by Cody Cassidy
The second issue, after the dust has cleared from the initial detonations, is that the dust wouldn’t clear. After a hundred multimegaton bombs exploded in the air, not only would they directly distribute carbon into the upper atmosphere but they would start enormous forest and urban fires that would release massive amounts of smoke. On top of that, the explosions would lift tons of fine dust—all of which would be heated by the sun to rise and collect in the stratosphere.
The smoke from your typical campfire stays below the clouds where it can be wicked away by rain. In the case of nuclear fallout, smoke and ash would be lifted above the clouds where it wouldn’t be wicked away by rain, so it would stay parked for years and block sunlight.
Even conservative environmental simulations show that a hundred nuclear detonations would block enough sunlight to drop the average global temperature by a few degrees. A sudden global drop in temperature of even a couple of degrees would be devastating for the world’s food supply, because a single frost kills rice. A serious disturbance in rice production would kill as many as 2 billion people around the globe.*
In a hundred-bomb nuclear war nearly a third of the world’s population would die from the explosions, starvation, or cancer, but our species would carry on. In larger, multithousand exchanges of thermonuclear weapons, like the one that almost occurred in November 1983 between the United States and the USSR, however, we probably wouldn’t.
On November 7, 1983, the United States led NATO in a massive training exercise called Able Archer that mimicked a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Unfortunately for nearly everybody, the USSR believed the exercise was a cover for an actual first strike. So in response the Soviets helicoptered missiles to their silos and mobilized their air force, actions that should have alarmed the U.S. military to respond in kind. Luckily, Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots of the U.S. Air Force mistook Russia’s actions for a simple training exercise and took no action. That lack of response convinced the USSR to stand down.
Lt. Gen. Perroots made a “fortuitous, if ill-informed” decision, according to declassified analysis of the scare. It might be the most fortuitous mistake in human history.
If the alarm had been raised and the misunderstanding escalated into full-scale nuclear war, a few thousand multimegaton bombs would have crisscrossed the globe and detonated over their targets. Even if you didn’t live in a large city (basically every city with a population of more than 100,000 in the United States and the USSR was targeted) and therefore weren’t killed by the initial blasts, you couldn’t expect to live long.
Within two weeks of something like this happening, 180 million tons of smoke, soot, and dust would coat our globe like black paint, and there it would stay.
Light levels would be reduced to a few percent of what they are today, so high noon would look like predawn. Midsummer highs in North America would be below zero.
The good news is there would be plenty of dead trees to burn for warmth. The bad news: You would starve. Crops would be wiped out, and those that weren’t would suffer from another problem: bugs.
Cockroaches and their ilk are quite durable when it comes to radiation, but their predators are not. Without any birds to keep them in check, crop-eating pests would prosper. Pests would decimate any crops that made it through the freeze.
But there is an upside (sort of). Cockroaches are actually more efficient than cows at turning grain into protein, and even in the new apocalyptic world there would be plenty for them to eat. They’re also a healthy snack. Cockroaches are high in vitamin C, protein, and fat, so as long as you’re not a picky eater, you may survive a little longer than expected.
You would just need to eat a lot of cockroaches, around 144 per day, to survive. Gross.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Vacationed on Venus?
VISITING VENUS DOES not offer the cornucopia of death that parachuting onto Jupiter does, but it’s still no picnic.
The descent into the Venusian atmosphere from deep space should be relatively pleasant. Its gravity is similar to Earth’s so you would not fall too quickly—it’s roughly the same as Earth’s reentry, reducing this to an already solved problem. All we have to do is put you in a NASA space shuttle and you would arrive 155,000 feet above the planet in one piece (if you decide to skip the shuttle, refer to p. 77 to see what would happen).
However, once you descended below that 155,000-foot mark, your troubles would begin.
First, you would need to watch out for the rain clouds, because on Venus it doesn’t rain water, it rains sulfuric acid—similar to what you find in car batteries. The rain would eat away at the exposed metal of your shuttle (and if you didn’t have a shuttle it would bore holes in your skin). A window in your shuttle would have to be made of diamond, which makes for a fantastic option due to its resistance to heat and sulfuric acid. The NASA Venus lander used a 205-carat industrial diamond as a lens for its camera.*
The second reason storm clouds could be dangerous is lightning. Scientists only recently confirmed lightning’s existence on Venus, but still do not know for sure whether it’s only intracloud lightning or whether it strikes the planet. Either way, if you’re inside your space shuttle it will conduct the electricity around you and protect you just like a car does on Earth. If you’re outside the shuttle and you’re hit by a sulfuric-inspired bolt, refer to p. 67 to see what would happen. It’s not pretty.
Once you descended below the clouds you would need to slow yourself down with a parachute. Unfortunately, Venus has a greenhouse-gas problem—a really, really big one. Its atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide, which means it’s a phenomenal heat trap. The planet’s temperature is 864 degrees during the day and it’s so good at storing heat that it’s still hot enough to melt lead at midnight. Think global warming to the max.
Standard polyester or nylon parachutes melt at 270 degrees. Your parachute would be gone seconds after it deployed. We recommend using Dacron, which is what the Venus lander used and is both resistant to sulfuric acid and melts at 500 degrees. So it would still melt, but at least it would hang in there for a little while, and that actually might be enough because the air is so thick on Venus—7 percent the density of water—your crash landing would be slow enough for you to survive.
When the Russians put a lander on Venus they used a combination of melting parachute, puffy balloon, and crash landing—and together they worked. The lander broadcast fifty-two minutes of data before the heat melted its electronics.
So with a bit of luck and engineering (not to mention an unbelievable air-conditioning unit) you might get your feet on Venus long enough to have a look around. You would probably be disappointed. The planet is perpetually covered in a seventeen-mile blanket of smoglike clouds that would make Los Angeles look like a Tahitian island. The smog is so thick that high noon on Venus would look like dusk.
The gravity is 90 percent of Earth’s, so your body can easily adapt, but the “air” is fifty times denser than Earth’s, so running would be in slow motion, like escaping an ax murderer in a dream.
The denser atmosphere also causes a problem for the air cavities in your body. Standing on the surface of Venus is the equivalent to being three thousand feet under water. Most of your body is made of water and therefore incompressible, but you do have a few air cavities in you. Those areas collapse under pressure. Your face would smash in on itself as if it were hit by a huge bat; your ears would crunch inward and your eyeballs would fall into your head. You would drop a few collar sizes as your throat and larynx cinched shut, and you would lose a few inches off your belly when your stomach and intestines collapsed inward.
Your lungs are the largest gaseous areas in your body and would also collapse, but they would be useless on Venus anyway, even if you could somehow keep them inflated. Since Venus’s atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, after a single breath your body would absolutely scream for oxygen. The fifteen secon
ds before you went unconscious would pass painfully.
The final issue on Venus is, of course, the heat. If you were in a swimsuit at 870 degrees, you would be dead in seconds, although you would not burn because there is no oxygen to support combustion. Even though you would not ignite, your cells stop working in 870-degree heat, more or less the temperature of a well-stoked fire, and your proteins denature. You would quickly progress from “well done” to “smoldering bones” and, eventually, “ash” over the course of a few days.
There are many ways to die on Venus: crematorium-level heat; crushing, deep-ocean-level pressure; a general lack of anything to breathe.
However, there is one way in which you would absolutely not die: falling.
The air is so thick your terminal velocity on the planet would be eleven miles per hour—the same speed you reach when jumping off a five-foot ledge here on Earth. Meaning no matter how high a cliff you jumped off on Venus, and although you would probably die while falling from a few different means, you could never fall to your death.
In summary, Venus is a terrible place to visit if you don’t want to die in a furnace, but a fantastic place to go if you’re afraid of heights.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Swarmed by Mosquitoes?
THE FEMALE ANOPHELES mosquito is the single most dangerous creature in human history. According to some estimates, its bite is responsible for half of all human deaths since the Stone Age. Of course, you should not give the mosquitoes all the credit. The real killer is malaria, a disease caused by a parasitic protozoa that hitches a ride on mosquitoes.
More than 247 million people are infected with malaria every year. More than 1 million die from it. On top of that a mosquito bite is annoying (their saliva is an anticoagulant, which most of us are allergic to), and we’re not the only ones who think so. The Alaskan caribou alter their migration routes into colder areas to avoid the bites.
Of course, caribou aren’t the only ones that avoid areas because of mosquito infestation. Huge swaths of jungle in Central America, South America, and Africa were completely impenetrable to early explorers thanks to the mosquito. The preservation of the Amazon rain forest can largely be attributed to it.
The first attempt to build the Panama Canal was a French-led effort that began in 1881. It did not go well. The Panamanian jungle was filled with poisonous snakes and spiders, which didn’t help, but their danger paled in comparison to the mosquito problem. Malaria absolutely decimated the French workforce. Mosquitoes killed nearly 200 workers per month at the height of the project. Deadlines were missed, costs ballooned, and after nine years the project ended in failure. In all, 22,000 workers died—nearly all killed by the mosquito. It wasn’t until the U.S. project twenty years later—and after doctors better understood the link between malaria and the mosquito—that the canal was completed, and still at the cost of 5,600 more lives.
There still remains a question for those of us who swat a lot of mosquitoes but don’t live in malaria country. Can mosquitoes kill you without the help of the protozoa? Can enough mosquito bites suck you dry? Is there such a thing as death by a thousand bites? Mosquitoes take a small amount of blood each time they bite, which isn’t a problem on your typical camping trip. You can afford to lose it. But it could become a problem if you happen to be camping on Alaska’s North Slope and find yourself naked in a large swarm. We know the specifics of this fate thanks to researchers in the Arctic who, after what we assume were a lot of dares and at least some vodka, ventured outdoors without shirts on. For one minute they stood outside in the thick cloud of mosquitoes before scampering back inside and assessing the damage.
They each counted more than 9,000 bites.
Mosquitoes drain only 5 microliters of your blood per bite, and you have roughly 5 liters pumping through your veins, which equates to roughly 1 million mosquito meals. So you can afford a few bites on your next camping trip, but 9,000 per minute is a different story.
If you followed in those brave shirtless scientists’ steps, but then stayed in the swarm, here’s what would happen.
Roughly fifteen minutes into your ordeal you would lose 15 percent of your blood, which is about the same amount taken at a blood bank. You would experience some slight anxiety and a lot of itchiness, but nothing a glass of orange juice and a cookie couldn’t fix.
After just over thirty minutes, however, the mosquitoes would have sucked 30 percent of your total volume. Your blood pressure would begin to drop and your heart would be forced to speed up to compensate. At the same time you would begin to feel a cooling in your extremities as your body focused on providing oxygen to your internal organs at the expense of your hands and feet. Meanwhile, your breathing rate would increase as your body tried to compensate for the oxygen deficit.
Forty minutes into the biting you would have lost two liters and reached a critical stage. You would be anxious and confused, with your heart racing at more than one hundred beats per minute. As your body concentrated the remaining blood and oxygen to your brain, kidneys, and heart, the tissue in your arms and legs would begin to starve and die.
After forty-five minutes and more than 400,000 bites, you would have lost more than 2 liters of blood. At that point your heart would no longer be able to maintain the minimum necessary blood pressure and you would go into shock followed by cardiac arrest. Without the blood flow needed to carry oxygen from your lungs, your brain cells would begin dying. Within a few seconds you would enter an unconscious state and suffer irreparable brain damage. Depending on which brain cells died and in what order, you would have between three and seven minutes from heart failure to total brain death.
And, in a most unusual way, you would join nearly half of all mankind to succumb to the mosquito.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Became an Actual Human Cannonball?
HUMAN CANNONBALLS—the kind that you see in the circus—are shot from circus cannons (basically long tubes with springs in the bottom). The record ride is about 200 feet, which, if you do the math, would take something like a 70-miles-per-hour launch. With a properly placed net, the experience is survivable, although not terribly safe. More than a few have died on the job. But even so, it’s a lot safer than getting shot from a real cannon.
Real cannonballs these days leave the muzzle at several thousand miles per hour. Let’s say you wanted to see what that felt like and so you crawled inside a modern cannon and found a friend to shoot you out. There are many hazards associated with this idea, but we’ll talk about only two.
One, the acceleration problem. The instant your friend pulled the trigger, you would go from zero to 3,800 miles per hour in about 1/100th of a second. This is the equivalent of 17,000 g’s, roughly 2,000 times greater than any astronaut has ever experienced. For a moment, you would “weigh” 2.5 million pounds. Your skull and your bones would instantly collapse along with all your soft tissue (your organs, flesh, muscle, etc.). Only the water in your body would resist. So while still in the barrel, you would have lost your human form and become a small cylinder of reddish water with a very thin scum of crushed bone and flesh at the bottom of it. After you exited the barrel, it would only get worse.
Traveling at 3,800 miles per hour creates a tremendous amount of friction with the air, which results in heat (the surface of a fighter jet reaches 600 degrees). That would be a problem for the water that would now make up the majority of your corpse.
So only in your fondest dreams would you be a thin disk of reddish water flying through the air. Your final form would be a superhot mist ejected into the atmosphere at five times the speed of sound.
Ouch.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Hit by a Penny Dropped from the Top of the Empire State Building?
THE BAD NEWS: A penny dropped on your head from the top of the Empire State Building will not bore a hole straight through your skull. Its
terminal velocity is only 25 miles per hour at sea level. The penny is both light and, like all coins, tumbles as it falls, which adds to its surface area and makes it an especially poor lethal projectile. Not even the Eisenhower silver dollar, the largest coin in circulation, would do more than sting.
Everyone is always disappointed to learn this. The image of a smoking penny-size hole through your head is so compelling that most people aren’t willing to give it up easily.
However, there are some objects that will do more damage if they’re dropped from the top of the Empire State Building, but as the penny example demonstrates, it isn’t always intuitive which you should try to catch and which you should run from. In response to this common urban-dweller’s dilemma, we have created a guide to walking under the Empire State Building.
Here’s what you should do if you see these objects falling from the top of the skyscraper.
Baseball
A five-ounce baseball dropped from the top of the Empire State Building would top out at 95 miles per hour, about the speed of a major league fastball.* If it bounced off your head you would probably suffer a concussion. But there is also an opportunity for a record here.
In 1939, Joe Sprinz, a catcher for the San Francisco Seals, set a world record by catching a baseball dropped 800 feet from a blimp. The ball hit his glove with enough force to smash it into his face, break a few teeth, and fracture his jaw.
In 2013, Zack Hample extended the record to 1,052 feet (he wore a catcher’s mask). Since the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall, you could set a new mark. Or concuss yourself in the effort.
Conclusion: If you see a ball falling from the ESB, grab a glove—and maybe some protective gear as well. Baseballs traveling slower than 95 miles per hour have killed people.