Exploding Heads!
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andreas-schmidt-pabst — 18 years ago(May 31, 2007 09:08 AM)
Ive read, if people are exposed to vacuum they would get quasily freeze dried, because their cell walls would breake and the water would leave the cells and the skin.
"Hooters, hooters, yum yum yum,
Hooters, hooters, on a girl thats dumb!"
The Bundy credo -
NukeyShay — 18 years ago(June 04, 2007 03:23 AM)
Cell walls are not that fragile.
For the lowdown, look to the experts on the subject:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html -
rooprect — 16 years ago(December 28, 2009 09:25 AM)
In reality, if the outside temperature is 175 below like one of the miners said, a body would crystallize into solid ice within a fraction of a secondas if they just got liquid oxygen poured on them. But to hell with science, man I really DIG exploding heads!!!
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Princerd — 16 years ago(February 02, 2010 06:14 PM)
Taken from a NASA web site
The Question
(Submitted June 03, 1997)
How would the unprotected human body react to the vacuum of outer space? Would it inflate to bursting? or would it not? or would just the interior gases hyperinflate? We are also relating this to short-term exposure only. This question primarily relates to the pressure differential problems. Temperature or radiation considerations would be interesting as well.
The question arose out of a discussion of the movie 2001. When Dave "blew" himself into the airlock from the pod without a helmet, should he have "blown up" or is there "no difference" as shown in the movie correct?
The Answer
From the now extinct page http://medlib/jsc.nasa.gov/intro/vacuum.html:
How long can a human live unprotected in space?
If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts and animal experiments confirm that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.
Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.
You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood. If your skin is exposed to direct sunlight without any protection from its intense ultraviolet radiation, you can get a very bad sunburn.
At NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in '65. He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil.
Aviation Week and Space Technology (02/13/95) printed a letter by Leonard Gordon which reported another vacuum-packed anecdote:
"The experiment of exposing an unpressurized hand to near vacuum for a significant time while the pilot went about his business occurred in real life on Aug. 16, 1960. Joe Kittinger, during his ascent to 102,800 ft (19.5 miles) in an open gondola, lost pressurization of his right hand. He decided to continue the mission, and the hand became painful and useless as you would expect. However, once back to lower altitudes following his record-breaking parachute jump, the hand returned to normal." -
sebaser — 12 years ago(August 22, 2013 01:20 PM)
if the outside temperature is 175 below like one of the miners said
Damn , kids those days dont learn beep in school.
There is no temperature in space, since there is no medium for the heat to travel in
Space is actually pretty warm, with all that cosmic radiation solar winds and your own body heat you will boil faster than you will start loosing your heat.
But yeah, every time a head exploded in this movie it made me cringe. So stupid. -
sebaser — 11 years ago(August 15, 2014 08:30 PM)
Both in a way, vacuum itself has no temperature so be being "neutral" it already feels like summer day. But still you will gain heat from other sources that are negligible on earth, like cosmic radiation or the mentioned solar winds when not protected properly.
So while vacuum might have no temperature, it will feel very warm, just because we are used to air stealing our heat on earth, and with the lack of that we will automatically think of it as being in a warm place. -
sebaser — 11 years ago(August 16, 2014 08:48 PM)
Electromagnetic radiation dosnt need medium thanks to its wave particle duality, that is it is at the same time both a wave and made up of particles called photons, and can be its own medium. Or its just one of the unexplained qualities of spacetime, this is quantum physics stuff so gotta ask a specialist on that.
Anyway, not all heat transfer consists of kinetic energy exchange between particles just most of it, at lest on earth where earth electromagnetic field protects us from most of suns and universes radiation. But in space without that protection its a different matter, depending on where you were you could ether fry or just slowly get cancer or die of radiation sickness. -
kurthowe — 9 years ago(October 30, 2016 01:29 AM)
Total Recall spoiler:
Only because Quaid thought it was that way. According to the director, the entire film after he visited Rekall was his own construct based on the secret agent ego trip they implanted. He ends up getting lobo'ed at the endjust as he was told would happen by the Rekall director who visits his "Ego Trip". So how things operate in reality are totally irrelevant.
Of course, the ending is purposely shot to leave things ambiguousbut that is the canon explanation in his commentary.