by Cody Cassidy
We also put a dollar value on our micromorts, whether we think about it consciously or not, and are willing to pay to reduce them. To mitigate everyday risks, the average American will spend fifty dollars on extra safety features, like adding optional airbags, to avoid 1 micromort. However, your government doesn’t value your micromorts quite as much as you do. When deciding whether to make road safety improvements, the Department of Transportation looks at how many micromorts the improvement is expected to save and divides that by the cost. If the price for saving each driver 1 micromort is more than the price of a Big Mac, they don’t make the change.
There are losers to this game, though, which brings us back to our original question regarding Russian roulette with the million-chamber gun. For every million people who play there will be, on average, one person who runs out of luck.
But wait! Just because you have shot yourself in the head doesn’t mean you’re going to die. It just means you’re probably going to die. Of victims who are shot in the head, 5 percent survive the injury. The reason? Redundancy. The brain can transfer jobs from one hemisphere to the other, and essential functions are done in both hemispheres. The brain’s hemispheres are divided left to right, and a bullet that destroys only one hemisphere or part of one hemisphere gives you a better chance of survival—meaning that a bullet that enters your forehead and leaves out the back of your head is slightly more survivable than one that goes from ear to ear (see p. 34 for how you could live if you don’t put just a bullet through your head but an entire rod).
The speed of the bullet to your head is also important. A high-speed rifle shot can hit your skull and skip in unpredictable ways, just like a stone skipping across water. This means a direct shot to the forehead might hit your skull, skip upward, and miss most of your brain.
A bullet from a handgun would hit your skull and travel straight like a slow-moving stone. That’s bad if its aim were true.
Even a handgun’s bullet travels faster than your tissue can tear, meaning it would push your brain out of the way as it traveled. If you could take an X-ray while the bullet was still in your head, you would see a wake behind the path of the slug wider than the bullet itself.
That X-ray would hide what was actually going on, though. Not only would the tissues and nerves in the bullet’s path be destroyed, but so would a large area on either side of it.
As the bullet passed through your brain matter the tissue would collapse back together—like water smashing together in the wake after a dive. This cavitation in your brain happens quickly, and the tissue would collapse with enough force to send a shock wave that would destroy your nerves in a wide swath.
If you were to survive the immediate shot, the areas that were damaged would dictate what type of recovery you would make. But because of the brain’s ability to transfer jobs, it’s impossible to predict exactly how you would recover.
In nearly every case, the first thing a person thinks after a bullet to the head is that something is burning. For reasons not entirely known, brain damage often makes victims smell burned toast.
In all likelihood, though, you would not have to worry about that. A point-blank shot would probably kill you before your brain was able to process what happened.
In other words, after being extremely unlucky to lose your one-in-a-million bet, you would be very lucky to survive it.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Traveled to Jupiter?
AT 3:21 EASTERN Standard Time on October 9, 2013, NASA’s Juno spacecraft whipped by Earth at 25 miles per second—that’s fifty times the speed of a bullet—and raced toward Jupiter on a mission to collect data. The probe was unmanned, but let’s say you jumped on, finally arrived at Jupiter in July 2016, and jumped out. Here’s what would happen.
Jupiter is a gas giant, so parachuting through it might seem as harmless as passing through a cloud. That is not the case. Jupiter’s mass is enormous, but its heat is intense and there’s enough pressure inside it to put our deepest oceans to shame. The planet is so impenetrable that we’re not even sure what makes up its core. So far it has gobbled up our probes long before they could get more than a few miles below Jupiter’s cloud tops. In 1995 the Galileo orbiter dropped a probe into Jupiter. It managed to transmit for fifty-eight minutes before it was crushed and incinerated. You would not be so lucky.
The trouble would begin long before your jump.
Jupiter’s magnetic field stores the sun’s radiation like a battery, the same as Earth. But Jupiter is bigger than Earth and its magnetic field is far stronger, so even 200,000 miles away from Jupiter you would be zapped by 5 sieverts (Sv) of radiation, which is enough to kill you after a few days of exposure. And as you got closer to the planet the dosage would increase to 36 Sv (10 Sv is a lethal dose), which would immediately induce vomiting and eventually death.
But let’s say you came prepared for this with a radiation shield on your space suit—lead and paraffin wax would work—and you survived long enough to jump.
Once your feet left the probe’s deck, Jupiter’s huge gravitational pull would accelerate you to more than 30 miles per second—for comparison, a .50-caliber bullet travels at a relatively pedestrian 0.5 miles per second.* When you entered Jupiter’s upper atmosphere you would begin to slow down from 30 miles per second to 4 miles per hour in less than 4 minutes. At the peak of your deceleration you would experience 230 g’s—the equivalent of face-planting off a sixteen-story building.
In addition, falling at 30 miles per second means the air cannot get out of the way fast enough, so it’s compressed and superheated. Your space suit would warm up to more than 15,500 degrees, vaporize, and turn you into a ball of plasma while producing a light brighter than the sun.
From the surface—if there was one and if there was anyone to look up and see you—you would look like a streaking ball of fire. But the Galileo probe was able to survive this process with a sophisticated heat shield that ablated and blew away as it entered the atmosphere, so let’s say you grabbed one of those before you left and survived your entry.
At this point we can say you have reached the surface of Jupiter, only what looks like the surface is just the cloud tops. Since Jupiter is made of gas, you would continue to fall. At 1 atmosphere of pressure here on Earth, a human body’s terminal velocity is about 200 miles per hour in the pike position. But Jupiter’s gravity is much stronger than Earth’s. At 1 atmosphere on Jupiter you would fall at 1,000 miles per hour—still fast, but at least you would have slowed enough so that your suit would no longer be melting. The temperature outside would be a chilly 135 degrees below zero with an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen and helium, but in your suit with an oxygen tank and a heater you would be okay.
After ten minutes of continued falling you would reach 3 atmospheres of pressure, or the equivalent of being 100 feet under water. Fortunately your body is mostly water, and water is incompressible. Professional free divers can drop 700 feet in under three minutes, where the pressure is 21 atmospheres. Not terribly safe, but survivable.
As you get closer to the core, Jupiter’s temperature rises, just like Earth’s, and by this time the temperature would have risen to 100 degrees below zero. The clouds are made of ice particles—similar to the upper atmosphere of Earth—and winds would have picked up to 450 miles per hour. But, assuming you made it this far, you would probably be okay inside your space suit.
After twenty-five minutes of falling, the temperature would rise to a balmy 70 degrees. The pressure would increase to 10 atmospheres—the equivalent of 330 feet of water. At 10 atmospheres of pressure, oxygen becomes toxic. To stay alive, you would need to switch tanks to one with a helium-oxygen mix like the kind deep-water scuba divers use.
After a full hour of falling you would be in real trouble. It would be completely dark outside and the temperature would have reached 400 degrees—hot enough to kill you within a few minutes and to melt the sold
er on the Galileo probe. Your only saving grace at this point would be if you were in a well-insulated space suit. Let’s say you were.
The atmosphere would continue to increase in density as you fell, becoming as dense as water, then as dense as rock. You would never encounter a surface on Jupiter—the atmosphere just smoothly grades denser and denser in the increasing pressure.
Eventually your density would reach an equilibrium with the planet’s, so you would stop sinking and hover in place. The pressure would now have increased to 1,000 times Earth’s atmosphere. Even your special space suit couldn’t withstand that. It would collapse along with the air cavities in your body. Your chest, ears, face, and gut would fall in on themselves until you were a solid mass of flesh and blood. And then there’s the heat.
The temperature would be 8,500 degrees at this depth—about the same as the surface of the sun. Not only would you vaporize but your atoms would break apart. You would become permanently entombed as bits of plasma wafting in the pitch-black, searing-hot liquid hydrogen.
If you managed to make it deeper into Jupiter the pressure would eventually be more than 1 million atmospheres and something interesting would happen: 62 percent of the atoms in your body are hydrogen, and at that pressure scientists predict that hydrogen turns into a liquid metal.
So if you somehow made it past the g-forces, heat, pressure, and poisonous atmosphere, you might resemble the bad guy from Terminator 2. That’s cool, at least.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Ate the World’s Deadliest Substances?
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko sat down to eat with two former KGB officers in London. Litvinenko was a former Russian security officer who publicly opposed the current regime, worked for the British secret service, and wrote articles accusing Russian president Vladimir Putin of terrorist acts and assassinations.
Soon after the meal Litvinenko felt ill. At first the symptoms resembled food poisoning: vomiting, upset stomach, and fatigue. But, unlike food poisoning, the symptoms intensified over the following days and doctors could find no explanation. Litvinenko’s hair fell out, his blood cell count plummeted, and eventually he couldn’t get out of bed. He died three weeks later.
Through an autopsy, investigators determined that Litvinenko was poisoned with 10 micrograms (half the weight of an eyelash) of polonium-210, a toxic radioactive isotope that occurs as uranium decays into lead.
Polonium-210 has a short half-life—only 138 days—and in that time releases a huge amount of energy. One gram will heat up to 900 degrees and generate 140 watts of power. It’s used on spacecraft as a heat and power source, and would make for the world’s greatest ski boot and glove warmer.
Polonium-210 is so reactive and its alpha radiation so terribly destructive, it dissipates all its energy over a very short distance, which means it can be blocked by clothing, two pieces of paper, or even skin. Litvinenko’s killers could have easily carried it in a pocket, probably in a vial of water, and been fine.
Once given an avenue past your skin, however, such as ingestion, polonium-210 becomes incredibly toxic, and death from radiation poisoning is inevitable. It doesn’t make a great weapon for an assassin, however, because it can be traced in a way that puts even the greatest bloodhound to shame. Apparently the ex-KGB officers weren’t aware that equipment exists to detect it in fantastically small quantities, and investigators followed the killer’s trail from his contaminated aircraft to all three of his hotels to his rendezvous with Litvinenko, and to Litvinenko’s teacup. (The Russian government declined to extradite the accused.)
As soon as Litvinenko drank his poisoned tea he was doomed. Once given access past the skin, polonium-210’s alpha radiation begins its bombardment of the body, starting with the lining of the stomach and gut, causing severe nausea, pain, and internal bleeding. The earlier these symptoms present themselves, the higher the dosage you received. If they begin within four hours after exposure, you’re in trouble.
Your bone marrow, which directs blood production, is particularly susceptible to radiation. As those cells are attacked and destroyed, your white and red blood cell counts fall and you become vulnerable to outside infection.
As more bone marrow is destroyed, fewer red blood cells are created. Eventually the blood becomes so thin you’re unable to oxygenate vital organs—the most important of which is your heart. Once the heart stops receiving enough oxygen it will fail and cut off all blood flow to the brain.
Polonium-210 has a lethal dose of a single microgram, which makes it the deadliest radioactive material, but it isn’t the deadliest substance in the world.
As bad as polonium is, botulism is five hundred times more toxic.
In 2013, the California Department of Public Health received a stool sample from a baby suffering from botulism. Babies have an undeveloped gut and will occasionally develop botulism when an adult would be able to fend it off.
The test is fairly routine, and with an antibotulism serum the survival rate is good. This time, however, the doctors discovered something different. They called it botulism H, a previously unknown type of botulism that’s unfathomably toxic with no known antiserum. The discovery so alarmed researchers, they have kept the DNA sequence a secret to prevent production and weaponization.
Botulism H is fatal at 2 nanograms. That’s 2 billionths of a gram. A single red blood cell, which is completely invisible to the naked eye, weighs 10 nanograms. The deadliest chemical weapon ever created, VX gas, is nasty stuff but requires a dose of 10 milligrams to kill you.* That makes it more than a million times less potent.
Here’s how toxic the botulism H toxin is: If you put it into an eye dropper and squeezed a single drop into a swimming pool, drinking a glass of water out of the pool would be fatal. That same drop, properly dispersed, could kill a million people. A cupful could wipe out Europe.
Unlike a virus, botulism H doesn’t grow once it takes up residence in your body—another remarkable aspect of the toxin. It starts very small, stays very small, and still grinds your body’s functions to a halt.
Muscles contract as a reaction to a chemical called acetylcholine. Botulism slides into your muscles’ acetylcholine receptors and takes up permanent residence, effectively paralyzing you.
This feature actually has a number of medical uses. A different strand, botulism A, is used in cosmetics. An injection of a tiny, tiny amount of it can relax the muscles in your face and eliminate wrinkles. Its commercial name is Botox.
But there is no commercial application for botulism H.
If you took a drink from that contaminated pool, twelve to thirty-six hours later your vision would get a little blurry, your eyelids would droop, and your speech would slur.
Botulism attacks the muscles controlled by your cranial nerves first—your eyes, mouth, and throat—and from there it spreads. Constipation is next, after the muscles that keep your meals moving are paralyzed.
One of the scarier aspects of botulism poisoning is that it has no effect on your mental state. As the wave of paralysis passed down your body you would be completely aware of what was happening, but neither you nor your doctors would be able to do anything about it.*
It would begin at your head. After your face froze, your shoulders and arms would follow suit.
The trouble begins once your diaphragm stops working. The muscles in your chest allow your lungs to expand and fill with air. As they became paralyzed, you would struggle more and more just to breathe, as if a five-hundred-pound man were sitting on your chest.
Eventually you would no longer be able to get enough air to sustain your brain. Brain cells need a constant supply of oxygen and start to drop off after only fifteen seconds of deprivation. A few minutes later—the timing depends on the order in which your brain cells died—you would suffer complete brain death brought on by a dose of poison smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Lived in a Nuclear Winter?
DURING THE COLD War it was widely understood that both the United States and the USSR had the capability to destroy the world with nuclear weapons. What people didn’t know was how easily they actually could do it.
Today, thanks to sophisticated weather models built to analyze global warming, we know that even a relatively small nuclear skirmish would be extremely bad news. Simulations of full-scale war between smaller nuclear-armed countries suggest that a hundred multimegaton bombs would be exchanged, and the simultaneous detonation of a hundred nuclear devices would be bad for you even if you were on the other side of the globe. Your first problem? Radiation.
When the nukes went off they would irradiate the area and transmute innocuous atoms into dangerous ones. One of the worst of these nuclear bastard children is called strontium-90. It’s light, so it doesn’t take many explosions for it to coat the globe and get deep into the food supply. Once ingested it’s so similar to calcium that your body absorbs it into your bones. Children born after the open-air nuclear tests of the 1950s have fifty times the natural level of strontium-90 in their teeth. Fortunately, that’s still below the threshold for serious danger. Unfortunately, unlike a test, a nuclear battle will blow past that threshold.
Once strontium-90 is in your bones its radioactive decay breaks up the DNA of your cells, leading to bone cancers and leukemia. So if you survived the initial nuclear exchange, you would have bone cancer to look forward to, but that’s only if you could also survive the more serious smoke, ash, and soot problem.