by Cody Cassidy
Air force officer John Stapp, already having almost suffocated himself testing oxygen systems and nearly skinning himself by flying without a canopy at 570 miles per hour, got the call.
The air force strapped Mr. Stapp into a specially designed rocket sled, accelerated the sled to Mach 0.9, and then watched what happened when it stopped in just 1.4 seconds, equating to 46.2 g’s.
For one very uncomfortable moment Stapp “weighed” more than 4,600 pounds. The blood vessels in his eyes burst, his ribs cracked, and he broke both wrists. But he survived, and proved that—properly restrained—you could withstand more than 40 g’s of deceleration.
One of the reasons John Stapp survived was his positioning, which takes us back to your free-falling elevator. Your best chance is to load your entire body evenly. Do not jump. It does not help. Even if you somehow, magically, jumped an instant before you hit, you would reduce your impact speed only by a mile or two per hour, and when you crashed, your organs would break from their arterial moorings and push their way down through your body.
You shouldn’t hang on the ceiling light fixture, in case you were thinking about that. You would be ripped off and then slammed into the floor just as hard as if you had jumped from the top floor. And as tempting as it might be, climbing onto the shoulders of the person next to you would not help either. It’s precarious, and he or she would just topple over at impact anyway.
Best practice? Lie on your back. It’s the best way to bring your body to a stop without causing an organ pileup.
Interestingly enough, when Mrs. Oliver was discovered inside her shattered elevator she was not lying flat on the ground, as we have recommended—she was sitting in the corner. Amazingly, she survived even though sitting isn’t the perfect position. She suffered broken ribs and a broken back, but had she been lying flat on the ground she probably would have been speared by debris that was at the bottom of the shaft and pierced the bottom of the car.
So don’t be misled. If your elevator cable breaks, your odds of surviving are pretty slim. Fortunately, the odds of it happening in the first place—less than one chance in a billion—are much slimmer.*
What Would Happen If . . .
You Barreled over Niagara Falls?
IN 1903, SIXTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD retired schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor was strapped for cash. Staring down a future in the poorhouse, she decided to be the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, thinking it would lead to fame and riches.* She constructed a barrel, pressurized it with a bicycle pump, and sent it over the falls with her cat inside as a test. The cat and barrel survived, so on her birthday she had herself towed out into the middle of the river and dropped off. A few minutes later her barrel was retrieved at the bottom, along with a relatively unscathed Ms. Taylor. In spite of her success, she is quoted as saying “I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces, than make another trip over the Falls.”
Despite this advice, Ms. Taylor’s survival inspired many copycats, many of whom were not as lucky. Barrels are the most popular craft, but other vessels have included a kayak, a Jet Ski, and even a giant rubber ball.
Let’s say you, like Ms. Taylor, chose a barrel as your craft, had a friend drop you into the middle of the Niagara, and allowed the current to drag you over the falls.
By the time you reached the bottom you would have fallen 180 feet and sped up to 70 miles per hour. Whether you survived would depend on what you hit.
If your barrel hit the rocks you would be in trouble. In NASA studies testing the human body’s durability, they concluded that an unrestrained fall of 22 feet—which means you would hit at 25 miles per hour—onto something solid and landing on your feet is usually survivable (this does not mean you wouldn’t suffer catastrophic injury—you probably would). A fall from 23 to 40 feet means your survival is questionable, and falling 40 feet (at 34 miles per hour) onto rocks is almost certain death.
Clearly, if you and your barrel hit rocks traveling at 70 miles per hour at the bottom of the 180-foot falls, you would die.
Landing in the water below the falls is far more preferable than landing on rocks, so your best chances are in the Horseshoe section of the falls, where you would fall into water. However, that doesn’t mean you would be safe, especially if it’s a pool of still water. Studies conducted by the U.S. Air Force show that if you hit still water at 70 miles per hour, your survival chances are just 25 percent, and that’s if you hit the water perfectly (feet first, knees a little bent, body leaning slightly back). Hit it in any other position and it’s near certain death.* That’s because if you did not hit perfectly you would do nearly all your slowing down in the first foot of water and the delicate bones of your rib cage would shatter under the intense g-load, firing pointy spears at your organs. Your skull would fracture as your head crushed into your spine. That goes for your other organs as well, which would carry their momentum toward your feet.*
There is some good news, though. The water below Niagara Falls isn’t still. It’s aerated, agitated, and churned up, which is good for high-speed landings. Air bubbles are less dense than water, so you would travel farther into the frothy water before stopping, decreasing the g’s you would experience. The aerated water below Niagara is what allows so many stuntmen to emerge with their organs still intact.
The bad news is also that the water is aerated and churned up, because that makes it less dense, which means you don’t float in it. This is probably why, no matter how unseaworthy barrels may seem, people going over the falls in sealed barrels actually do survive more frequently than those who go over in their swim trunks. Barrels float better than people.
If you survived the fall with barrel and body intact, the next issue you would face is how the water recirculates under the falls. Barrels are sometimes stuck for hours behind the curtain of water.
George L. Stathakis, another Niagara daredevil, who went over the falls in 1930, was stuck in his barrel for fourteen hours behind the curtain. Even if your barrel maintained its integrity, it would not have enough air for you to last that long. Sometime during his recycling under the falls, Stathakis suffocated.
The recycling currents under Niagara are the real killer. The aerated water usually saves daredevils from death on impact (though many break bones), but how it recycles you is random. If you were lucky the current would spit you out within seconds and you could go on a publicity tour to pay off the fine you would be assessed. If you were unlucky, like Stathakis, you would be pulled under, stuck behind the curtain, and buried alive in water.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Couldn’t Fall Asleep?
ON YOUR 10,000TH day alive, you will have spent 27 years, 4 months, and 25 days on this planet. Or, if you prefer, you will be 240,000 hours old. Of those hours, you will have spent 11,000 eating, an entire year in the bathroom, and another year with your eyes blinked closed. All of that is dwarfed, though, by one of your favorite activities—being unconscious. By the time you’re 10,000 days old, you will have spent 9 years asleep.
If you were given the chance to get all that time back, would you take it? Or, to put it another way, would you drink the ultimate energy drink, one that enables you to stay awake forever?
Think carefully before you answer. If you’re faced with a choice between going foodless or going sleepless, you should forgo the ham sandwiches. Going without sleep will kill you more quickly, and in much more distress, than skipping food.
The more interesting question is . . . why? Experts aren’t totally sure. Whatever is going on during sleep, it’s obviously important, not just because of the enormous amount of time devoted to it but because evolutionarily it doesn’t seem to make sense. For much of our history we shared a world with some very large predators. We occupied no more than a middle rung on the food chain. Lying down completely oblivious to an approaching saber-toothed tiger for hours at a time seems
hazardous. It’s hard to imagine, in an environment where only the fittest survived, that the fittest included animals that were sitting ducks for a third of their lives.
Clearly something important is going on here. Sleep is almost a universal need throughout the entire animal kingdom, whatever the risk. Mice will doze in an environment filled with cats. Even plants have a daily circadian rhythm that’s sleeplike.
Obviously sleep is an adaptation that goes far back in evolutionary time. Perhaps your distant relative—maybe some algae a few millennia ago—caught a few z’s that cleared its blue-green head and allowed it to perform a little better than its peers. The rest is evolutionary history.
Although we don’t know the name of that algae, we do know Randy Gardner’s, and Randy provides a more recent insight into the essential value of sleep.
In 1964, Randy Gardner, a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore from San Diego, California, performed the longest medically observed insomniac feat in history. Guinness no longer tracks records like Gardner’s (too dangerous), but in 1964, under official continuous observation, the sophomore didn’t sleep for 264.4 hours. That’s more than 11 days.
It was part of a high school science project—hopefully a large part—and it did not go smoothly. On the third day he mistook a street sign for a pedestrian, and by the fourth night he was convinced that he was a professional football player. According to his medical examiners, he took great offense at those questioning his skills.
On the sixth day he began to lose muscle control and short-term memory. When asked to count backward from one hundred by sevens he forgot what he was doing halfway through the task. On the last day, though, he was still able to beat one of his observers in pinball (one questions his opponent’s skill). Despite all that, after fourteen hours of sleep, Gardner made a full recovery.
While Randy Gardner didn’t take sleeplessness to his physical limit, unfortunately for a few rats, we think we know what happens when you do.
Researchers once forced a group of lab rats into insomnia by monitoring their brain waves and spinning a wheel under their feet when they began to drift off, forcing them to move. In other words, they could not sleep. Period.
After two weeks of this, the rats were dead. The researchers then repeated the experiment, only this time they tried to save the rats with something other than a nap. During the experiment, the rats’ body temperatures began to drop, so the experimenters raised the temperature of their environment. It didn’t help. They saw the rats’ immune systems weaken, so they fed them antibiotics. This didn’t do anything either. The rats lost weight, so they were given more food. They still died. The only thing the researchers could do to save the rats was very simple: Allow them to sleep. After that, their recovery was nearly always complete. In some badly understood way, insomnia was “poisoning” the rats and the only effective antidote was sleep.
In people we can see the effects of insomnia by measuring brain waves. When you’re tired, your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls memory and reasoning, goes into overdrive. It has to work harder to do the same amount of work it can do easily when you’re feeling fresh, like an old computer opening a large file. Your brain just doesn’t work well when it’s tired.
To this day the only 100 percent definitive reason scientists can offer for sleep’s necessity is, as Stanford University sleep researcher Dr. William Dement told National Geographic without trying to be funny, “we sleep because we get sleepy.”
But that may be changing. Recent research may shine a bit more light on the subject.
In observations of both mice and monkeys (though not yet humans), sleep looks like it might be a kind of brain dishwasher.
When you’re awake, your brain cells produce toxic waste proteins that hang around and impair brain function.* To clean these toxins out you have cerebrospinal fluid that washes through your brain cells and carries away the waste. Unfortunately, cerebrospinal fluid doesn’t flow when you’re awake. When you’re up and about, your brain cells are fatter so there’s not much room to move between them. That means the spinal fluid gets “stuck” in a cerebral-fluid traffic jam and the toxins stay in place and build up.
Once you fall asleep, your brain cells shrink and your spinal fluid kicks into gear like it’s midnight on the freeway. The fluid rushes through your brain and carries away the polluting toxins. When you wake your cells are fresh, clean, and ready to ponder life’s deepest meaning, or whether you’re going to have eggs or cereal.
If this theory is true, it explains why mental function falls so sharply when you’re tired, why sleeplessness will eventually kill you, and why rats stubbornly refuse to stay alive when subjected to forced insomnia. Just by being awake you’re dirtying your brain, and the brain, it appears, really, really hates being dirty. It desperately wants to sleep, as you might have experienced while trying to pull an unsuccessful all-nighter. It’s so desperate to sleep that while many people have died by refusing water, warmth, or food, no one in medical history has ever been able to deny sleep to the point of death.* The impulse appears to be ultimately irresistible.
It seems evolution gave you the ability to sleep and it made damn sure you were going to use it.
Nearly fifteen hundred people die every year in car accidents because a driver’s brain sent itself into an unconscious state despite knowing full well it was in charge of a one-ton object moving at sixty miles per hour. And that’s just the beginning. Train, plane, and industrial accidents all the way up to Chernobyl have been blamed on drowsiness. If you’re driving a train or car, drowsiness is a dangerous period that can lead to a microsleep, which is a short thirty-second or less period of unconsciousness. Microsleeps are impossible to resist, and falling in and out of them is so seamless you probably wouldn’t be aware it happened, unless of course you woke up in a ditch.
Sleep may be the only human need so strong that you could never die in want of it. It could be that the only way to truly test your brain’s ability to go without it is to hook yourself up to a larger version of the diabolical machine the unlucky rats died on. We don’t recommend it, but if you did, approximately two weeks after stepping onto this torture contraption, after hallucinating conversations, being unable to hold a thought for longer than a few minutes, and perhaps believing yourself to be a professional football player, you would die a filthy brain-cell death.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Struck by Lightning?
ON APRIL 2, 1978, a Vela spy satellite designed to spot the telltale double flash of a nuclear bomb picked up a hit. Somebody, it seemed, had dropped a nuclear bomb on the small mining community of Bell Island off the Newfoundland coast. That seemed unlikely to military analysts—Newfoundland was an unexpected place for the Cold War to turn hot—and, indeed, a few quick phone calls confirmed that the mining community was not a nuclear wasteland.
So what had happened?
The Vela satellites ignored lightning because the flash from a nuclear bomb is far brighter. What the Velas didn’t account for were superbolts—the rare lightning strikes so powerful they mimic nuclear blasts. The Bell Island strike was a superbolt. Heard more than 30 miles away, it left a 3-foot crater, damaged houses, and exploded TV sets.
What is a superbolt? Normal lightning strikes from the bottom of a cloud, just 3,000 feet above the ground. A one-in-a-million superbolt strikes from the top—30,000 feet above Earth—and because it requires far more voltage to travel the greater distance, a superbolt is more than 100 times as powerful as regular lightning.*
Superbolts are extremely rare and most occur over water, so only a few firsthand accounts exist: On April 2, 1959, a strike in Leland, Illinois, left a 12-foot hole in a cornfield, and in 1838 a superbolt struck the 800-pound mast of the HMS Rodney and “instantly converted it to shavings,” according to Frank Lane in The Elements Rage.
So what would happen if you were really,
really unlucky and stood underneath a particularly ominous-looking thundercloud that started generating electricity at its top, 30,000 feet above the ground? Would you be converted to shavings?
Probably. But the exact answer depends on exactly how the bolt strikes you and how much energy it delivers. Even a normal bolt of lightning could turn you into the mast of the HMS Rodney if the entire arm-wide bolt passed through you. They usually don’t, though, even in direct hits, because lightning ordinarily strikes victims with only a portion of its force. Some people have even survived direct strikes when the bolt “encased them” instead of passing directly through their bodies.
Becoming encased in lightning sounds like a fatal experience, but if you’re going to be hit, it’s your best chance at survival—and it helps if you’re wet. Electricity always travels along the path of least resistance, so if the bolt hits you and you’re really wet, that path might be along the outside of your skin and not through you. The strike will also charge the air immediately around you, and for an instant can turn that air into an easier path than the one through your gut.* This is called the flashover phenomenon, and some people who have been struck and knocked unconscious woke up naked after the water on their skin was instantly vaporized and blew the clothing off their bodies.
One of the biggest differences between a lightning strike and a typical household electrocution is how quickly the lightning passes through you—typically between eight to ten microseconds. In regular, run-of-the-mill, fork-in-a-socket electrocutions, the timing of the electrocution and your heartbeat isn’t as critical because the electric flow lasts a long time. In lightning strikes, exactly when the lightning passes through your heart can save you or kill you. If you’re unlucky, it would hit your heart a moment before it contracts. If the current passes through your heart during this instant—which lasts only one tenth of a second—it would likely send your heart into fibrillation, which, without a defibrillator, is certain death.