by Cody Cassidy
After just twenty-four hours without exercise, your muscles would begin to atrophy, starting with your calves and quads, which are the ones most accustomed to a daily workout. But not only do your muscles waste away without a workout, so do your bones.*
When you switch to a horizontal lifestyle, strange things start happening with your fluids. The liquid that sloshes around your cells is used to gravity pulling it down, and if you were to lie flat for too long, these extracellular liquids would start to creep upward into your face, crush your optic nerve, and mess with your balance and sense of smell.*
Your blood is also used to gravity and exercise. During their Mars study, NASA had patients wear compressive sleeves on their legs. Why? Your veins need help returning blood from your legs to your heart. Normal walking and flexing of your muscles are usually enough, but while lying immobile, blood can pool, coagulate, and clot within a vein.
This is bad.
The pressure of downstream blood will break the clot off. It should move fine through your larger arteries, but unfortunately your heart and brain have narrower valves and veins. The clot can get caught up in these choke points and form a dam.
If the blockage is in your heart it causes a heart attack, and if it’s in your brain it can cause a stroke, either of which could kill you within a few minutes.
But heart attacks and strokes only might kill you, and precautions like wearing compressive sleeves can be taken. However, if you stayed in bed for seven months and weren’t careful, bedsores would kill you.
Bedsores happen when the pressure between your bed and your bones kink your blood vessels shut, starving your skin of oxygen.
The pain would start off as a dull ache but within a few hours could progress into a painful sore. The more time you spend in bed, the worse they would get. Eventually the ulcers would progress from reddish sores to deep wounds surrounded by dead tissue.
This is when infection would become a real concern. Your skin is your primary defense against outside germs, and a continuously open wound provides a direct path for outside bacteria to enter your bloodstream and spread to your organs— sepsis.
Without immediate care—and sometimes even with it—sepsis will kill you. Your body’s response to an infection is overwhelming. Your blood pressure would drop to dangerous levels, your kidneys would fail, your breathing would quicken, and eventually you would lose the ability to swallow, leading to the gurgle and crackle sometimes called a death rattle. Eventually enough brain cells would die that you would lose consciousness and fall into a coma.
All this from just lying in bed. So if you’re trying to lower the daily one-in-a-million shot at death-by-accident, allow us to propose a few better ways.
First of all, get out of bed and move away from tornadoes. Kansas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky rank as the most dangerous states for natural disasters. You will also want to avoid the northern Midwest, like Minnesota and North Dakota (too much ice), and the South (too many hurricanes). The best state for avoiding natural disasters? Hawaii. But Hawaii has a lot of two-lane roads, so their driving safety ranking is middling. The safest roads, and the safest state to live in, period, is Massachusetts. Not too many natural disasters, safer cities, and the safest roads.
You should also avoid cars. Every 230 miles you drive is a one-in-a-million chance at death. Use trains instead—you can go 3,000 miles before you get to the same risk level.
You will want to be married. That adds ten years to life expectancy.
Nursing homes are the most dangerous places to work, just edging out firefighting. The safest job? Money manager.
So if the one-in-a-million chance of death each day seems high, don’t stay in bed; instead, get married, move to Boston, become an accountant, and take the train to work.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Dug a Hole to China and Jumped In?
AT SOME POINT in your life, probably early on, you might have attempted to dig a hole to China. You might have even made it part of the way, maybe three or four feet, depending on the type of sand at your beach.
But now you’re older and more persistent. So let’s say on your next trip to the ocean you succeed where you previously failed and dig a hole all the way through the planet, all 8,000 miles. And then you jump in.
What would happen?
First, it depends on where you began digging. Exactly where you start is important. The belief that China is on the other side of America is actually incorrect. In truth, if you started your hole anywhere in the continental United States you would end up drowning in the Indian Ocean. To start your hole in the United States and emerge on dry land you would need to begin on a beach in Hawaii, where, after digging, you would surface in a Botswana game preserve.
But starting in Hawaii has its own problems. The outside of our planet is spinning much faster than the inside of it—just like a merry-go-round. Standing on a Hawaiian beach, you would be traveling 800 miles per hour faster than the core. As a result, when you jumped into your hole, you would grind against the front edge of the wall on your way down and then against the back wall on your way up.
At slow speeds this grinding would leave no more than a light road rash, but at higher speeds a continuous road rash in free fall would sand down your skin and bones until you were nothing more than falling pulp.
The smartest way to avoid the sanded-to-death problem is to begin your dig at one of the poles, where the surface of the planet is spinning at the same speed as the core.
That’s step one, but death by road rash is not the only reason jumping into a hole through Earth is risky.
The terminal velocity of a falling human body in pike position at sea level is roughly 200 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 40 hours to fall 8,000 miles. In other words, depending on connections, you could book a flight to Botswana and beat yourself there the regular way. But let’s assume you’re not in a hurry and 40 hours is okay. You still would not make it all the way through.
Within a few seconds you would start slowing down, for two reasons.
First, as you came closer to the center of the planet there would be less Earth to pull you down, meaning you would actually start weighing less and falling more slowly. But the second, more dangerous, issue is the thickness of the air.
Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth at 29,000 feet. At that elevation there is less atmosphere above you compressing the air, and as a result the surface air is so thin, only the well trained can survive in it.
The opposite effect happens when you go in the opposite direction.
As more atmosphere is added above you, it compresses the air you’re falling into. After falling only 60 miles—less than 1 percent of the way—the air would be as dense as water. For a while you would sink, but eventually you would reach a point of equilibrium where the air would be as dense as you were. So there you would stay, “floating” inside Earth for all eternity.*
Obviously, we need to make a design change to your sand pit. The solution to the air density problem is to suck all the air out of your tunnel, seal it off, and make it a long vacuum tube. That solves both the floating problem and the slow travel time, because now you would be screaming past the center of Earth at 18,000 miles per hour instead of getting stuck only partway.
Unfortunately, your tunnel still wouldn’t be safe to use, because as the Russians proved when they dug the world’s greatest sand hole, the inside of Earth has a heat problem.
The Russian sand pit is called the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It’s the result of a massive twenty-two-year project that began in 1970 for no other reason than to see how deep they could dig. The Soviets made it 40,000 feet in 1989 before extreme heat melted the soldering on their drill and shut the project down. Even though they dug through less than 0.1 percent of the planet, the temperature reached 356 degrees.
The rule of thumb is that for every 100 feet below t
he surface you dig, the Earth heats up 1 degree, which means that after falling for 2 seconds you will be roughly one degree warmer. Not a big deal, but in your new vacuum tube you would be accelerating rapidly.
After 3 seconds your tunnel would be 3 degrees warmer, and after 30 seconds it would be as hot as an oven. It would not be comfortable, but you would survive for a surprisingly long time. In the eighteenth century the Englishman Sir Charles Blagden heated a room up to 221 degrees, sat in it for 15 minutes, and walked out unharmed. But Sir Blagden wasn’t in a room that kept getting warmer, unlike your tunnel. After 30 seconds you might still be alive, but the hole would continue to heat up. After another 30 seconds you would have gone 13 miles and the temperature would have reached 1,000 degrees. If you brought a take-and-bake pizza with you, it would be ready to eat, and so would you.
But it gets worse. Not even your body would make it to the other side.
The center of the Earth reaches 11,000 degrees, hotter than the surface of the sun. At that temperature your body would instantly vaporize, which means your electrons would be ripped from your atoms and the only thing left of you would be falling bits of plasma.
So we need to make another design change on your tunnel. We need to insulate it very, very (impossibly) well. Would you make it?
Assuming you didn’t hit the sides of your tunnel—which would slow you down and leave you short of the other side—you would reach the center of the Earth in just over 19 minutes and be falling at 18,000 miles per hour. Once you passed the center you would begin slowing as more and more planet began pulling you back. But, just like on a playground swing, your momentum would carry you back to the same height at which you started—in this case the other side of the Earth.
So if you ignore the impossibility (with current technology) of digging a hole in the extreme temperatures and pressures of the Earth’s core, would you make it to the other side? Actually, yes! Approximately 38 minutes and 11 seconds later you would reach the other side of the globe. Just make sure to grab the surface when you get there.
Miss, and you would start the whole process over again.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Toured the Pringles Factory and Fell off the Catwalk?
YOU HAVE PROBABLY taken a factory tour at some point in your life. Not terribly exciting, but maybe that’s because you didn’t become a part of the product. Let’s change that.
Let’s say you were walking above the factory floor at the Pringles potato chip factory and just as you were admiring a shipment of potatoes, you fell into them.
As far as we can tell no one has ever died in the Pringles plant, but you would hardly be the first to die in an American factory.
In the five-year period between 1902 and 1907, for example, more than five hundred American workers died every year in factories. The Factory Inspector’s annual report chronicled some of the accidents in its yearly roundup:
A worker in a brick-making factory was caught in a belt and had most of his skin torn off.
A sawmill worker fell onto a large, unguarded circular saw and was split in two.
A worker got caught in the large flywheel of the main steam power plant of a navy yard, his arms and legs were torn off, and his lifeless trunk was hurled against a wall fifty feet away.
And on it goes. Pringles chips weren’t invented until 1967, long after factory safety standards had improved, so no one’s been turned into a Pringles chip yet. But if you fell into the potatoes, you would change that. Here’s how it would go.
Once you were in with the raw potatoes you would head to the first stop: the heater.
To make a chip, potatoes are first dehydrated for consistency and preservation with a blast of 600-degree air. While humans are better at retaining water than potatoes are and you would not be completely dehydrated, your cells would not like the extreme heat.*
Human cells are capable of functioning at a body temperature of up to 113 degrees, but a 108-degree fever is often fatal because your cells have a self-destruct button as an adaptation to fend off disease.
When a virus infects your body, it commandeers your cells and turns them into little virus-making factories. Infected cells break open and release the viruses to infect other cells. To slow a virus’s growth, your cells interpret a high body temperature as a signal that you’re battling a virus and destroy themselves before they’re commandeered, like a self-destructing message in Mission: Impossible.
Back at the factory, your cells would misinterpret your body temperature rising from the heat of the oven as a fever and begin to self-destruct. At 108 degrees you would have lost so many brain cells that you would lose control of critical functions like your heartbeat.
From there you would be mashed and minced into a fine powder. Then some corn and wheat would be mixed in with your powdered body to create a formula resembling pancake mix. After that, water would be added until you were a nice slurry, and from there you would go to a rolling press that would flatten you with four tons of pressure.
If you stuck your hand into the press it would be flattened into the size of a basketball. But fortunately you’re already dead and are now a powdered slurry, so all it would do is stamp your human pancake mix flat.
Next, your thin sheet of body would be cut up into small chip-size ovals, with the remainder peeled off and recycled back into the process. From there you would be molded into the familiar concave chip.
Your new shape—called a hyperbolic paraboloid—was not created haphazardly, by the way. Its design was one of the first commercial uses of a supercomputer. Your new form is perfectly unaerodynamic so that it won’t fly off the factory conveyor belt and crafted so your pieces fit snugly into the can.
Once you’re in the familiar Pringles shape you would be immersed into a deep fryer for exactly eleven seconds. At this point you would be dead by way of heat, powdering, pressing, and cutting.
After that your fried remains would be lightly flavored. In the United States the flavors are usually salt and pepper, or maybe ranch. If you wanted to be turned into something more interesting, you should have fallen into the Pringles factory in Mechelen, Belgium, where they produce flavors like wasabi and prawn cocktail.
Your final flavored parts would then be stacked and placed into Pringles cans. At this point, you would be the first human Pringles chip, but, interestingly, you would not be the first human buried in a Pringles can. That distinction belongs to Fred Baur, the inventor of the Pringles can, who requested that his ashes be placed in his invention.
You would, however, be the first ever placed into multiple Pringles cans. Let’s assume you fell into the potatoes weighing 180 pounds. Once the water is removed from you, you would lose 60 percent of your weight, but then because only 42 percent of Pringles is potato you would gain much of that weight back in both corn and wheat. In the end, after a bit of back-of-the-envelope math, we think you would be processed into roughly 40,000 Pringles chips, thereby filling just over 400 cans. In a typical day Americans consume 300 million Pringles chips—that’s 3 million cans—so the odds that any single potato chip consumer would enjoy all of your ranch-flavored remains are quite low. But a few unlucky souls would get a full can of you, and, thanks to a rather gruesome experiment run by the American journalist William Seabrook in the early 1900s, we have some idea of what those unfortunate few would taste.
With the help of a hospital, Seabrook acquired a chunk of human meat from a recently deceased person, and after cooking and preparing it he reported that “in color, texture, smell as well as taste . . . veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.”
Exactly how a chip composed of 42 percent veal, some corn, wheat, and ranch seasoning tastes we will leave to an adventurous reader.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Played Russian Roulette with a Really, Really Big Gun?
QUESTION: IF YOU played R
ussian roulette with a million-chamber gun, would it add any meaningful danger to your life?
Answer: If your only activity on a single day was to hoist a million-chamber gun to your head and pull the trigger one fateful time, it would be the safest day of your life.*
All the basic risks you take every day—walking a few blocks, driving a couple of miles, walking underneath air conditioners—taken together add up to about 1.5 times the danger of playing a single round of enormous-gun Russian roulette.
Ronald Howard, a professor of decision analysis at Stanford University, needed a way to measure the tiny risks of everyday activities against one another, so he coined the term micromort—the one-in-a-million probability that a given activity will kill you.*
You can use micromorts to measure the risks of different modes of travel. Driving 250 miles in a car equals a single micromort. Motorcycling—or canoeing!—for only 6 miles is equal to the same. Flying in a private aircraft is only slightly safer at 8 miles per micromort. Walking (17 miles) and bicycling (20 miles) are safer still, but by far the safest modes are commercial flying (1,000 miles) and riding on a train (6,000 miles).
If you’re adventurous, the idea of playing this version of roulette should seem tame. Going for a swim in the ocean? That’s 3.5 micromorts. Scuba diving? 5 micromorts per dive. Running a marathon is a surprisingly high 7 micromorts per run.* White-water rafting? 8.6 micromorts per day on the river. Skydiving goes up to 9. The average adventurer seems willing to risk 10 micromorts for a thrilling experience, but true daredevils risk far more.
A BASE jumper, for example, risks 430 micromorts per jump. A climber that goes beyond base camp at Mount Everest risks 12,000 micromorts (a 1-in-83 shot at death). And for every ten people who have reached the top of the mountain K2, three have died.
For those of us who don’t BASE jump or climb Himalayan mountains and are younger than eighty, our very first day is probably the most dangerous of our lives. At 480 micromorts, that day is the equivalent of a cross-country motorcycle trip.