And Then You're Dead

by Cody Cassidy

  Let’s assume you came prepared with a fantastic insulator, though, and you made it to the center of the gas star.

  The greatest difference between our sun and Jupiter is not the ingredients each is made out of, but how much of each ingredient (helium and hydrogen, mostly) there is. The sun is a thousand times as massive as Jupiter, which means the temperature and pressure in the center are so great, nuclear reactions begin to take place.

  Nuclear reactions are dangerous to stand near, or in this case, participate in.

  Inside the sun, the temperature reaches 27 million degrees with a pressure of 250 billion times the surface of the Earth. That’s bad for the parts of you made of hydrogen—meaning most of you. In this heat those hydrogen atoms would move so fast they would ram into one another, eventually fusing together to make deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen. The isotopes would then be slammed together to make a helium nucleus. The end result: You would now be a slow-motion hydrogen bomb.

  However, it should be noted that as well as the sun produces heat, you do an even better job. As you sit on the couch converting food into energy you’re producing more heat by weight than the sun does. What makes the sun so hot is its enormous size. If you were as massive as the sun, the chemical energy you produced would make you the hottest star in the galaxy.

  So if you somehow did make it inside the star, for the briefest moment—just before you were irradiated and vaporized—you would make the sun just a little bit warmer.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Ate as Many Cookies as Cookie Monster?

  WHEN IT’S EMPTY, your stomach is about the same size as your fist and frustratingly limited during feasts. Fortunately, its walls are stretchy, so when cookies are offered for dessert you’re able to eat one, two, three, four . . .

  But a stomach can’t stretch forever, and the muscles involved in food swallowing are powerful enough to force more cookies into your stomach than it can handle.

  That can lead to an issue.

  The expert on cookie stuffing is, of course, Cookie Monster. For the record, he’s appeared in 4,378 Sesame Street episodes, and an unscientific survey reveals that he eats approximately 3 cookies per episode. That’s a total of 13,134 cookies consumed. Although that’s a big number, when you spread it out over a 45-year TV run it’s perfectly safe.

  But what if you were to give Cookie Monster a run for his money and eat all those cookies in one sitting?

  Satiety is the medical term for being stuffed. It’s a complicated process that involves not just the quantity of food consumed but also the kind of calories it contains. Different calories trigger different responses—protein and fiber increase satiety while carbohydrates and fats have less effect.

  The signal from your stomach to your brain is also a bit delayed—it can take fifteen to twenty minutes for your brain to get the message, which means the faster you eat, the more cookies you can jam into your stomach before you realize there’s an overfull issue.

  Most people are typically satiated after about 25 cookies’ worth of food—more or less what Cookie Monster eats in a single frenzy. Of course, stomachs are stretchy, so 25 is not the physical limit, and competitive eaters have a few tricks to stretch it.

  First, a thin physique helps. Exactly how you can stay thin while eating 11 pounds of cookies is a bit of a paradox, but it’s true that with less fat in the way your stomach has more room to expand outward.

  Second, in preparation for eating all those cookies, you could to do some limbering up. Eating low-calorie, high-volume food (like grapes) the night before would stretch your stomach and help make it ready to stretch again.

  For Cookie Monster and you, the 60-cookie mark is where things would start to get difficult. (To be clear, we’re talking about an average-size chocolate chip cookie, not one of those cookie behemoths.)

  Unless you have eaten 60 cookies many times (and thus suppressed your gag reflex), your stomach will revolt and you will vomit. But that’s a good thing: 60 cookies equals roughly 4 liters of food, and that’s approaching your stomach’s breaking point.*

  We know the physical limit of the stomach thanks to the German physician Algot Key-Aberg, who in the late 1800s attempted to cleanse a patient of an opium overdose by pumping water into his stomach. Unfortunately, the patient’s drug use suppressed the normal vomiting response and his stomach broke like an overfilled water balloon, killing him on the operating table.

  This event piqued Key-Aberg’s curiosity and he began experimenting to determine the true capacity of a stretched human stomach using corpses. He concluded that the typical stomach can hold 4 liters of food before eruption. (Imagine two party-size sodas next to each other. If you eat or drink more than that, you are approaching what we will call here the stomach eruption limit.)

  This limit applies to all of us, except, however, for a gifted few. A small number of people have publicly passed the 4-liter mark. Depending on your training, or whether you received the genetic gift of a flexible stomach, it is possible to eat more. Joey Chestnut, the reigning hot-dog-eating champion, once ate 69 hot dogs in 10 minutes. That’s approximately 9.5 liters of food—or 130 chocolate chip cookies.

  But let’s say you lack any genetic stomach gifts. You would begin to run into real trouble at the 90-cookie mark, or about 6 liters of food.

  The weakest part of the stomach is the lesser curvature. If you imagine your stomach looking like a kidney bean, the lesser curvature is the area that bends inward. This is where the cookies would initially break through.

  The body’s innards have little defense against the bacteria that live on cookies. Clostridium perfringens,* otherwise known as gas gangrene, starts to grow in your gut as soon as the cookies bust out. It destroys live tissue and produces gas that explodes and distributes dead and rotting material throughout your guts.

  In response to the massive bacterial invasion, your immune system would send an overwhelming amount of chemicals to the infected area. This is known as septic shock and constitutes a body’s defense to widespread infection. It can be so overwhelming that the response itself can kill you. How? Inflammation, blood clots, and decreased blood flow. The pulse picks up to try to get more blood to vital organs, the body temperature drops, often dangerously, and gas gangrene can appear.

  This infection lives within a protective cocoon of dead tissue, outside the reach of white blood cells and antibacterials. Once the body progresses to this stage, which it would do rapidly, you would be unlikely to survive even with skilled medical care. Within an hour your heart would not receive enough oxygen to keep beating and you would go into cardiac arrest followed quickly by total brain death.

  All that being said, it’s possible that you would actually die before that. Remember that a typical unstretched stomach is the size of your fist. After you have filled it with 6 liters’ worth of cookies, that stomach would now be more than 20 times its normal size. This begins to get in the way of other bodily functions. The vein that runs below the stomach and returns blood from the bowels to the heart would be pinched shut.

  Then there’s the breathing problem. The stomach’s upward growth can also compromise your lungs. At 20 times normal size, your stomach would have grown into your lung space and you would be suffocating on cookies.

  Between suffocation, stomach explosion, and bowel death from oxygen starvation (never mind septic shock), the medical battle to save you would be very close, and in the end would probably depend on the amount of gas produced during digestion. After 60-some-odd cookies, the gaseous side effects of digestion might push the pressure of your stomach beyond its physical capacity. It could explode violently and distribute its fatal chocolate chip cookie content throughout your innards.

  In other words, death by burping.

  References and Further Reading

  NOT ENOUGH GRUESOMENESS for you? We’ve compiled some of our favorite sourc
es below. Here you can find plenty more details on factory mishaps, shark attacks, and air force experiments if the previous pages didn’t satisfy.

  You Were in an Airplane and Your Window Popped Out?

  Average human body proportions

  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~loebinfo/loebinfo/Proportions/humanfigure.html

  The actual story of the British Airways pilot who was sucked out of his windscreen

  http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/what-to-do-when-your-pilot-gets-sucked-out-the-plane-window/236860/

  You Were Attacked by a Great White Shark?

  Unprovoked fatal shark attacks in the United States

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal,_unprovoked_shark_attacks_in_the_United_States

  Treatment for vascular trauma

  http://www.trauma.org/archive/vascular/PVTmanage.html

  You Slipped on a Banana Peel?

  Frictional coefficient of a banana peel

  Frictional Coefficient under Banana Skin, https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/trol/7/3/7_147/_article

  Durability of the human skull and the physics of skull fracture

  Gary M. Bakken, H. Harvey Cohen, and Jon R. Abele, Slips, Trips, Missteps and Their Consequences, 119

  You Were Buried Alive?

  Mechanism of death in avalanche victims

  H. Stalsberg, C. Albretsen, M. Gilbert, et al., Vichows Archiv A Pathol Anat 414, no. 5 (September 1989): 415

  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00718625

  Survival-in-a-closed-space equation

  http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap01/ox_exer.html

  Death by CO2 buildup

  http://www.blm.gov/style/medialib/blm/wy/information/NEPA/cfodocs/howell.Par.2800.File.dat/25apxC.pdf

  You Were Attacked by a Swarm of Bees?

  The complete Schmidt sting pain index

  Justin O. Schmidt, The Sting of the Wild

  National Geographic on Smith

  http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/03/the-worst-places-to-get-stung-by-a-bee-nostril-lip-penis/

  Smith’s study on honeybee sting pain by body location

  https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.338

  You Were Hit by a Meteorite?

  Price of a meteorite

  http://geology.com/meteorites/value-of-meteorites.shtml

  Meteorite impact tsunamis

  https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2003/pmpd0310.htm

  You Lost Your Head?

  The story of Phineas Gage

  Malcolm Macmillan, An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage

  Hydrocephalus case studies

  Dr. John Lorber, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”

  http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf

  You Put on the World’s Loudest Headphones?

  Loudest sounds in recorded history

  http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times

  How long would you have to yell to heat up a cup of coffee?

  http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/poster-coffee.cfm

  You Stowed Away on the Next Moon Mission?

  Human exposure to a vacuum

  http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html

  A human exposed to low pressure

  https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2001/pmpd0110.htm

  You Were Strapped into Dr. Frankenstein’s Machine?

  Electric current effects in the human body

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763825/

  Your Elevator Cable Broke?

  Story of Nicholas White stuck in the elevator

  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down

  You Barreled over Niagara Falls?

  Daredevils of the falls

  http://www.niagarafallslive.com/daredevils_of_niagara_falls.htm

  NASA study on fatal fall heights

  http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930020462.pdf

  The splat calculator

  http://www.angio.net/personal/climb/speed

  You Couldn’t Fall Asleep?

  Sleep deprivation on rats

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2928622

  Randy Gardner story and other neurological findings after sleep deprivation

  http://archneur.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=565718

  You Were Struck by Lightning?

  The book on lightning

  Martin A. Uman, All About Lightning

  Exact timing of lightning strikes and your heartbeat

  Craig B. Smith, Lightning: Fire from the Sky, 44

  Ben Franklin and electrostatics

  https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/pmpd0610.htm

  You Took a Bath in the World’s Coldest Tub?

  CERN accident report

  https://cds.cern.ch/record/1235168/files/CERN-ATS-2010-006.pdf

  Volume of liquid helium

  http://www.airproducts.com/products/Gases/gas-facts/con version-formulas/weight-and-volume-equivalents/helium.aspx

  Supercold temperatures

  https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2010/pmpd1007.htm

  You Skydived from Outer Space?

  Calculate orbital speed

  http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/orbv3.html

  Falling bodies in the atmosphere

  http://www.pdas.com/falling.html

  You Time Traveled?

  History of the sun

  http://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html

  Timeline of the far future

  http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140105-timeline-of-the-far-future

  History of oxygen in our atmosphere

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#/me dia/File:Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png

  What would it be like to live in the dinosaur era?

  http://www.robotbutt.com/2015/06/12/an-interview-with-thomas-r-holtz-dinosaur-rock-star/

  Universal edibility test

  http://www.wilderness-survival.net/plants-1.php#fig9_5

  Fossils record the past

  https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2015/pmpd1507.htm

  You Were Caught in a Human Stampede?

  Standing crowd density

  http://www.gkstill.com/Support/crowd-density/CrowdDensity-1.html

  Past crushes and prevention strategies

  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/07/crush-point

  You Jumped into a Black Hole?

  Falling into a black hole

  https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2015/pmpd1501.htm

  Spaghettification

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

  You Were on the Titanic and Didn’t Make It into a Lifeboat?

  What happens during a brain freeze

  http://www.fasebj.org/content/26/1_Supplement/685.4.short

  You Were Killed by This Book?

  Bomb calorimeter

  http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=14079.0

  You Died from “Old Age”?

  Gain or lose microlives

  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-gain-or-lose-30-minutes-of-life-everyday/

  A simple derivation of the Gompertz law for human mortality

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18202874

  You Were Stuck in . . . ?

  Standard atmosphere by altitude

  http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/standard-atmosphere-d_604.html?v=8.3&units=psi#

  Military survival guide, chapter 7—don’t drink urine

  http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/21-76-1/fm_21-76-1survival.pdf

  You Were Raised by Buzzards?

  Composition of raw meat

  http://time.com/3731226/you-asked-why-cant-i-e
at-raw-meat/

  The microbiome of New World vultures

  http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141125/ncomms6498/full/ncomms6498.html

  Why it’s a bad idea to scare a vulture

  http://animals.howstuffworks.com/birds/vulture-vomit.htm

  You Were Sacrificed into a Volcano?

  Geologist actually falls into lava (and survives)

  http://articles.latimes.com/1985-06-14/news/mn-2540_1_kilauea-volcano

  Video of organic material dropped into a lava pit

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq7DDk8eLs8

  You Just Stayed in Bed?

  2016’s safest states in America

  https://wallethub.com/edu/safest-states-to-live-in/4566/

  You Dug a Hole to China and Jumped In?

  The structure of the Earth

  http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/geophys/earth struct.html

  Temperature of Earth versus depth

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient#/media/File:Temperature_schematic_of_inner_Earth.jpg

  Antipode map (useful for finding out where you should start your dig)

  http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/antipode-map/#.VS6rxqWYCyM

  The exact time it would take to fall through Earth (gravity tunnel in nonuniform Earth)

  http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/ajp/83/3/10.1119/1.4898780

  You Toured the Pringles Factory and Fell off the Catwalk?

  Historical factory deaths

  Factory Inspector, April 1905

  You Played Russian Roulette with a Really, Really Big Gun?