And Then You're Dead

by Cody Cassidy

  At first the pulling would feel good, like a gentle tugging at the chiropractor. However, it would quickly get uncomfortable and you might begin to realize the trouble you were in.

  This “tidal force” on your body would eventually rip you apart as if you were tied to two trains moving in opposite directions.* First you would be pulled apart where you’re weakest, right near the belly button, where you have only a spinal cord and soft fleshy parts. There aren’t any vital organs in your lower half and bleeding to death takes a while, so you would still be alive. For the moment. But the tidal forces increase as you continue toward the center, so you would rip again. And then again and again. Your body would continue to split until you were nothing but a head speeding toward the singularity. And then that would be ripped apart too.

  This dicing would all happen very, very quickly. Someone would need to film you in slow motion to see what actually happened. To the naked eye you would just be gone.

  But it gets worse. The black hole’s gravity not only pulls your body but also constricts it, squeezing you like the ultimate corset. Eventually the gravitational forces would become stronger than the chemical bonds in your body, so the gravity wouldn’t just split your body into pieces but your molecules as well—stringing them out until you were nothing but a parade of atoms speeding toward the singularity.

  Black holes do not allow light to escape, so there’s no way to know what the hypothetical singularity looks like, or what you would look like inside. However, wherever you are in the black hole and in whatever form, we know it is not your final resting place. A black hole gradually leaks out Hawking radiation until it evaporates entirely. So at some point many tens of billions of years later your remains would reappear outside the event horizon in the form of a few radiated photons.*

  But let’s go back and allow you to change your mind. Let’s say instead of jumping into a small black hole, you leapt into a supermassive one. Your death would still be a certainty, sadly, but it would also be a little more interesting.

  Since the gravity of these supergiant holes increases more slowly, you would actually make it beyond the event horizon alive. What happens after that is a profound mystery. Because light can’t escape from inside a black hole, it is impossible to know what happens inside. We cannot look in because light doesn’t bounce back, and any probes that crossed the event horizon would vanish. No signal would ever emerge.

  But we can still speculate. The manner of your death would likely be the same—stretched out and spaghettified by the tidal forces from a singularity at the center. But because you would still be alive inside the horizon, your final moments would be a little different. You could look out at your friends on their ship, only your vision would not be perfect. Everything would appear distorted, because not only would you be bent and squeezed into a black hole but light would be too. So looking out at the galaxy would be like peering at the stars out of a porthole, or looking up at the world from under water—the stars and planets would all be compacted into your tunnel vision.

  And then you’re (spaghettified and compacted into subatomic particles) dead.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Were on the Titanic and Didn’t Make It into a Lifeboat?

  LET’S SAY YOU were one of the lucky 2,228 people to earn passage on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic in 1912. You gladly paid the three hundred dollars (what it would be worth today) for your third-class ticket and the privilege to ride two floors below Europe’s elite to America.

  As you may have heard, this trip ended poorly.

  Once the boat hit the iceberg, passengers had just over two hours to find lifeboats, of which there weren’t enough. In third class, fewer than half of the women survived and just 16 percent of men made it out alive.* In third class, you probably wouldn’t have made it onto a lifeboat, and instead would have fallen into the North Atlantic Ocean. What would happen next?

  The ocean’s salt allows the water temperature to drop below its freezing point. In the North Atlantic, where the Titanic went down, the water was 28 degrees, and because water is already extremely efficient at lowering your body temperature by virtue of being so dense, you would be in one of the world’s most dangerous places to go for a swim. You would be rubbing up against molecules packed 800 times denser than they were just a few minutes ago on the Titanic’s deck, which means you would cool down 25 times faster in 28-degree water than in 28-degree air.

  Your first reaction to that rapid cooling when you hit the water would be a gasp. If your head was under water you would risk taking water into your lungs, which is dangerous regardless of its temperature, so you would need to keep your head above the surface for the first part of this (and really for all the parts if you could help it).

  Your second sensation, other than a chill, would probably be a headache. One of life’s early lessons comes in the form of a headache. When you drank your first milk shake, you probably did it too quickly and froze your brain. Or at least that’s what it felt like. What you really did was freeze a nerve that runs along the roof of your mouth. When that happened, your brain reacted—or actually overreacted. It thought your whole head was freezing, so it diverted extra-warm blood to itself, which caused it to swell and created a size problem: too much brain and not enough skull. The result was an ice-cream headache.

  That same thing would happen when you first hit the water (although in this case your brain wouldn’t be fooled into thinking it was freezing; it would actually be freezing). Your brain would receive a rush of warm blood, swell up, and give you a blistering headache. Then you would spend the next thirty seconds in cold-water shock and start hyperventilating.

  Prolonged hyperventilation gets rid of too much CO2 from your blood, dropping its acidity. If your blood’s acidity dropped too low you would faint, and losing consciousness while swimming is a bad thing.

  If you could manage to stay conscious, the next thing you would undergo is an attack of muscle spasms—called shivering. Shivering is your body’s attempt to warm itself up by engaging its muscles. Basically, if you’re not going to do jumping jacks, your body will do them for you. Unfortunately, shivering makes muscles bad at what they do—coordinated motion. That’s fine if you’re waiting for the heat to come on in your house, but in freezing-cold water you need your muscles to get you out of the pickle you’re in, which you can’t easily do when they’re twitching and shaking uncontrollably.

  Both the shock and the shivering are parts of an overreaction, a misfiring of your body’s fight-or-flight response, which has evolved to keep you alive. Repressing them is possible with training, but even if you have trained yourself to suppress your body’s overreactions, there are a few physiological changes you can’t avoid.

  For one, your arteries would shrink so much your heart would have to go into overdrive in order to force blood through them. Meanwhile, your brain would be reassessing priorities and diverting warm blood away from your limbs and to your critical organs.

  Your extremities would go numb because the chemistry of your muscles and nerve fibers works best at body temperature. As your nerves cool, your muscles would lose their strength and your limbs would lose feeling. Basically, your toes would freeze because your brain was throwing them under the bus.

  The numbness in your hands and feet would creep higher, so that after 15 minutes at subzero temperatures, your arms and legs would lose feeling. This is bad for swimming. Most people who die in cold water don’t technically die of hypothermia. They drown. Which is exactly what you would do at this point without a life jacket.

  The good news is, if you have some flotation, you can survive a surprisingly long time. Even in freezing water.

  That’s because not only is your flesh a good insulator, you’re also really good at generating heat. Right now you’re using that heater to keep your core body temperature at 98.6 degrees. Once you hit the ice water that number would start to dr
op, but a bit slower than you might think. You would have between 30 and 60 minutes (depending on how much insulation you have) before your temperature dropped to 90 degrees. At this point you would fall unconscious. This isn’t great when it comes to swimming, but assuming you have some flotation and your head is above water, you would still be alive.

  Sometime 30 minutes after falling in, you would progress beyond moderate hypothermia. Stay in much longer and things get dangerous. After 45 to 90 minutes your body would reach 77 degrees and you would go into cardiac arrest. Normally that means you would likely die. But in this case, you may still have a chance. Your heart is a little like your car’s dead battery—it can be jump-started. The part you really have to worry about is your brain—once it doesn’t have any electrical signals it’s gone for good, and for reasons that aren’t well understood, your brain cells don’t need as much oxygen when they’re chilled.

  Whenever people go in for risky heart surgery, as a safety measure the doctors first cool them down. If something goes wrong and the patient’s brain stops getting oxygen, the cooling gives the doctors a little buffer time to fix the problem. With a low body temperature your brain can go as long as 20 minutes without air before it starts dying. Under normal conditions you have only 4 minutes.

  The record holder for returning to life from the frozen dead might be Anna Bagenholm, a Swedish skier who fell through thin ice and became trapped. Anna found a pocket of air, but after 40 minutes in the water she went into cardiac arrest. By the time she was rescued—another 40 minutes after her heart had stopped—her body temperature was 57 degrees. Despite all that, after 9 hours of resuscitation she made a full recovery.

  So the cold kills you at first, but in the end it could be what saves your life, and it’s why doctors say you’re never dead until you’re warm and dead.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Were Killed by This Book?

  SITTING THERE READING this book you might not think you are holding a lethal weapon. You probably think you have never seen a less lethal object in your life, but that’s where you’re wrong. If you were to properly employ this book’s kinetic, chemical, or nuclear energy it could destroy you, the bookstore, or your entire city. How do you turn this book into an instrument of gruesome lethality? Let’s start with And Then You’re Dead’s kinetic energy.

  Dropping this book won’t make it lethal. Even if you were reading this on top of the Empire State Building, it wouldn’t build up enough speed to do any damage.* Its terminal velocity is only 25 miles per hour—slower than you could throw it. And we’ll stop you right there. Throwing it won’t do the trick either. A 50-miles-per-hour book might hurt but is definitely not lethal.

  But what if you launched it from a book cannon?

  At 100 miles per hour this book would hit you with roughly the same force as a baseball, which would hurt but most likely not kill you (though a 100-miles-per-hour baseball has killed before). So let’s take it up a notch.

  A copy of And Then You’re Dead (ATYD) hitting you at the speed of sound would penetrate your skin and knock you down. You would probably survive if it hit you in the arm or leg, but if it hit you in the chest the shock wave could disrupt your heartbeat and kill you.

  If we sped the book up to Mach 10, it would hit you with 5,000 times the energy of a 100-miles-per-hour copy. The book would compress and heat the air in front of it so that it would fly toward you as a 3,000-degree incandescent ball. Unfortunately for you, it would not burn up entirely. It would if you just left it there—it’s certainly hot enough—but it isn’t just lying there. It’s traveling toward you at 10 times the speed of sound, so it doesn’t have time to burn up. Instead, it would embed itself in your chest as a 3,000-degree paper cannonball.

  But let’s fire it faster. Mach 200 is the fastest a man-made object has ever traveled. To get the book up to this speed you would need to build a giant potato cannon with a nuclear bomb functioning as the hair spray.* At this speed the book is a flying plasma sphere coming toward you at more than 150,000 miles per hour. It would take 1 minute and 12 seconds to travel from New York to San Francisco. If it hit you, you would be blown apart in a big mess of body parts and pages.

  That’s using this book’s kinetic energy, but to do even more damage you should take advantage of its chemical properties.

  Putting a match to this book will barely warm your hands. But that’s not making the best use of its potential chemical energy. The best thing to do is the same thing scientists do when testing the number of calories in a candy bar: Explode it.

  The way scientists test the calorie content of food is to dehydrate it, grind it up, and place it in a pure-oxygen-filled steel container, then spark it. The power of the explosion (equal to approximately one stick of dynamite, in the case of the candy bar) is the measure of the food’s calories.

  A copy of ATYD contains 1,600 calories,* or nearly a full day’s worth of food if you were like a termite and could digest paper’s cellulose. If you ground this book up, put it in a steel container with pure oxygen, and sparked it, it would explode with the same power as five sticks of dynamite.* If you were reading it at the time, that would certainly kill you. But we’re still not getting the largest possible explosion out of this book.

  If you’re looking for a bigger boom, you will need to release ATYD’s nuclear energy.

  All mass has energy: This book. Your coffee mug. The chair you’re sitting in. Everything. And when you convert mass to energy, you get big numbers very quickly. The atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki converted a single gram of mass (equivalent to less than half a page of this book) into energy. The trick is making the conversion happen. Fortunately, it’s not easy to do. The Nagasaki bomb used plutonium because plutonium is unstable and easily converts to energy. Books like ATYD are far more stable.

  So it’s difficult to convert this book’s mass into energy—but it is not impossible. The best way to accomplish it is to create a book of antimatter and combine it with your copy.* Then back away. Quickly.

  Release this book’s nuclear energy and it would explode with the power of the largest hydrogen bomb the United States has ever detonated. You would get so hot, each of your atoms would break off, then your atoms’ electrons would be ripped off, and you would be scattered about the atmosphere as ionized plasma.

  Creating that much antimatter is beyond our capabilities right now—the most antimatter we have ever made is 17 nanograms (17 billionths of 1 gram) of antiprotons, and that took many years, so an exploding book is a problem for future generations. But there are more realistic ways you could turn this book into a lethal weapon—like turning a page too quickly.

  A single paper cut could kill you. It has happened before. In 2008, an English engineer sliced a quarter-inch paper cut on his arm just before leaving on a trip to France. He soon developed flulike symptoms, became weakened with fatigue, and grew delirious. He died in the hospital six days later from necrotizing fasciitis, a rare but nasty bug that infects through even the smallest wounds and cuts.

  It is a hypochondriac’s worst nightmare.

  Unbeknownst to you as you read this page, the necrotizing fasciitis bacteria could be living on your skin. If you’re hasty in turning the page and the paper slices your finger, the erstwhile harmless bacteria could gain entry.

  Part of necrotizing fasciitis’s charm is that it lives within dead tissue that neither antibiotics nor white blood cells can access, and as the bacteria grows, it belches out a mix of exotoxins that kill your cells before your immune system can mount a defense. Without early intervention, you will progress beyond physical pain into severe sepsis.

  Sepsis is your body killing itself in an effort to stop the invader. Your body reroutes so much blood that your heart won’t be able to send any to your brain. At first you will feel faint and confused as your brain sputters along on the bare minimum. As your blood pressure continues to drop it
leads to multiple organ failure, most critically your heart. Once that fails your brain stops receiving oxygen and you die within a few minutes.

  Without medical attention, the death rate for necrotizing fasciitis is 100 percent. Even with early medical care 70 percent die, making it more deadly than the Ebola virus.

  Be careful as you turn this page.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Died from “Old Age”?

  THE MOMENT YOU were born, the odds of your death skyrocketed, and your very first day was one of your most perilous. (It looks like you made it. Congratulations!) Even if you were born on time and without any congenital abnormalities, you had a 0.04 out of 1,000 chance of death, the same odds of dying in one day as a ninety-two-year-old has. As you grow older your immune system strengthens and your chances of dying decrease every day.

  Your twenty-fifth birthday should be a celebration, not only because you’re allowed to rent a car but also because it’s the healthiest day you will ever have. You have overcome childhood diseases and your adult life begins. From here, it’s all downhill.

  Every day you get older, the odds of your death increase at a very predictable rate.

  In 1825, working as an actuary for an insurance company he helped found, Benjamin Gompertz published his law of mortality—every eight years after your twenty-fifth birthday your chances of death double. He discovered that humans, just like fruit flies, mice, and most other complex biological organisms, die off at an exponential rate.

  What we don’t know is why we die so predictably or even why we age. There are several theories but so far nothing has been proven. One possible answer is called the reliability theory.