by Cody Cassidy
Hisashi Ouchi and Masato Shinohara were creating a small batch of nuclear fuel when they miscalculated the recipe and their mixture went critical. Even in lethal radiation exposures victims don’t always feel terrible right away. The symptoms can take a few hours to set in. But in extreme exposures—like yours, Ouchi’s, and Shinohara’s—there’s no delay.
Just after the beam pierced your hand, your vision would turn blue, the result of radiation passing through the liquid of your eyeball faster than the speed of light. The speed of light is 30 percent slower in water than in a vacuum and it produces an electromagnetic shock wave, called Cherenkov radiation, that appears blue. Both Ouchi and Shinohara reported that the room turned blue despite security cameras showing no change in color.
Besides appearing to change its hue, the room would feel hot even though the actual temperature would remain unchanged as the beam’s energy heated you.
You would also feel nauseated almost immediately as the radiation attacked the lining of your stomach. Your skin would be severely burned, you would have trouble breathing, and you might lose consciousness.
Your white blood cell count would drop to near zero, preventing your immune system from functioning, and the damage to your internal organs would slowly progress. Doctors would be able to treat your symptoms but would not be able to do anything about your irradiated organs. Depending on the exact dosage you received and the progression of the damage, you would die within four to eight weeks.
The hole in your hand, however, would be small enough that it should heal in time with only a small scar.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Holding This Book and It Instantly Collapsed into a Black Hole?
WHEN THE LARGE Hadron Collider was first proposed a vocal few were concerned that the smashing atoms would create a small black hole that would consume Earth. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Creating a black hole is beyond our capabilities, as things stand. And that’s a good thing, because even small black holes should be avoided. If this book collapsed into a black hole, a few things would happen—all of them bad.
Anything can become a black hole if it’s squeezed small enough. Most things don’t, though, because there’s nothing to squeeze them down to size. The only thing we know of that can crush an object small enough to create a black hole is a massive star’s own gravity.
Everything has its own gravitational field, but it takes a truly enormous star—at least twenty times the size of our sun—to have gravity strong enough to crush it down small enough to create a black hole.*
It’s possible that during the big bang such huge compressive forces were created that objects smaller than massive stars—objects the size of this book, say—were crushed into black holes.
That’s a long way of saying that while it’s unlikely that this book will turn into a black hole when you’re done reading it, it isn’t impossible.
You’re going to want to back away if it does.
Assume this book has a mass of about a pound. Collapsed into a black hole it will still have that same mass, only it’s going to be very, very small. About 1 trillion times smaller than a proton—which itself is just a small part of an atom.
Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes are not perfectly black. Instead, they leak out Hawking radiation until they die. For big black holes that takes a long time (the black hole at the center of the Milky Way will take 1 googol years to evaporate), but this tiny And Then You’re Dead black hole is going to vanish a split second after it’s created.
It wouldn’t go quietly. In that split second the book would explode with five hundred times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. It would emit a bright flash and bombard the area with a full spectrum of light including X-rays and gamma rays, and the air would become ionized, heat up, and glow. A massive shock wave, powerful enough to knock down buildings, would spread for miles.
You and your surrounding area would be totally destroyed, but, fortunately, the information in this book would not be.
According to the latest theories published by Stephen Hawking and others, the information inside black holes is not totally destroyed; it’s just in a language that we have no idea how to read.
Unfortunately, it could be many thousands of years before physicists are able to read the data leaked from black holes, and by that time English and all other current languages are likely to have long been lost.
So, though it’s unlikely that this book will ever be converted into a black hole and therefore improbable that you would be blown apart, irradiated, vaporized, transmuted, and ionized, it’s not impossible, and thus we feel compelled to speak to the future physicists who will sift through the ancient wreckage in the only way we feel confident they will be able to understand.
To these future beings, we say:
What Would Happen If . . .
You Stuck a Really, Really Powerful Magnet to Your Forehead?
TAKE A KITCHEN magnet and put it up against your forehead. What happens? Nothing, right? Not even a tingle.
That’s because you’re impervious to the pull of kitchen magnets, and in fact you’re impervious to the pull of the strongest magnets we have on Earth. The most powerful magnet created by researchers registers at 45 tesla—a kitchen magnet is 0.001 tesla—and though it would be strong enough to levitate you (we’ll get to that), it would be harmless.
But what if you decided to look elsewhere for a magnet? The biggest kitchen magnets in the galaxy are rare versions of neutron stars called magnetars, which register at an atom-deforming 100 billion tesla.
Neutron stars are stars that have gone supernova but were not big enough to create black holes, so instead were crushed by their own gravity into superdense gigantic nuclei. A magnetar’s initial extremely fast rotation gives it an enormously powerful magnetic field.
Magnetars are such fantastically strong magnets that if the moon were replaced by a magnetar, it would wipe out every credit card on Earth. This powerful magnetism also makes it one of the most destructive stars in the galaxy. If we wrote this book forty years ago we would have had no idea magnetars existed and thus would have sworn that you couldn’t die from magnetism in our galaxy. Then in 1979, a magnetar had a starquake, hit us with 100 times more gamma rays than our satellites had ever measured, and alerted us to their presence.
In 2004, an even more powerful one struck. A magnetar 50,000 light-years away released as much energy as our sun does in 250,000 years. The gamma ray burst fried satellites and altered Earth’s magnetic field. If you were unlucky enough to be within a light-year of a magnetar when it had a quake, you would be X-rayed to death.
If the magnetar weren’t experiencing a starquake you could get closer, but once you got within 600 miles the extreme magnetism would become a problem.
You probably don’t think of yourself as a magnet, but in truth you are—you’re just a pathetically weak one. Water—which makes up 80 percent of our bodies—is a diamagnetic material, meaning it’s repelled by both the north and south poles of a magnet. That means a strong enough magnet would repel you with enough force that you would float.
Scientists once floated frogs within 10-tesla magnetic fields—magnets five times stronger than an MRI machine (no frogs were harmed in this experiment). Scientists could float you if they made a 10-tesla magnet large enough for you to fit inside.*
Unfortunately, you wouldn’t float harmlessly above a magnetar because a number of your body’s processes are affected when you’re exposed to magnetism 100 billion times stronger than an MRI machine.
Right now your atoms look like beach balls as your electrons circle their nuclei. That’s good; it’s how they should be. But your electrons are also magnetic. Once you were within 600 miles of a magnetar, the magnetic pull would become strong enough to tug at your electrons and give them an elliptical orbit. So instead of your atoms looking like beach balls, they would look l
ike cigars. That’s not good.
Without spherically shaped atoms, your proteins unfold and the bonds binding your atoms into molecules break, instantly splitting you into billions of independent atoms. Instead of H2O, for example, you would now have two Hs and an O.
This would be profoundly fatal.
If someone were looking at you from a passing spaceship when the magnetism first pulled your molecules apart, you would appear as a shimmering human-shaped gas, but that would not be your final form.
Different atoms of yours have different magnetic properties, so some parts of you would be pulled toward the magnetar faster than others, stretching your “body” out. Then the magnetar’s gravity would begin tugging at you.
Magnetars are small—about the size of Manhattan—but incredibly dense, giving them an enormously strong gravitational field that would pull you toward the star, overpowering the star’s magnetic repulsion. In your stretched-out form, you would accelerate toward the magnetar.
To any nearby observers, your last remains would appear as a long wisp of gas like smoke from a chimney, accelerating toward the magnetar until you augered into it, whereupon your atoms would be transmuted into a smear of neutrons and crushed down to the size of a single red blood cell.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Were Swallowed by a Whale?
THE OLD TESTAMENT tells the story of Jonah, a disobedient prophet who is swallowed by a whale and spends three days in its belly before being spat out on a beach, healthy and whole and in the presence of a few incredulous witnesses. Amazed by the feat, onlookers lead the reprobate city of Nineveh to repent their sins in the face of such a miracle.
Jonah may indeed have had some outside assistance because according to marine biologists, entering the belly of a whale is a risky endeavor. Your best bet to get a ride inside the stomach of one of these beasts is to find a sperm whale. Most whales eat microscopic organisms like plankton, and so their throats are only four or five inches wide. If you happen to find yourself inside the mouth of a blue whale you would be too big for it to swallow and your journey would likely end with a crushing blow from its 6,000-pound tongue.
Sperm whales, on the other hand, eat larger prey like giant squid and have been known to swallow the 400-pound animals whole. So it could, in theory, swallow you. But even if you escaped the whale’s teeth and tongue, you would find yourself in the first of the whale’s four stomachs and facing another set of problems.
Whales are flatulent creatures. The only gas you would find in its belly is methane, not oxygen. And while it’s not toxic, it is a natural asphyxiate. Most untrained humans can’t hold their breath much longer than thirty seconds. A lack of oxygen is fine for most of your tissue, which can go for hours without a resupply, but your brain is another matter entirely. Once the leftover oxygen in your bloodstream was exhausted, brain cells would begin to die immediately. Unless a higher power stepped in, irreversible brain damage would begin within four minutes and complete brain death would follow a couple of minutes later.
You would also have the whale’s stomach muscles to contend with. Because sperm whales don’t chew their food, they rely on the muscles in their first stomach to squeeze prey down to size. So before you had a chance to be dissolved in powerful stomach acid, the muscles of its stomach would squeeze you into something resembling chunky peanut butter.
There is some good news, though.
Sperm whales have the most expensive poop in the world. Their bile duct secretion, called ambergris, is a prized commodity in the perfume industry. A one-pound chunk is worth around sixty thousand dollars.*
So it’s possible that after being suffocated, crushed, dissolved, passed through a thousand feet of intestines, and pooped out the back end of a whale, your remains will wash up on a beach somewhere, where a lucky sunbather will pick up your waxy, manure-smelling, ambergris-covered corpse and sell it for a small fortune. And from there, things really start looking up. After the perfumer is done with you, not only will your corpse smell significantly better, your final resting place won’t be a hole in the ground or the bottom of the ocean, but on the back of a lady’s neck as a gentle spray to improve her scent.
Considering the alternatives, you too may believe in divine intervention.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Took a Swim Outside a Deep-Sea Submarine?
IN JANUARY 1960, two navy divers piloted a specially designed submarine to the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, a crevasse in the sea floor off the island of Guam roughly 7 miles deep. It took Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard nearly 5 hours to reach the bottom. They had just 20 minutes to survey the landscape before a crack in their window prompted a hasty retreat to the surface.* During their short visit they conducted some scientific experiments and made a few observations. They did not, however, exit the sub for a swim.
But what if they had?
Anyone who has swum to the bottom of a pool can tell you about the squeeze felt under a few feet of water, especially in the ears. But at 7 miles that pressure is multiplied roughly a thousandfold. Sitting at the bottom of the pool your body is under 12 feet of water, equivalent to 5 pounds per square inch of pressure. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench you would experience 15,750 pounds per square inch. Surprisingly, this crushing weight would not smash your body, or at least not your entire body. That’s because, with a few exceptions, you’re mostly just water, and water is incompressible. Unfortunately for you, you’re not all water—and it’s those gases that are going to be a problem.
The instant you stepped out of the sub your eardrums would blow out, your nasal cavities would collapse, and your throat would cave in. None of that’s good, but the real problem would be your chest, which would collapse as your lungs were crushed to the size of Ping-Pong balls and refilled with water. Every air pocket in your body would crunch down until you were a tightly packed humanoid-shaped flesh chunk.*
It’s probably just as well, considering your appearance, but you would likely never be seen again. Your corpse would not float to the surface because every air pocket inside your body would have collapsed, and your body would decompose slowly because bacteria don’t do well in freezing temperatures. Most likely your flesh would be consumed by the various creatures living at the bottom of the ocean, and your bones would be eaten by the gloriously named bone-eating snot flower, which normally lives on whale bone but would likely make an exception in your case.
What Would Happen If . . .
You Stood on the Surface of the Sun?
THOUGH HUMAN LIVES are fragile, the matter that makes up our bodies isn’t. Whether you jumped into a volcano or were hit by an asteroid, at least a few of your atoms would remain. However, if you’re dead set on destroying every last piece of you, down to the atomic level, look to the sun.
The fastest, though not the most fuel-efficient, way to the sun is simple: Allow yourself to fall into it.* Right now Earth is orbiting the sun at 67,000 miles per hour—and orbiting is nothing more than falling into an object while traveling sideways so quickly you miss it. So to reach the sun, all you need to do is stop your horizontal velocity.
First, you would need to exit Earth’s gravity—around 1 million miles away (four times farther away than the moon) should be enough—and then fire retro-rockets that slowed your orbit around the sun from 67,000 miles per hour to zero.
Then you would start accelerating. By the time you reached the sun you would be traveling at 384 miles per second—or 1.4 million miles per hour, by far the fastest any human has ever gone—and you would reach it in just 65 days. The first 64 days of your trip would pass smoothly. You would need an X-ray and a heat shield—we recommend the carbon fiber shield used by the (unmanned) Solar Probe Plus, which NASA will be sending to the sun. That shield is good enough that even when the temperature hits 2,500 degrees (within four hours of travel time from the visible surface of the sun), the
inside of your ship would be at room temperature.
Unfortunately, over the last four hours of your descent, the temperature would climb well past the shield’s capability.
The sun’s magnetic field heats the outer atmosphere, called the corona, to 2 million degrees.
Because you would still be in a vacuum, you would feel only the 10,000 degrees of radiating heat of the surface at first—but that’s still enough to vaporize your heat shield, your spacecraft, and you.
Then, after spending some time in the sun’s corona, what was left of you would slowly be cooked to 2 million degrees and you would be turned into a fourth state of matter—a highly ionized plasma. In that condition the solar magnetic field would grab and stretch you into a thin spaghetti string around the sun, then bend and twist you into arcs of glowing light—a beautiful sight for any space telescope focused on the sun.
You may also return home. Once you were shredded down to size, the solar magnetic fields would fling you into space fast enough to cover the 100-million-mile distance to Earth in a couple of days.
So far what we have described is all feasible. You could be turned into a highly ionized plasma if NASA made it a priority. But let’s depart from reality for a second and make an improvement to your heat shield that would allow you to travel past the corona and make it to the visible surface of the sun.*
Once you got past the corona and to the visible surface, the temperature would actually cool off to a relatively mild 10,000 degrees as you left the near vacuum of the corona and made it into the sun’s atmosphere.
Assuming your heat shield was still holding strong, the first thing you might notice would be the sound. In space no one can hear you scream, nor can anyone hear the deafening roar of the sun. If sound could travel perfectly through space, the sun would sound like a revving motorcycle to us on Earth. On the surface, though, when the sun’s gas bubbles popped, the noise would be deafening—one hundred times louder than standing in front of concert speakers. That’s enough power to blast out shock waves that destroy the alveoli in your lungs.