Hollywood showing things instantly exploding or shattering the second they hit a vacuum does that to us, but the actual physics of space and the biology of cells are a lot tougher than the films make it seem.
Neither the human body nor the bacteria inside it would burst, and the cold space environment behaves much differently than some expect lol
The pressure difference between the inside of a human body and the vacuum of space is exactly 1 atmosphere (which is not that much in the grand scheme of things).
And bacteria are tiny tanks, because they are microscopical, the physical forces acting on them are minuscule. Scientists have tested exposing bacteria directly to the vacuum of space outside the ISS, and many species survived for years.
And about the cold, because space is a vacuum, counterintuitively, heat is actually hard to lose lol, it can only escape slowly through thermal radiation (there is no cold air to whip past and steal heat away), so they would still be gradually working for some time. And even when finally reaching extreme cold, we usually think of it as destructive, but for microbes it’s actually “preservative”. When Labs want to keep bacteria alive for decades without them changing or dying, they freeze them. So a lot of them wouldn’t even die, but stay “suspended”.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
The pressure isnt violently different (it’s only 1atm. Scuba divers can go up to 70atm with special breathing equipment). The issue is the boiling point of water is very low at that pressure, but on a cellular level the physics of that are going to be different.
Also space being “cold” is a bit of a misconception. Your body produces heat constantly, and it’s hard to dissipate heat in space, since you can basically only radiate it out as infrared light, which is a much slower process than being in physical contact with something.
In fact, we use vacuum chambers to insulate things such as in those metal thermoses that they tell you not to put in the dishwasher.
So being in space would actually be more like being wrapped in the thickest possible blanket than being cold.
yuri@pawb.social 3 days ago
i love hitting people with the heat dissipation fact. it’s measurably cold, but if you were out there with no protection you would get quite hot!
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
So if i just get brakes into space, and we ignore dying from oxygen deprivation, could I die of overheating?
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Let’s pretend your spherical cow had a blood oxygenating machine implanted where its lungs go because it’s just lungs.
CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world 3 days ago
How many minutes would Elon survive if strapped to the nose cone of a SpaceX rocket sitting in a ducktaped lawnchair wearing a Hawaiian Shirt and shorts and flipflops?
autriyo@feddit.org 3 days ago
5-10 idk how fast the rockets ascend, but I’d wager after that time he’d be doing pretty poorly…
Earths atmosphere is cold, and the rocket is probably too slow to get heated by friction significantly.
And Theres little oxygen up there.
StumblingWasabi@lemmy.today 3 days ago
That does make since, but would the lower boiling temperature of water not cool you down at least for a while? It takes energy for water to convert from liquid to gas, and I imagine in space that energy would come from you.
state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Can’t we use a spare billionaire or two to get some experimental data?