by Cody Cassidy
Lung tissue is relatively fragile, and extreme sound vibrations could cause a rapid overexpansion and destroy the small alveoli sacs that line your lungs. Alveoli are the key intermediary between your lungs and blood that allow the gas exchange to take place. Without your alveoli, you couldn’t oxygenate your blood and your lungs would be useless.
So if you were standing in front of a speaker listening to death metal and it was turned up to eleven—in this case, 190 decibels—the pressure wave would force your lungs to overexpand and perhaps break your alveoli sacs. You would suffocate while trying to breathe like a fish out of water.
Of course a true metal fan should travel to Venus. In our atmosphere 194 decibels is the upper limit for music, but on the surface of Venus, where the atmosphere is much denser, rock music can be ten thousand times more powerful. Listening to a guitar solo would be like standing near a bomb blast.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Stowed Away on the Next Moon Mission?
NASA IS PROBABLY not going to return to the moon in the near future. In preparation for a manned trip to Mars, the current plan is to land on an asteroid instead. If you want to go to the moon, your best bet is get a ride with the Chinese. But even if you do speak Mandarin, the competition for the job is intense. Let’s go out on a limb and say you won’t be accepted. But what if you’re determined? What if you refuse to take no for an answer, so you stow away on the spacecraft? And because space suits are expensive ($12 million) you just wear shorts and a T-shirt. Here’s what we think would happen.
At the count of w (five), which you wouldn’t hear over the radio like the real astronauts but could probably hear from the loudspeaker outside, the main engine would fire. At liftoff the spacecraft would accelerate over the next eight minutes to 25,000 miles per hour and you would endure 4 g’s of acceleration, about the same as the most intense roller coasters but over a much longer period. This is survivable, but without the G suits and padded seats that the astronauts are using you wouldn’t be comfortable and would probably pass out. The space suits are also helpful if there’s a breach in the spacecraft. Since you’re not wearing one, you would need to hope for smooth sailing.
You would also need to hope the space agency added some extra fuel for the trip, because with your extra two hundred pounds of body weight, the spacecraft’s trajectory would be incorrect and the engineers would have to fire maneuvering rockets to adjust your course.
But let’s say all goes well, and by the time you’re discovered it’s too late to do anything but take you along. How would you be feeling traveling in zero-g for three days toward the moon? Very, very sick.
Nausea is an unfortunate part of the initiation into life in zero-g. Space sickness is a supercharged version of motion sickness, which is itself the uncomfortable result of a “disagreement” between your eyes and your inner ear. Your brain interprets this disagreement as food poisoning and prescribes an antidote: vomit.
Exactly how sick you would become depends on the quality of the connection between your brain and inner ear. Nobody’s connection is flawless—if you are spun under water, your inner ear can’t tell which way is up—but the higher your fidelity, the stronger the disagreement, and the sicker you will get.
The current space-sick champion is former Utah senator Jake Garn, who used his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to earn himself a ride to space in 1985. The degree of Senator Garn’s nausea became so legendary that NASA named the space-sick scale in his honor. The Garn Scale goes from 0 to 1.
At 0 Garns you’re feeling fine, and your typical car-sickness nausea registers at only a tenth of a Garn. A full Garn means you’re totally sick and incapacitated.
Vomiting is not typically lethal on a windy car ride, but in space it’s dangerous. If you’re on a space walk with a helmet on you can drown in your own sick.* So in order to help with the problem, NASA trains astronauts in a specially outfitted aircraft, nicknamed the Vomit Comet, which carries passengers on enormous parabolic loop flights. At the beginning of each parabola (just as it starts to climb), the plane begins to freefall, and for roughly ninety seconds everybody inside falls with it—zero-g.
In your case, lacking any Vomit Comet training, your inner ear would be thrown for a major loop, and very quickly you would hit a full Garn—near incapacitating nausea.
The good news is that once you landed on the moon, its gravity would cure you of your space sickness. The bad news is that you still wouldn’t have a space suit.
The moon, just like space, is an airless vacuum, which is why your fellow astronauts will be wearing their expensive and cumbersome space suits when they step onto it. When you venture out onto the moon in your more comfortable outfit, you will die. But not instantly!
How do we know?
In 1966, a NASA technician proved it. While testing a space suit in a vacuum chamber, a faulty hose caused the suit to depressurize. He was in the vacuum unprotected for eighty-seven seconds before the chamber could be repressurized. For most of that time—all but the first ten seconds—he was unconscious. But fortunately, other than an earache from the rapid pressure changes he was unharmed. The lesson? In a vacuum a human body can survive for a minute—maybe even two—without protection but can only stay conscious for about 10 seconds.
What would you experience in that brief window of consciousness?
It depends on what side of the moon you are on. Are you on the sunny side, or the shady side? It makes a difference. Earth takes twenty-four hours to do a full rotation, but the moon takes an entire month, which means one side is allowed to bake in the sun for fifteen days and heats up to 253 degrees, while the shady side gets down to 243 degrees below zero. This temperature difference would matter when you first opened your door and stepped outside. What would you feel?
If the sun was down and it was 243 below, you would feel a chill but not freeze, because 243 degrees below zero in a vacuum is different from walking into a 243-degrees-below-zero freezer on Earth. Without any atmosphere, heat transfer happens slowly. If you landed on the shady side, the temperature change would feel roughly like stepping into a cool room naked. Then, because the boiling temperature of water is lower than your body temperature in a vacuum, you would feel a chill as your sweat instantly boiled off. But that’s the worst it would feel—just a chill.
If you landed on the sunny side of the moon, where it’s 253 degrees above zero, the vacuum would again save you from baking. But because of the radiating heat from the hot surface of the moon, you would feel just a bit warmer than on a summer day in Death Valley.
In addition to being a little warmer, there are a few other differences from the shady side. The moon surface is also 253 degrees, so without a boot on you would need to be careful where you stepped. Most of the surface is a fine powder, which isn’t very dense. It’s so light, in fact, that instead of the moon burning your foot, your foot would cool down the moon.* Step on a moon rock, though (they’re everywhere and denser than your foot), and your foot would sizzle.
Along with avoiding moon rocks, you would also need to take into consideration the sun—more specifically, its UV radiation.
The sun is firing X-rays, ultraviolet light, and high-energy particles of radiation at all of us all the time. Fortunately for everyone on Earth’s surface, the planet’s atmosphere, ozone layer, and magnetic field take care of most of that, and sunscreen or clothing blocks the rest.* Under these layers of protection, life can thrive. For anyone above the atmosphere, however, the situation is radically different.
On the moon you would not have the benefit of the atmosphere’s protection, so even if you carefully applied SPF 50 before stepping out, in a few seconds you would get enough radiation to give you a healthy tan. Within fifteen seconds you would absorb a dose that would eventually develop into a blistering third-degree sunburn.
Another consideration is breathing. If you took a deep bre
ath and held it before you left the lunar module, the air in your full lungs would instantly expand in the vacuum, ripping apart the delicate alveoli sacs. The best way to deal with this is prevention: Instead of filling your lungs or holding your breath as you exit the craft, you would need to keep your mouth open, letting the gas in your lungs rush out.
Your blood contains enough oxygen to give you ten to fifteen seconds of consciousness. After that you would pass out, and 1960s research into vacuum exposure with dogs shows that after two minutes you would be brain-dead.*
Once your heart stopped beating things would get gruesome.
We said earlier that the boiling temperature of water is below body temperature in a vacuum, so all your sweat would boil off (along with your tears and saliva, which makes a stinging sensation), and that’s true. But that’s the water on the outside of your body. The water inside you—namely, your blood—would take tens of seconds to start to boil.
You would be unconscious and soon dead—so this is more of a cosmetic issue than anything else—but as your blood boiled and turned into a gas, your skin would expand until stretched taut, fully inflating you into a human balloon.
Eventually all that gas would escape your body and you would deflate, but the process of ripping your skin from its anchors would probably result in at least a few new wrinkles.
There aren’t any bugs or bacteria living on the moon, just the ones living inside you, but they would be killed by the vacuum and wild temperature swings as well, so you would not rot or decompose.
Assuming your fellow astronauts didn’t want to haul you back, you would stay on the moon for many thousands of years as a well-preserved, desiccated, and wrinkly moon man.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Strapped into Dr. Frankenstein’s Machine?
A CLOSE EXAMINATION of the original Frankenstein texts doesn’t reveal exactly what voltage or current the doctor used for his machine, but it would have to have been substantial. In any event, let’s say you stepped in for the monster and strapped yourself to the table. Because you are, presumably, alive, not dead like Frankenstein’s monster preelectricity, the current would have a far different effect on you than it would on the monster (and in reality be far more effective at making you dead rather than the other way around).
The first thing Dr. Frankenstein would do is strap electrodes to your head and ankles to guide the electricity through your body. Then he would throw the switch and a number of things would happen very quickly—but before we get into the specifics of what they would be, let’s pause for a moment to talk about the electricity in your body right now.
A sharp electrical jolt is hitting your heart as you read these lines. At least you had better hope it is. If not, you are experiencing what doctors call being dead. Hopefully, if all is going well, your heart will be jolted eighty-five thousand times today, just like yesterday and, if you’re going to have a tomorrow, just like tomorrow too.
The timing and the amount of electricity hitting your heart is critical, and it’s easy to screw up. Your heart needs only a tenth of a volt to trigger its contraction, and a mistimed volt can mess up the beating of your heart and kill you.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is your skin makes for a decent electricity-resistant suit.
If you’re hopping onto Dr. Frankenstein’s table and you’re dry and wearing clothes, anything less than 100 volts would probably not make it to your heart.*
To guarantee the current’s access to your innards, Dr. Frankenstein would need to use at least 600 volts—powerful enough to force a dielectric breakdown or, more colloquially, blow a hole in your skin.
Next, your body would jump as the electricity mimicked the voltage your nerves use to fire your muscles.* This jolting phenomenon is the origin of the Frankenstein story after author Mary Shelley saw corpses jump in experiments, which apparently sparked an idea (“It’s ALIVE!!”).
Mild electrical stimulation is not necessarily bad. Electrical shocks that force muscles to contract over and over is called exercise—six-pack abs without effort!
You would have other issues beyond unwanted exercise, though. The current would not want to travel along your skin where the resistance is high, so it would worm its way into your brain through the low-resistance pathways of your nose, eyes, and mouth. Whatever the current touches it heats, which is not so bad on your skin—just a light scorching and smoldering. However, your brain is more sensitive.
Once the current gained access inside your skull it would heat and cook your brain’s proteins. After scorching the outside of your brain, the current would continue on its way toward the electric band on your ankles, which means it would pass and concentrate on your brain stem, where a number of vital functions are controlled, like breathing. Once the brain stem is fried, you would “forget” to breathe, no matter how hard you tried to remember.
Your brain can continue to function for a few seconds on oxygen reserve, but within fifteen seconds it would go unconscious, and after four to eight minutes you would experience complete brain death. If this were Mary Shelley’s story, brain death would of course be no problem. Dr. Frankenstein could just throw the switch again and you would be up and walking in no time. In reality, however, brain death is a more problematic condition. If your heart is fluttering it can be reorganized by a jolt of electricity, but trying to jump-start your brain is like trying to jump-start a computer.
Not to mention your brain has already been denatured, so if Dr. Frankenstein wants to reverse the process and bring you back to life, he will have to start by digging up a new brain.
What Would Happen If . . .
Your Elevator Cable Broke?
OVER THE 150 years of modern elevator history, on more than 800 billion rides, it’s likely a majority of the 1.3 trillion elevator passengers have at one time worried that the cable would accidentally break and they would die a horrible, flattened death.
And they have reason to.
Because it has happened.
Once.
In 1945, the pilot of a U.S. Air Force B-25 became lost in the fog and flew into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building, severing the hoist and safety cables of two elevators and sending both plummeting down the shafts. In those days, before elevators became automatic, they had operators—people who sat inside the elevators and guided passengers to their destinations.
One of the operators had stepped away on one of the best-timed smoke breaks in human history. The other, Mrs. Betty Lou Oliver, plunged seventy-five stories into the elevator pit below.
Elevators are the safest motorized transport you can use. They are not entirely without risk—on average, twenty-seven people die in elevator accidents in the United States every year, but nearly all of them are due to “operator error.” That would be you. (Safety tips: Don’t squeeze your way into closing elevator doors. Don’t try to climb out of a stuck elevator. And don’t ride on top of them.) In comparison, escalators are thirteen times more dangerous.
Part of the reason elevators are so safe is thanks to the safety brake, invented by Elisha Graves Otis in 1853. The safety brake is on the elevator car itself and allows an elevator to stop even if the cable is severed.
Elevators weren’t popular until Otis’s invention. Before then, nobody wanted to get into a box where their life hung by a single thread, even if it was a thick one. Otis changed that, and when he did, he changed everything.
Elevators might seem like no more than a handy-dandy modern convenience, but, in fact, the elevator is essential to urban living as we know it. Before elevators, buildings topped out at six stories—nobody was willing to carry up a bag of groceries any farther—and in pre-elevator buildings the penthouses were on the first floor. The fewer stairs you had to climb, the more you paid for your apartment.
Elevators allowed architects to build up, increasing the
number of people who could be jammed into a city block. Without elevators, our population would have oozed outward from city centers in a never-ending suburban sprawl.
Thanks to Mr. Otis, not every city looks like Los Angeles, but should the impossible happen, should Otis’s invention fail, and your elevator plummeted from the top of a skyscraper like Mrs. Oliver’s, you wouldn’t necessarily die. With a bit of luck, and because of a few freaks of physics, you could survive—just like she did.
The farthest you could possibly fall in an elevator these days is 1,700 feet. Elevators can’t go higher because their hoist cables become too heavy; it wasn’t until the invention of an elevator-transfer floor in the World Trade Center in 1973 that skyscrapers exceeded this elevator limit.
An elevator free-falling from 170 stories would hit the ground at 190 miles per hour—an almost certainly fatal speed. But if you’re lucky, your elevator fits snugly in its shaft. If that’s the case, the air below won’t be able to escape fast enough, creating a pillow of pressure like a soft airbag that could slow your descent.
That would help, but you would still need to do more to survive.
Gradually slowing your stop is the key to reducing the g-forces on your body. G-forces are a way to express the force of acceleration or deceleration on your body using Earth’s gravity as a unit of measure. Right now you’re experiencing 1 g. The most intense roller coasters peak around 5 g’s (which means you will “weigh” 5 times your weight). Trained fighter pilots can withstand 9 g’s and keep flying.
Around 50 g’s over a few seconds appears to be the survivable limit. How do we know? In 1954, the U.S. Air Force was designing fighter jet ejection seats and needed to know how fast they could get pilots out of their planes without killing them. Specifically, they needed to know how many g-forces the human body could withstand. So they built the world’s scariest carnival ride and asked for volunteers.