your skin: strong evaporative cooling. But it would be far worse than alcohol, and you’d probably get frostbite if you didn’t asphixiate so quickly. If you let a cup of water boil for a few minutes in a vacuum chamber, an ice cube will form.
Another reported effect: without ambient pressure to oppose them, intestinal gases will expand (15 pounds on a square inch of bubble surface is a lot of force!) Imagine having a tube shoved into your colon and then pumped at 15psi. Yow! If you were lucky you’d only f**t like mad rather than bloating up like a corpse inflated by decay gases. I seriously doubt whether you’d actually pop (unless perhaps you had eaten a whole lot of mexican food before hand!)
About boiling blood: if there are no seed bubbles, a fluid will superheat to an enormous degree before bubbles appear spontaneously. And when they do finally appear it’s rather explosive. Think of spagetti sauce in your microwave oven. Lacking seed bubbles, it doesn’t boil normally, instead it superheats and then sponteneously goes “boomf” all over the oven interior. Maybe you could survive for many minutes in a vacuum, but if someone shook you up, you’d foam all over (or perhaps detonate with one big “boomf.”)
Well, that’s why they started putting women on shuttle missions: to clean up the “boomf” messes.
All this ‘boiling blood’ talk bothers my frontal lobes, in order to boil the blood would have to be exposed to the vacuum and the walls of your arteries and veins are pretty tough. They’d have to let a vacuum in before anything would happen, and even then the blood would only boil enough to equalize the pressure. I guess if you had an IV with an open end it might happen but then you’d probably die of blood loss. The structure of your circulatory system doesn’t give in if you spend a few hours scuba diving at the bottom of a pool and suddenly come to the surface (a much greater pressure differential). In fact, the membranes protecting the surface of your body posses more than enough structural integrity to withstand one atmosphere of pressure.
If you’re worried about the difference of pressure, think about scuba divers who go through a difference of far more than 14 psi on an average trek (with no side effects if it’s not too deep).
As far as the suction example goes (sucking a glass over your mouth) that trauma is caused by the force of 1 atmosphere of pressure all over you body pushing in and causing that one small area to push out. If your skin can take that then it certainly won’t pop, especially with nothing else to push on it elsewhere (unless you stick your mouth over a hole in the hull of a spacecraft, then it might get red and irritated).
The only thing you have to worry about are gasses, which like to expand. Liquids don’t turn into gas (boil) at room temperature without a sufficient vacuum so all you really have to worry about is the liquids on you skin. The rest of your liquids are already protected by your tough skin. The surface liquids would evaporate and get cold very quickly, much like the alcohol analogy.
As far as the air in your lungs, that would be a problem, which is why scuba divers are taught to exhale as they ascend, same theory applies.
Exposed to unfiltered solar radiation, you would get a severe sunburn in a matter of a few seconds. That would not feel nice to begin with.
I imagine it would feel pretty hot for a few seconds until your nerves got damaged beyond their ability to transfer messages… I’m probably a bit off on this one here.
Secondly, all moisture would boil off of your skin due to the lack of air pressure. (lowering air pressure makes a liquid’s boiling point lower) Your body’s vascular system would do a good job of protecting your blood, so it would not boil.
After awhile, your cells would freeze, and the expanding ice crystals inside them would cause your cellular walls to rupture, making you pretty messy.
It would take hours or more for a human to freeze solid, since we have a great deal of heat energy stored inside of ourselves, and the only way to lose it in space is via radiation. Consider that in cold water, heat can be transferred directly to the water. But with nothing contacting you in space to make the heat transfer, radiation is the only way.
Question on spacesuit design: do you actually need air surrounding you at one atmosphere of pressure to keep your skin from freezing and various embolisms from forming, or could some really tight Spandex do the job equally well? Why no skin-tight space suits?
Doghouse, your Spandex idea has been considered in the past. The potential benefit of a skin-tight suit is vastly increased freedom of movement. The problem is that pressure needs to be applied over your entire body. This is tricky to do around places like your groin, in between your fingers etc, especialy when you are moving. These areas would be susceptible to haemorrhage.
Darn, I meant “especially”. I couldn’t even get my first post right.
What about a skin-tight space suit with some kind of liquid (oil?) as a filler for joints and hard-to-reach places?
Let me nitpick a nitpick:
Let vacuum in? it’s nothing, how can you let it in? (you let the fluid pressure out).
Also, why has nobody mentioned Cecil’s column here?