And Then You're Dead

by Cody Cassidy

  But even if you were lucky and the lightning came a moment after contraction, you would still be in danger. A superbolt can scramble an entire town’s wiring, like it did to the houses on Bell Island. Imagine what it could do to yours. Your brain works on tenth-of-a-volt signals. A lightning strike can overstimulate your central nervous system, temporarily overwhelm your brain, send you into unconsciousness, and possibly scramble your brain stem, which is the area that reminds you to breathe. If it’s sufficiently scrambled, you would forget to do that.* This can happen even if you’re not directly hit.

  How can you avoid all this unpleasantness? Standing underneath a tree in a storm is a particularly bad idea.* Lightning can hit the tree, travel to the ground, and turn the area around it into a hot plate of electricity. That’s bad for you because you’re mostly just salty water, and since salt water has a lower resistance than the water on the ground you would become the path of least resistance.

  The bolt would travel up one leg and down the other, hijacking your electrical system and causing your leg muscles to fire, forcing you to leap into the air. The current would also puncture and destroy the walls of the cells it passed through in a process called electroporation that would create a highway of dead material perfect for the growth of infections. The upside? At least the current won’t pass through your brain stem, so you would have a shot at remembering to breathe.

  When the superbolt hit the mast of the HMS Rodney it flash-boiled every last bit of water in the mast, rapidly expanding the water molecules into gas and exploding the mast into the sea “as if the carpenters had swept their shavings overboard,” according to Lane.

  If you took a direct shot from a superbolt, most of the electricity would, in all likelihood, pass alongside you. However, superbolts are powerful enough that even if most of the bolt passed alongside you, there would still be plenty left over to stop your heart and scramble your brain. In other words, you would be dead—you just wouldn’t have exploded.

  But if you’re really unlucky—or let’s say you make the ill-advised decision to hold a metal rod high above you—and you take the full, dinner-plate-size bolt to the head, you would end up like the mast of the HMS Rodney. The electricity would travel down your juicy veins and organs, heat you with more energy than if you were standing on the surface of the sun, turn your water to steam, and explode you into tiny bits.*

  Vela satellites would pick up the strike, and perhaps a few scientists would fly in to make sure no one set off a nuclear bomb, but all they would discover would be a few broken TV sets, a couple of rattled neighbors, and one evenly distributed human.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Took a Bath in the World’s Coldest Tub?

  WE HAVE ALL accidentally run a bath that was too cold, but what if you really screwed up, things got way out of hand, and you took a bath in the world’s coldest tub? Maybe the plumber somehow made a mistake and switched the cold water with liquid helium, the world’s coldest liquid, and let’s say instead of dipping a toe in first you hopped right in.

  This actually almost happened to a few scientists. (Okay, not this exact scenario, but close.) Nine days after reopening the Large Hadron Collider—the giant particle accelerator in Switzerland—a solder joint failed and six tons of liquid helium spilled into the tunnel.* It was pure luck that no one happened to be there when it happened. If any scientists had been in the tunnel they would have been (spoiler alert) frozen like the bad guy in Terminator 2.

  Helium is the gas you’re probably familiar with from party balloons. It has to be 452 degrees below zero to be a liquid, which is just a few notches above absolute zero.

  If your tub were filled with liquid helium, some of it would warm up and convert to gas, and one pound of liquid helium produces one hundred cubic feet of gas. That’s going to displace quite a bit of oxygen.

  So once you hopped in, your shriek would probably come out as a squeak. That’s because the speed of sound is more than twice as fast in helium as in air, and the quality of your voice is determined by how sound reverberates in your mouth. In helium it bounces faster and your voice rises an octave.

  So you would sound funny.

  Of course, there’s also the cold problem, but for at least a few seconds after you jumped in you might be surprised by how little pain you felt. That’s because of something called the Leidenfrost effect. When you first hit the extremely cold liquid your warm skin would instantly convert the liquid helium it touched to a gas, which would insulate you from the extreme cold. The Leidenfrost effect is the same reason you can painlessly dip your hand into liquid helium, liquid nitrogen, or even molten lead if you’re fast enough.

  We’re not sure exactly how long the effect would last, but you could plan on at least a few relatively pain-free seconds.

  Eventually your skin would cool enough that it would stop boiling the liquid and the helium would hit your skin. This is when the pain would begin.

  You have two types of receptors primarily responsible for telling you you’re cold. One tells you you’re chilly—that one activates at temperatures down to 68 degrees—and another tells you you’re freezing, a signal that you interpret as pain. That freezing neuron begins firing when you touch something below 60 degrees. The colder it is, the more pain you feel.

  Needless to say, in liquid helium you would bypass the chilly neurons and go straight to extreme agony. But in addition to the pain, you would also be dealing with another issue: asphyxiation.

  All the helium gas you would be breathing not only would make your yelps sound funny, it also would be displacing oxygen. Helium isn’t poisonous, which is why you can inhale it from a balloon as a party trick. However, in this case, it would displace enough oxygen to turn deadly, and because your body can detect only a rising level of carbon dioxide in your blood and not a decreased level of oxygen, you wouldn’t realize there was a problem. As soon as you got in the tub, you would have only fifteen seconds of consciousness before you passed out.*

  Somewhere between your first high-pitched squeaks of pain and passing out from lack of oxygen, a window of probably ten or so seconds, you might notice something funny going on with the liquid.

  Liquid helium is known, of course, for being very, very cold, but it’s also one of a select group of liquids called superfluids because it seems to have a few superpowers.

  For one, it has so little friction that if you stirred up a tank of it and came back a million years later, bits of it would still be swirling.* It can also climb walls. It is so light, and so frictionless, that if you poured it into a glass, it would crawl its way up the lip of the glass and drip onto your hand, which means that if the tub was filled to chest level, the liquid would climb all the way to your neck.

  Your neck is a bad place for supercold fluids. It doesn’t have much insulation and it’s carrying a lot of blood. Even if you didn’t pass out from lack of oxygen (say you brought a scuba tank with you), the liquid helium would freeze your blood to create ice dams within your neck. Your brain needs blood to work, and once your blood is blocked in your arteries, it wouldn’t be getting any, so it would fail.

  Even after you were dead, though, you would keep freezing. Soon you would be rock solid like the bad guy in Terminator 2—and, yes, if someone shot your frozen body with a bullet, some parts of you would shatter.

  You do have a few advantages over the Terminator when it comes to supercold liquids. Because metal is a fantastic conductor of heat, even though it was only the Terminator’s feet that were covered in the liquid (in his case, the slightly warmer liquid nitrogen), his entire body froze. Your flesh is a much better insulator, so if you just put your feet in the tub, your head would not turn to ice.

  However, you also have some disadvantages compared to the Terminator. Namely, once his body defrosts he’s good to go. You would not be.

  Eventually the helium would evaporate and you would thaw out, and
the thawing out is what would kill your cells. This, incidentally, is the problem (okay, one of the problems) that the brains in cryogenic labs face. If you were to freeze slowly, the water in your cells would grow spikes like a snowflake and these spikes would destroy your cells. If you were frozen quickly, however, in a tub of liquid helium or in a cryogenic lab, you would skip the spiky snowflake stage and your cells wouldn’t be permanently destroyed.

  Unfortunately for you, and for all the heads in the cryo lab, there is no way to quickly go from frozen to unfrozen, so in the transition back to room temperature, your cells would grow those spikes and die.

  Destroyed cells are dead cells, and dead cells can’t be revived once they’re gone—so, unlike the Terminator, you won’t be back.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Skydived from Outer Space?

  THE HIGHEST SKYDIVE in history was Alan Eustace’s jump from 29½ miles above New Mexico in October 2014. He fell at 822 miles per hour, breaking the speed of sound and setting off a sonic boom that could be heard from the ground. Alan, however, did not begin his jump from space—the somewhat arbitrarily designated line 62 miles above Earth*—for a few good reasons. But let’s say you didn’t listen to reason and decided to set a new record for the world’s highest skydive. And in the interest of making your record tough to beat, let’s say you used a diving board on the International Space Station (ISS) as your launching point, 249 miles above Earth.

  To get started, you would need a space suit and some oxygen to keep you alive for the moment (refer to p. 43 for what happens if you don’t have these things). Your first challenge upon leaving the space station would be getting to where you wanted to go. You would be falling toward Earth, just like the space station, but, also like the space station, you would be traveling sideways at 5 miles per second. In fact, you would be traveling so fast sideways that as you fell toward Earth you would miss it. This is called orbit. A little confusing, but think of it this way: Consider Earth had no mountains or air resistance and we fired you out of a cannon so that you skimmed over the planet 6 feet high going 5 miles per second. Gravity would pull you down those 6 feet, but in that time you would have traveled far enough that Earth, because it’s a sphere, had also fallen 6 feet.* The ISS is doing the same thing, just much higher.

  Once you left the diving board you would not need any help falling to Earth. Gravity would already be taking care of that. What you would need is help decelerating so that you would stop missing the planet as you fell. So let’s give you some rocket boosters to slow you down, like a Soyuz spacecraft does on its return to Earth.

  As your speed decreased, you would hit that arbitrary 62-mile marker above Earth. At this point you would be falling at a blistering Mach 25. The fastest manned aircraft was the experimental X-15—basically a rocket with a cockpit. It topped out at Mach 6.7, only it couldn’t maintain that speed for long because the plane started to melt.

  You would be going a few times faster. Mach 25 isn’t quite man’s all-time speed record—that’s the Mach 32 that the Apollo 10 module hit as it returned to Earth—but it’s darn close, and Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan were inside a vehicle with a heat shield when they did that. You wouldn’t be.

  That poses a few problems. Mach 25 is just over 19,000 miles per hour. While it’s fine up at space station altitude, where there’s hardly any atmosphere, as the air thickens up you begin to slow down.

  That slowing down process would be painful, because the air simply couldn’t get out of your way fast enough. This brings up a number of issues, but we’ll focus on the big three.

  The first issue is the g-forces problem. You would be slowing down so quickly, you would temporarily “weigh” 4,500 pounds. U.S. Air Force officer John Stapp proved you can withstand 46 g’s for a brief moment, but 30 g’s applied over many seconds—as you would experience—would be certain death. Your softer parts, like your airways and lungs, would be crushed under the g load.

  The second and simultaneous issue you would experience is the turbulence problem. At Mach 25 the wind is moving so fast it would spin you around and rip you apart. When a satellite is allowed to slow down and fall out of orbit it doesn’t fall in one piece; it falls in many pieces. And that’s a satellite, which is welded metal—its limbs are attached far more strongly than yours. Even rocks are ripped apart as they make their way to Earth.

  The third issue is the heat problem. All that air that couldn’t get out of your way fast enough would get compressed, and compressed air gets hot. The SR-71’s wings get to 600 degrees, and that’s only at Mach 3.

  At Mach 25 the air is hot enough to melt rock. To withstand this heat, space shuttles use tiles made of rock strands with a high melting point and such poor thermal conductivity they can be heated in a 2,200-degree oven and touched with bare hands.* Damage to the space shuttle Columbia’s heat shield allowed hot compressed air to enter the inside of the spacecraft, causing it to disintegrate during reentry.*

  You would not have the benefit of a heat shield, so you would bear the brunt of it. The heat would carbonize your flesh, at first cooking, then burning when there’s enough oxygen, and finally vaporizing you at more than 3,000 degrees.

  Vaporizing is another way of saying your molecules are broken apart into separate atoms so that you become a CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen) gas. But eventually even the atoms of this gas wouldn’t withstand the temperature.

  The heat would tear the electrons from your atoms, turning you into a falling, glowing plasma.*

  The good news is your last moments would be spectacular. From Earth you would appear as streaking flames across the sky, visible during the day and far brighter than any shooting star.

  Like a typical shooting star, no piece of you would make it to Earth, at least at first. Instead, you would waft about the atmosphere as separate bits of ionized plasma.

  Eventually, though, your lonely nuclei would pick up replacement electrons, become whole again, and sprinkle down to complete the highest skydive in history.

  Then, because you have so many atoms in your body, after they have time to coat the atmosphere at least one of them will be in every breath everyone ever takes. Forever.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Time Traveled?

  THROUGHOUT MOST OF its history Earth has been a very inhospitable place. Either too hot, too cold, or just right but filled with terrifying predators. But let’s imagine you had a time machine and wanted to see for yourself. Here’s what we think would happen to you if you traveled back to . . .

  4.6 billion years ago: Earth is just starting to form, but it isn’t there yet. You would step into a cloud of gas and dust collapsing together under its own gravity. There’s a lot of junk flinging about, some going slow enough to bounce off you and some rocks speeding by many times faster than a bullet. If you were hit by one of those it would pass clean through you. That’s unlikely, though. The real problem is that Earth is still a big, unorganized pile of space trash without a surface or an atmosphere, so you’re in a vacuum—expect to pass out in fifteen seconds and die of asphyxiation within a few minutes.

  Earth is under construction—check back later.

  4.5 billion years ago: Earth has a surface now! Unfortunately for you, that surface is made of lava, so before you have the chance to asphyxiate you would be burned alive. There aren’t any solid rocks yet; everything is still molten, and nothing has cooled off. Earth also has an atmosphere, but that atmosphere doesn’t have any oxygen. Not that you would have time to care about that because, again, you’re standing in lava. The air does have a lot of helium in it, though, so your final screams would come out as high-pitched squeaks.

  You have popped up right in the middle of the aptly named Hadean era. Better luck next time.

  4.4 billion years ago: This is a slightly better time to visit, as the surface of the planet has cooled by now.
The oldest rocks ever discovered come from this time period—so we know that at least there would be something to stand on.

  Unfortunately, Earth still doesn’t have an ozone layer to block the sun’s ultraviolet light, which means you would get enough ultraviolet radiation to give you a sunburn in fifteen seconds.

  And then there’s the oxygen problem. Namely, there isn’t any. So you would suffocate. We recommend holding your breath because: one, you might buy yourself another minute; and two, because the air is full of methane, sulfur dioxide, and ammonia—if you try to breathe your last memory will be the stench of rotten eggs.

  3.8 billion years ago: Now you can actually take a swim before you die!

  During the early years the solar system was a messy place with chunks of rock careening about. Earth was under constant bombardment. These meteoroids brought presents, though, in the form of new gases, and those combined with gases from the Earth’s crust created an atmosphere, then rain and oceans. By this point, Earth has even wicked itself clean of the smelly sulfur—so everything wouldn’t stink.

  Life has also begun, so at least you will not die alone. Cyanobacteria microbes now inhabit the Earth.

  There’s still no oxygen, though, so you would suffocate, or, if you were really unlucky, a meteor would crush you, fry you as it passed overhead, or drown you in the resulting tsunami.

  1.4 billion years ago: Something to breathe! Small organisms have been living in the oceans for more than a billion years, but recently a new guy showed up with a neat trick. This unnamed blue-green algae fed off the atmosphere’s abundant carbon dioxide, then released oxygen as a waste by-product. Armed with the new technique, called photosynthesis, the algae enjoyed huge success, and over the course of a few million years changed the composition of the entire atmosphere.