Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: it's Christian Seger. Do you remember that time in Battlestar
Speaker 1: Galactica when that one character was blown out an air
Speaker 1: lock into outer space without a suit? No, what about
Speaker 1: when it happened in two thousand one, or Guardians of
Speaker 1: the Galaxy or Sunshine. Yes, we all dream about traveling
Speaker 1: in space, but if movies are any indication, we spend
Speaker 1: almost as much time thinking about flying around up there
Speaker 1: without a suit on. So let's answer this question once
Speaker 1: and for all. What would space actually do to a
Speaker 1: human body. Well, here's the good news. You wouldn't die instantly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you might actually survive for a little bit out there.
Speaker 1: How do we know because somebody tested it out on dogs.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty five, researchers at Brooks Air Force Base
Speaker 1: in Texas exposed several dogs to a near vacuum. The
Speaker 1: dogs survived for up to nineties seconds, but if they
Speaker 1: went two minutes or more, they died when re pressurized.
Speaker 1: And if your first thought is they did this to dogs,
Speaker 1: look I'm right there with you. Researchers at NASA did
Speaker 1: the same to chimpanzees in the late nineteen sixties, finding
Speaker 1: that they could last up to three point five minutes.
Speaker 1: And then there's been a few accidents where people got
Speaker 1: d and then re pressurized, like a technician at Johnson
Speaker 1: Space Center who lost consciousness after twelve seconds. This was
Speaker 1: just before the moisture on his tongue began to boil.
Speaker 1: That's right, his tongue boiled sea. Without air pressure to
Speaker 1: keep your precious bodily fluids in their liquid state, they
Speaker 1: would rapidly lose heat energy before they froze and then
Speaker 1: evaporated totally. This isn't the worst thing the lack of
Speaker 1: pressure can do to you either. The gases inside you
Speaker 1: would expand, causing you to swell up like a balloon
Speaker 1: in a thank Giving Day parade. This includes air and
Speaker 1: gas bubbles formed from your boiling bodily fluids. That effect
Speaker 1: is called ebulism, which can block your bloodstream with those bubbles,
Speaker 1: and that would cause you to pass out in about
Speaker 1: fifteen seconds. From the lack of blood flowing into your brain,
Speaker 1: your skins blood vessels would burst. Your internal organs would
Speaker 1: also swell and likely tear, but you wouldn't explode like
Speaker 1: in total recall. You would just stretch painfully until you died.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, so far we've only been talking about
Speaker 1: the effects to a body in a vacuum. In actual space,
Speaker 1: there are even more hazards to deal with. Contrary to
Speaker 1: what some inferior intellects may say, it actually isn't very
Speaker 1: cold in space because there aren't enough gas particles to
Speaker 1: transfer heat. But depending on your location, you could either
Speaker 1: be exposed to a star's thermal radiation at around a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty degrees celsius, or your own body heat
Speaker 1: would radiate away in the shade at around negative one
Speaker 1: hundred degrees. Cosmic rays and solar wind would also cook
Speaker 1: you with high energy photons, destroying your DNA and possibly
Speaker 1: leading to cancer if you even survived, And while you're
Speaker 1: swelling and roasting, you might also be hit by micro meteoroids,
Speaker 1: which are those little particles of dust and rock that
Speaker 1: whipped through space at high speed. Finally, there's the obvious
Speaker 1: lack of oxygen. Normally, you could hold your breath for
Speaker 1: several minutes, but remember without pressure, that whole boiling effect
Speaker 1: would diffuse the oxygen from your blood, so again, after
Speaker 1: about fifteen seconds, you'd pass out, and don't try to
Speaker 1: hold your breath either, it would just expand with the
Speaker 1: other gases, rupturing your lungs. All in all, these things
Speaker 1: would probably kill you in less than a minute. Check
Speaker 1: out the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com.