by Cody Cassidy
Micromort source
http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm
Micromorts table for common risks
http://www.riskcomm.com/visualaids/riskscale/datasources.php
Visual display of everyday dangers
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/11/6/1352225082582/Mortality-rates-big-graph-001.jpg
You Traveled to Jupiter?
Jupiter atmosphere
http://lasp.colorado.edu/education/outerplanets/giantplan ets_atmospheres.php
Galileo probe
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1989-084E
Planetary atmospheres
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2013/pmpd1301.htm
You Ate the World’s Deadliest Substances?
Discovery of botulinium toxin H
Jason R. Barash and Stephen S. Arnon, Journal of Infectious Diseases, October 7, 2013
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/10/07/infdis.jit449.short
The Litvinenko Inquiry: Report into the death of Alexander Litvinenko by Robert Owen
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/21/world/europe/litvinenko-inquiry-report.html
You Lived in a Nuclear Winter?
Able Archer war scare declassified report
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb533-The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report-Released/2012-0238-MR.pdf
Nuclear winter destruction
http://www.helencaldicott.com/nuclear-war-nuclear-winter-and-human-extinction/
Computer models show what would happen to Earth in a nuclear war
http://www.popsci.com/article/science/computer-models-show-what-exactly-would-happen-earth-after-nuclear-war
Environmental consequences of nuclear war
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ToonRobockTurcoPhysicsToday.pdf
IPPNW study on nuclear famine
http://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html
You Vacationed on Venus?
Solar system parachutes
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/docs/07%20-%20Space%20parachute%20system%20design%20Lingard.pdf
Lightning on Venus
http://www.space.com/9176-lightning-venus-strikingly-similar-earth.html
You Were Swarmed by Mosquitoes?
Mosquito menace during the construction of the Panama Canal
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/10/economist-explains-2
Researchers report more than 9,000 bites per minute in Canadian tundra
Richard Jones, Mosquito, 51
You Became an Actual Human Cannonball?
Muzzle velocity of a cannonball
http://defense-update.com/products/digits/120ke.htm
You Were Hit by a Penny Dropped from the Top of the Empire State Building?
Terminal velocity of a penny
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/dynamics/q0203.shtml
How to catch a grape in your mouth
George Plimpton, George Plimpton on Sports, 187
Basketball coefficient of restitution
http://blogmaverick.com/2006/10/27/nba-balls/3/
You Actually Shook Someone’s Hand?
Energy generation by fusion in the sun
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/interior.shtml
Proton-proton chain from hyperphysics
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/procyc.html
You Were the Ant Under the Magnifying Glass?
MIT video demonstration of Archimedes death ray
http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_ArchimedesResult.html
Concentrating many lasers onto one small spot
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2001/pmpd0101.htm
You Stuck Your Hand in a Particle Accelerator?
The Large Hadron Collider
http://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider
Man who stuck his head in a particle accelerator
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186999-what-happens-if-you-get-hit-by-the-main-beam-of-a-particle-accelerator-like-the-lhc
You Were Holding This Book and It Instantly Collapsed into a Black Hole?
What if a coin turned into a black hole?
http://quarksandcoffee.com/index.php/2015/07/10/black-hole-in-your-pocket/
You Stuck a Really, Really Powerful Magnet to Your Forehead?
What is a magnetar?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/magnetars/
Magnetic levitation
http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
Physics of strong magnetic fields
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0002442
You Were Swallowed by a Whale?
The size of a sperm whale’s throat
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/could-a-whale-accidentally-swallow-you-it-is-possible-26353362/?no-ist
Explanation of ambergris and its value
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/08/120830-ambergris-charlie-naysmith-whale-vomit-science/
You Took a Swim Outside a Deep-Sea Submarine?
Death in overpressure chambers
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docket/archive/pdfs/NIOSH-125/125-ExplosionsandRefugeChambers.pdf
Pressure versus ocean depth
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/pflu.html
You Stood on the Surface of the Sun?
Solar X-rays
http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/swac/tutorials/sig_goes.php
You Ate as Many Cookies as Cookie Monster?
Dr. A. Key-Aberg’s study on the limits of the stomach
The Lancet, September 19, 1891, 678
General Use and Inspiration
Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm, 141.
Randall Munroe, What If?
Phil Plait, Death from the Skies!
Jearl Walker, The Flying Circus of Physics with Answers
Hyperphysics: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hph.html
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the enormous help of many creative, extremely generous people. Drafting an entire list of names would be impossible in this space, but we would be remiss to not mention a few people who deserve special recognition.
Thanks to family and their tremendous advice on everything from the Oxford comma to the title; to friends and their willingness to be peppered with questions both silly and serious; to the great teachers in our lives, both in school and in discussions around tables, in living rooms, around campfires, and online.
Thanks to Kevin Plottner for his talents in drawing icons and then killing them. Thanks to Alia Habib and the folks at McCormick for taking a chance. And thanks to our editor, Meg Leder, and the entire team at Penguin for their assistance at every turn.
*Why do a few feet make such a difference? Picture it this way: When you plug up your bathtub, the power of the water sucking the plug into place gets exponentially greater the closer it gets. Same thing when it comes to airplane windows, and you’re the plug.
*This is where real life differs from the James Bond movie Goldfinger. Goldfinger would not have been sucked out of the window; he just would have been stuffed into it.
*Instead of being pressed into the plane, you would bang against it because of something called reverberation dynamics, which is the same principle that explains a flag flapping in the wind instead of being held in one position. Even if it seems like the wind is constant, it isn’t, and the flag is in a perpetual state of change and adjustment. Your changes and adjustments would be your face slamming against the aircraft repeatedly.
*This happened on professional golfer Payne Stewart’s private jet in 1999. His plane decompressed at 30,000 feet and the pilots weren’t able to put their masks on in
time. Because the plane was on autopilot when it depressurized, it continued flying for 1,500 miles before it ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota.
*It’s important to note that we’re talking about great white sharks here—which kill the most people but don’t appear to do it out of hunger. Another breed of shark, called the oceanic whitetip, has intentionally killed and eaten humans. However, attacks from whitetips are uncommon (usually survivors of shipwrecks) because they frequent open ocean, far away from people, whereas great whites often patrol beaches.
The most famous oceanic whitetip attack occurred in 1945 just before Japan’s surrender when a navy ship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed near the Philippines. Nine hundred men hit the water alive, but because of a miscommunication they weren’t rescued for four days. Oceanic whitetip sharks, attracted to all the commotion, began feeding on the sailors. By the time the survivors were rescued, the sharks had killed and eaten as many as 150 men.
*A CoF larger than 1 means the object slips at an angle greater than 45 degrees. The highest CoF we can find is the rubber on the tires of top fuel dragsters, which when spinning have a CoF on pavement of 4 (they could climb a 75-degree wall).
*Lubricated surfaces have even less friction. The synovial fluid that lubricates your joints, for example, is one of the slipperiest substances in the world—registering at a CoF of .0003, which is a good thing, otherwise it would give cracking your knuckles a more literal interpretation.
*This is where bugs really have us beat. No bug in the history of bugs has ever fallen to its death.
*Maybe you suffer from sleep paralysis. During parts of sleep the body is paralyzed, which is fine unless the brain makes a mistake and you wake up during this paralysis and your muscles don’t turn on. On average this happens to everyone once in their life and it usually lasts less than a minute, but in some cases can last up to an hour and can really confuse EMTs. In one case a woman made it all the way to the morgue before she woke up.
*Another test: Doctors would hold up a mirror near your mouth, and if you were breathing, your humid exhalation would “fog the mirror.” Thus the origin of the phrase “Anyone who could fog a mirror could do this job.”
*Edgar Allan Poe was one of them. He had a thing about being buried alive.
*Q: What if you were buried with a few potted plants—would that help? A: Sadly, no, they don’t create oxygen quickly enough to make up for the amount of space they take up.
*This was the same issue the astronauts on Apollo 13 faced after they were forced to move to the lunar excursion module.
*Due to the fact that a sting is fatal to a honeybee, they reserve it for their larger predators. For the smaller ones, like the Asian giant hornet (which has a real sweet tooth for their honey), they have a rather unique killing method. The honeybees surround the intruder in a tightly packed ball and use a combination of their body heat and carbon dioxide emissions to overheat and asphyxiate the thief.
*It does sting and paralyze tarantulas, after which it lays an egg on the spider. When the egg hatches, the larva eats its way inside the tarantula and begins consuming it, though the larva takes care to avoid the major organs of the spider so as to keep it alive for as long as possible. When the young wasp is ready, it finally bursts out of its abdomen, like the alien out of Kane’s stomach. And now you somehow feel sorry for tarantulas.
*The verbage on meteors is confusing. Here’s how it works: A meteor is the flash of light in the sky. A meteorite is the solid object that made the flash and reached the ground. A meteoroid is the solid object before it hits the atmosphere.
*Modified bike pumps, called fire pistons, can compress air so that it gets hot enough to start campfires.
*What started as a bad day for Michelle quickly began looking up, though, after she was able to sell the destroyed Malibu for $10,000 and the meteorite for $69,000.
*If you were lucky, it would be a meteorite from the moon or Mars. Those go for hundreds of dollars per carat, while the cheaper and more common ones come from the asteroid belt and fetch far less.
*Too fast to surf, unfortunately.
*It’s hard to imagine how devastating the tsunami would be. Just 2,300 years ago a meteor only 500 feet wide landed in the Atlantic and washed away what is now New York City.
*If your head was chopped off, experiments in rats show that you would have around four seconds of consciousness before the massive loss in blood pressure, akin to getting up too quickly out of a hot tub, would cause you to pass out.
*The other explanation for this student’s remarkable mental capability is that the inner part of the brain (which he was almost entirely missing), called white matter, is not quite as important as the outer bits, called gray matter. So if you’re going to lose some brain, scoop some out of the middle.
*Incidentally, while we’re on the topic of brains versus computers, yours can still do some things faster than the fastest supercomputer. But the computer is catching up.
*These pressure waves dissipate in the air as heat, and though yelling doesn’t produce enough heat to be a health risk, if you hollered at a cold cup of coffee that was in a perfect thermos, your cup would be hot and ready to drink in a year and a half.
*One way to make a speaker this loud is to connect one exit tube alternately between one vacuum chamber and one chamber pressurized to two atmospheres.
*Liquid of any kind in your space helmet is dangerous. In 2013, on a space walk around the International Space Station, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned when water leaked into his helmet, sending dangerous globs floating about.
*This is the same reason why walking on hot coals is possible if done correctly.
*Earth’s atmosphere has an SPF rating of around 200.
*Okay, we know this all sounds like bad news, but the opportunity for rescue is real! The experiments with dogs showed that exposure to vacuum for ninety seconds is nearly always survivable, though during this period the dogs were unconscious and paralyzed, and the gas escaping their bowels caused defecation, vomiting, and urination. Their tongues were also coated in ice and the dogs swelled up, so it doesn’t sound pleasant, but after repressurization they deflated, and after a few minutes they were as good as new. Two minutes of vacuum exposure appears to be the limit, though.
*It’s difficult to say exactly what the lethal dose of electricity is because how it travels is a little unpredictable. At least one person has been killed by as few as 24 volts, but that involved a lot of water.
*Part of the danger in grabbing an electric fence is that the electricity will cause your arm muscles to fire—and the clench muscle is stronger than the release muscle, so you cannot let go of the fence. The same goes for your legs. Electricity does not “blow” people off the ground. It causes leg muscles to fire, and the extend leg muscles are stronger than the contract ones, so you jump.
*As a comparison, if you’re trying to get to the second story of your building, taking the stairs or escalator are both ten times as dangerous and rock climbing the outside of the building is more than a thousand times riskier.
*It didn’t.
*According to the same study, a 240-foot fall (hitting the water at 80 miles per hour) is fatal regardless of body position. The Golden Gate Bridge is 245 feet high, and 95 percent of jumpers die on impact.
*Common question: If you were falling into water, would firing a bullet into the water to “break up the surface tension” as you fell save you? Unfortunately, no. Surface tension is not relevant to your survival. What is relevant is the density of the water and how quickly it will stop you. In order to survive you have to decrease that density, so what you need are lots of bubbles, and a single standard bullet will not create enough. To survive you would need a column of bubbles three feet deep and as wide as you are. So to give yourself a chance, you would need
either an explosive bullet or many bullets, e.g., a machine gun.
*One of the waste products removed during sleep is called beta-amyloid, and its presence is closely associated with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
*There is a very rare and fatal disease called fatal familial insomnia that prevents its sufferers from sleeping, but it looks like the damage it does to your brain is what kills you and insomnia is a side effect.
*How a cloud generates electricity is still not totally understood, but we think it has to do with how ice and water travel up and down in the up and down drafts of a storm cloud, generating bits of static electricity in the exchange, like lots of tiny wool socks rubbing on a carpet.
*If you feel static electricity building, like the hair on your arms rising or the air around you beginning to crackle, take cover quickly. Getting into a car is best. The metal of a car provides the ultimate low-resistance path for the lightning bolt. The electric charge follows around the outside of the car, avoiding the inside entirely.