Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren boglebam here with a classic episode from our erstwhile host, Christian Sager. This one gets a little intense. It's about what would really happen to a person if they found themselves in the nearer vacuum of space without a space suit. Hey, brain Stuff, it's Christians Sager. Do you remember that time in Battlestar Galactica when that one character was blown out
an air lock into outer space without a suit? No, what about when it happened in two thousand one, or Guardians of the Galaxy or Sunshine. Yes, we all dream about traveling in space, but if movies are any indication, we spend almost as much time thinking about flying around up there without a suit on. So let's answer this question once and for all. What would space actually due to a human body? Well, here's the good news. You wouldn't die instantly. Yeah, you might actually survive for a
little bit out there. How do we know because somebody tested it out on dogs. In nineteen sixty five, researchers at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas exposed several dogs to a near vacuum. The dogs survived for up to nineties seconds, but if they went two minutes or more, they died when re pressurized. And if your first thought is they did this to dogs, look I'm right there with you. Researchers at NASA did the same to chimpanzees in the late nineteen sixties, finding that they could last
up to three point five minutes. And then there's been a few accidents where people got d and then re pressurized, like a technician at Johnson Space Center who lost consciousness after twelve seconds. This was just before the moisture on his tongue began to boil. That's right, his tongue boiled. Sea. Without air pressure to keep your precious bodily fluids in their with state, they would rapidly lose heat energy before
they froze and then evaporated totally. This isn't the worst thing the lack of pressure can do to you either. The gases inside you would expand, causing you to swell up like a balloon in a Thanksgiving Day parade. This includes air and gas bubbles formed from your boiling bodily fluids. That effect is called ebulism, which can block your bloodstream. With those bubbles and that would cause you to pass
out in about fifteen seconds. From the lack of blood flowing into your brain, your skins blood vessels would burst. Your internal organs would also swell and likely tear, but you wouldn't explode like in total recall. You would just stretch painfully until you died. Keep in mind, so far we've only been talking about the effects to a body in a vacuum. In actual space, there are even more
hazards to deal with. Contrary to what some inferior intellects may say, it act actually isn't very cold in space because there aren't enough gas particles to transfer heat. But depending on your location, you could either be exposed to a star's thermal radiation at around a hundred and twenty degrees celsius, or your own body heat would radiate away
in the shade at around negative one hundred degrees. Cosmic rays and solar wind would also cook you with high energy photons, destroying your DNA and possibly leading to cancer if you even survived. And while you're swelling and roasting, you might also be hit by micro meteoroids, which are those little particles of dust and rock that whipped through space at high speed. Finally, there's the obvious lack of oxygen.
Normally you could hold your breath for several minutes, but remember without pressure, that whole boiling effect would diffuse the oxygen from your blood, so again, after about fifteen seconds, you'd pass out. And don't try to hold your breath either, it would just expand with the other gases, rupturing your lungs. All in all, these things would probably kill you in less than a minute. Today's episode was written by Christian
and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how Stuffworks dot com. Plus. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.