by Cody Cassidy
According to the reliability theory, when you were born your body was absolutely littered with errors and failures in key components. Sorry, nothing personal, the same goes for everyone you know. It turns out that humans may be built like old French cars, riddled with faulty parts. Not only that, but the parts that do work break down all the time.
Fortunately, unlike a Renault Dauphine,* you have a lot of redundancy. Cells are small, and around 37 trillion of them have been stuffed into your body. It seems like nature knew it had unreliable parts but, unlike the Renault manufacturer, cost was no concern, so it built as many backups as it could. However, over time, as more and more of these cellular backups break down, you “age” until you’re all out of spare parts, at which point you die.*
Of course there are ways to accelerate or decelerate this process.
Once you hit age twenty-five, you have roughly 1 million half hours left to live, give or take. Therefore, every half hour after your twenty-fifth birthday counts as one microlife. Using this as a baseline, Cambridge statisticians David Spiegelhalter and Alejandro Leiva created a way to measure the cost or benefits of different lifestyles.* For example, smoking two cigarettes costs you one microlife, i.e., your expected life-span is a half hour shorter after smoking those cigarettes. Smoke two more? That will cost you another microlife. Ten pounds overweight? That’s a microlife per day. More than one alcoholic drink per day costs you another microlife per drink. Living and breathing Mexico City’s air pollution costs you one half of a microlife every day.
That’s the bad news. The good news is you can also add microlives to your account with good behavior. Twenty minutes of exercise? Add two microlives. Eating your fruits and vegetables? Add four microlives per day. Drinking two to three cups of coffee adds another microlife. By simply staying alive you are gaining twelve microlives per day due to medical advances.
Eventually you will run out of cellular backups and your account of microlives will drop to zero, which explains why, at least according to the latest research done by The Onion, the world’s death rate is holding steady at 100 percent.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Stuck in . . . ?
CLAUSTROPHOBIA, THE FEAR of suffocation or being confined, is one of the world’s most common phobias. Studies suggest that at least 5 percent of the world’s population suffers severely from it, but in nearly every case the fear is unwarranted. It’s a gross overreaction of the body’s fight-or-flight response that usually does more harm than good.
However, there are some places where you should be concerned if you happen to find yourself stuck, where even the most claustrophobic brain may undersell the danger. Here’s what would happen if you were stuck in . . .
An Airplane Wheel Well
Since 1947, 105 people have stowed away in an airplane’s wheel well. In nearly every case it was a bad idea. But if you’re still on the fence about buying a seat, we’ll make a pros-and-cons list of stowing away in a wheel well for you.
Pros:
It’s cheap.
You can skip the Ambien. Once the plane reaches cruising altitude you will pass out from lack of oxygen and remain unconscious for the remainder of the flight.
Depending on the airliner you may actually have more leg room than in coach.
That’s about it for the pros.
Cons:
The odds aren’t in your favor. Of the 105 people that we know of who opted to fly wheel-well class, only a quarter survived, and most of the survivors were either young (with less body mass younger people cool down faster, and we’ll get to why that’s a good thing later) or on short flights that don’t fly as high (for which we would recommend a bus).
The cold problem. At 35,000 feet it’s 65 degrees below zero outside. You will have a bit of insulation once the wheel door closes, so the cold probably won’t kill you, but don’t be surprised if you lose a digit or two.
The exposure issue. There are no seat belts in wheel-well class, and the doors open for landing when you’re still at a few thousand feet. You would not be the first to fall. We would say hold on, but because of the lack of air you’re going to be unconscious.
The lack of oxygen. This is the real killer. At 35,000 feet the air is so thin the oxygen you breathe drops to 25 percent of what you’re used to. People get woozy at 50 percent, so unless you are acclimated you will pass out unexpectedly and die a few minutes later. Your best shot is to allow yourself to nearly freeze to death. Your brain needs far less oxygen when chilled, so wearing shorts and a T-shirt may actually be a better idea than a jacket. You will probably lose at least some of your fingers and toes to frostbite, but as long as you’re not dropped you may make it out of this.
Conclusion: The trip won’t cost you an arm and a leg, just some portion of your hands and feet. If you’re really lucky.
A Gas Station (Or: What Would Happen If You Lived on a Diet of Only Junk Food?)
Surviving a single gas station hot dog is a feat, so how long could you live on a diet of them?
Junk food, for all its faults, preserves quite well. Potato chips last a long time, and it’s unclear if a Twinkie will ever rot, so you would not starve, though if you ate junk food and soda for years you would probably develop diabetes. However, there’s a more short-term problem: Junk food has practically no vitamins or minerals, so while it makes for a good snack, it’s a poor meal.
If there were any fresh fruit in your gas station, it would expire within a few days. And without fruit you would get almost no vitamin C, which is one of the worst to skip if you’re going without vitamins.
In the early 1500s bigger boats and better maps made long sea voyages possible. Unfortunately, food preservation lagged behind—which meant no fresh food, no vitamin C, and the inevitable result: scurvy.
Magellan lost 80 percent of his sailors to scurvy on a voyage across the Pacific, and even by 1740, thirteen hundred sailors died of it in ten months aboard a ship captained by the explorer George Anson.*
A month after you started your diet of pure junk food in the gas station, you would show the first signs of scurvy (gum bleeding, fatigue, skin spots). After another month you would be unable to repair your capillaries and you would bleed to death.
Conclusion: If you’re ever stuck in a gas station, you had better hope it stocks multivitamins.
An Elevator
The record for the longest elevator ride may belong to Nicholas White, who, while working late one Friday evening in October 1999, took the elevator for a smoke break and didn’t get off it for forty-one hours. The technicians apparently didn’t check to see if anyone was inside before shutting it down. White spent a very boring weekend in the small box but was eventually discovered and rescued, and, according to Mr. White, in need of only a beer.
It was a good thing White wasn’t stuck much longer, because elevator trappings can be lethal. In 2016 in a busy Beijing apartment complex, an elevator malfunctioned between the tenth and eleventh floors and technicians cut its power without seeing if anyone was in it. Someone was. A month later her body was discovered.
The greatest danger when trapped in an elevator is lack of water. Elevators have good ventilation, so oxygen isn’t a problem, but dehydration is. Just sitting around sweating and breathing, you lose two cups of water per day—and then there’s the peeing.
Urine is 95 percent water, and after a few days stuck in an elevator, extreme thirst may make it look like a refreshing beverage, but your body is getting rid of the remaining 5 percent for a reason. It’s filled with enough potassium to send you into kidney failure if you drink too much. There’s also enough sodium in it to make it a poor choice for hydration.* The U.S. Army’s survival handbook advises against drinking it.
As you lose more and more water through sweating, peeing, and exhalation, your blood becomes thicker and thicker, oozing through your veins until your heart can no lo
nger pump; meanwhile, your kidneys are being poisoned from blood that’s too concentrated.
Conclusion: If you get stuck in an elevator, you have about two weeks before you die of kidney failure—and pass on the pee while you’re in there.
A Walk-in Freezer
Modern walk-in freezers are required to open from the inside, so you cannot be locked in. But what if you got stuck in an old one wearing shorts and a T-shirt?
In the 10-degrees-below-zero temperature of a meat locker, your body will reroute your blood to your core to keep your vital organs warm, which will leave your extremities out in the cold. That means frostbite, and in a meat freezer that would happen within thirty minutes. If you were able to stay alive, your fingers would eventually blacken, die, and require amputation. But you would be dead long before that became a concern.
In a meat locker your body temperature would fall a degree every thirty minutes, so after six hours your body temperature would fall to 86 degrees and your cells would stop working. Unfortunately, all you are is a bunch of cells.
Conclusion: You have only six hours before you join the meat section. According to FDA rules for similar meat (veal) you would stay fresh for four to six months before you would have to be thrown out.
Quicksand
In the enormous world of overstated Hollywood risks, dying a horrible death in quicksand might take the top spot—which, from the industry that gave us forty-foot sharks, killer computers, and alien parasites, is saying something.
Despite what you might have seen, there have been no confirmed deaths in quicksand ever. Zero. A few people might have been stuck in mud near the shore break and drowned in the incoming tide, but that’s it.
The reason for quicksand’s lack of lethality is that you float in it. It’s twice as dense as water, and you already float in water. If you stepped in quicksand you would sink only up to your belly button before you became neutrally buoyant. The only way you would ever be in trouble is if you went in headfirst. Avoid that and you should be fine.
Conclusion: Yes, you could conceivably die in a quicksand pit, but in all of human history you might be the first to do it.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Raised by Buzzards?
HÁKARL IS A gourmet treat and national dish in Iceland. It is also, according to chef and experienced eater Anthony Bourdain, “the single worst, most disgusting-tasting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.” That’s probably because the recipe involves allowing shark meat to rot for six months. That’s not done to improve its taste, but rather because the Greenland shark’s flesh is poisonous. If you eat it fresh, the effects from the toxins resemble extreme drunkenness. Rotting is the only cure and the final product reeks of ammonia. Apparently, it’s an acquired taste.
Hákarl is one of the few foods safer to eat rotten than fresh. Most go the other way. When an animal dies on the prairie, it loses its ability to fight off infection. That’s not critical to the animal, obviously—its fight is over—but it is a big deal to anything trying to eat that animal’s dead flesh. These infections produce some nasty toxins as by-products. The more recently an animal died, the fewer toxins it’s likely to have.
The ultimate expired-food eater is the turkey vulture, so, disregarding the difficulty of establishing an emotional connection, let’s look at what would happen if you were abandoned as a babe on the open prairie and adopted by a band of buzzards.
Food would definitely be an issue. You might have heard that playing in dirt strengthens your immune system. The turkey vulture is the ultimate example. They have been eating rotting carcasses and not washing their claws for millions of years, so they’ve built up a killer immune system. Because of that, their idea of a Thanksgiving feast looks quite a bit different from yours.
The first thing you might notice when joining your new adoptive family at the table: maggots.
Maggots grow from fly eggs and once they hatch they will begin competing with you to eat the rotting carcass. The good news is that maggots are a source of protein, and because they’re alive they’re actually safer to eat than the rotten food, so help yourself. Maggots also like to eat rotten flesh, which means the meat they leave behind will be a little fresher. So if you see them preferring one rotted carcass over another, hold your nose and dine with the maggots.*
Which brings up the second issue: smell.
Rotten food smells bad to humans for a reason. We have been naturally selected to find the smell revolting. We can detect the two chemicals that organisms produce when they die, putrescine and cadavarine, in minute amounts. Which is good—it’s an adaptation that kept our ancestors alive. But it’s amazing what you can get used to.
If you were raised by vultures, you would probably grow to love the scent of rotted meat. The smell of skunk is addictive to workers who handle it, and durian is a Southeast Asian fruit that smells like raw sewage—yet those who eat it regularly love it.
Smell plays a large role in taste, so we think that while the adjustment would be rough, in time you would grow to love your new rotten diet. Unfortunately, time is not something you’re going to have a lot of, because your stomach and immune system would not adjust as quickly as your nose.
Eating old dead animals exposes you to whatever pathogen is eating their flesh. You could wait to see if the meat kills one of your fellow buzzards, but that’s not reliable. Buzzards have a number of adaptations that allow them to eat meat that would kill you. Their stomach acid, for one, is a hundred times stronger than yours. With a pH between 0 and 1, it’s stronger than battery acid and can dissolve metal. On top of that, they have the strongest immune system of any vertebrate animal. They’re resistant to cholera, salmonella, and even anthrax—all lethal to humans. If you and your buzzard family dined on an animal infected with any of these, your family would be fine—but you would be dead.
However, if you were raised by buzzards, at least you would learn one good habit: A buzzard’s urine is so acidic it sterilizes everything.
So after eating a hearty meal of rotten meat you might as well do as the buzzards do to clean up: Pee on yourself.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Sacrificed into a Volcano?
THE VIRGIN SACRIFICED into a volcano is, in reality, almost entirely Hollywood fiction. The cultures accused of doing this didn’t have good volcanoes for sacrificing, and even if they did, hiking all the way up a volcano just to throw someone in is pretty impractical.
Still, let’s say they made an exception in your case. Let’s say you were pitched into a volcano. Your first question: Will you sink or float?
This may seem like a technicality, but it has some relevance to you. Not whether you would live, of course; unfortunately there’s no chance of that, but it would change your exact mode of death.
Lava is melted rock, so it’s two to three times denser than water, depending on its composition. It’s dense enough that if you stumbled upon a river of lava you could trudge across it if you ignored the heat issue—so, yes, you would float. At least initially.
But this actually presents a problem. Sinking is a good thing when jumping from tall places into a liquid.
If you were tossed from the rim of a decent-size volcano you would sink into the lava only a few inches. The heat would be the least of your concerns. It would be like jumping from a five-story building and expecting to survive because you aimed for a sand pit. The result? Not surviving.
So hopefully your volcano has a short drop. That would give you a few more moments. Of course, that would leave the matter of the heat.
Lava is between 1,300 and 2,200 degrees. It’s so hot you wouldn’t even cook or burn—you would flash boil, which means all your water would turn to steam. Since you’re mostly water, this is bad. Once your water converted to gas you would turn into a bubbly mess, and all that bubbling would churn and broil the lava into big lava fountains. These foun
tains can shoot up surprisingly high, five or six feet, and they would cover you in the stuff.
So eventually you would drop below the surface, but to be technical, it’s not because you were sinking.
It’s because you were being buried.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Just Stayed in Bed?
IF YOU’RE MIDDLE-AGED, you face a one-in-a-million chance of death just by getting out of bed and adding up the small risks you take every day by driving to work, cleaning out gutters, and walking over street grates. It’s enough danger to make you want to stay under the covers.
But if that’s your plan, think again. It turns out that staying in bed actually makes your chances of death skyrocket.
Inactivity in itself is bad for your health. In the United States it kills more people than smoking. Sitting on your butt watching a movie knocks a half hour off your life expectancy per feature, according to research by Cambridge professor David Spiegelhalter. If you did that all day every day, your life would speed by 25 percent faster than everyone else’s.
But you would be dead long before that if, petrified by the risks of daily life, you stayed in bed and never got up.
Strict bed rest is extremely dangerous. It’s akin to the effects of zero gravity, and part of the reason NASA has had astronauts stay in the space station for a year is to study what might happen on a trip to Mars (a seven-month one-way trip).
If you stayed in bed for seven months, like astronauts going to Mars, you would face a few issues.