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Blobfish
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Humans don't explode in vacuum.
Thanks! I was about to ask if there is time for the pressure differences to act upon our biology, or if the freezing bit happens before everything has a chance to go pop!
That makes sense, I mean we're already melting over here with the atmospheric buffer, I imagine it'd be the same or maybe even hotter straight on.
Feel dumb for not thinking about it this way, to be honest, thank you!
If it'd get me to space, I'd happily volunteer!:)) With a sensor-laden space suit, of course, not looking to lose any toes:))
There are no cool breezes in space
For gases, volume is inversely proportional to pressure, which means as pressure approaches zero, very slight changes in pressure will make a big difference to the behavior of the gases.
But for solids and liquids, the absence of pressure doesn't make that big of a difference. Yes, vapor pressure means that water will boil at lower temperatures in a vacuum, but the way the actual liquids stay together, especially when enclosed in in a way that limits vapor pressure, remains the same in low pressure environments as they are in medium pressure environments.
So when you go scuba diving, the doubling of pressure when you hit a depth of 10 meters is simply accommodated by you breathing denser air out of your tank. But nothing else about your body feels any different under that pressure. Go even deeper, and some things might start getting affected by the dissolved gases in your blood and other bodily fluids, but we're talking about huge pressure differences from the surface, basically 1 atmosphere of pressure for each 10 meters you descend.
In contrast, the difference between sea level atmospheric pressure and the vacuum of space is only one atmosphere of pressure. The liquid and solid parts of your body will be fine. Your reliance on breathing might not fare so well, but see how militaries deal with it: pressurizing the cabin to some degree but making sure that the actual breathing mask is delivering the right amount of oxygen even when the cabin pressure is the equivalent of a high altitude.
So when that blobfish gets yanked out from 900 meters deep up to the surface, that's a sudden loss of pressure from 91 atms to 1 atm, a 90 atm swing. But for a human going from 1 to 0 atms, that's just a 1-atm difference. If you open your mouth and exhale while it's happening, maybe relax your eustachian tubes if you know how to do that, you probably won't have any issues from the decompression, until you start to try to breathe.
Oh, wow, so not all of that sci-fi was purely -fi! This makes so much sense, yet I've never conceptualised it as such. Like, I knew the concrete pressure differences, but never had them set in a big picture view:-?
Jesus, now I wish I would've taken up more physics, would've happily soldiered through the math for this amount of interesting!
You don't really freeze because in a vacuum you lose heat very slowly. You'd suffocate long before that. Or, as previously mentioned, go pop
Hmm, is it because vacuum acts essentially like an insulator? I'm thinking this because, from what I remember about high-school thermodynamics, heat needs to "jump" from matter to matter, and there's not a relevant quantity of matter in a vacuum to act as a heat absorber, like air does over here, right?:-?
I'm genuinely asking, I'm sure I have brain rot from watching too many sci-fi movies...
I'm not sure that I'll get the English terms wrong but basically heat can move in three ways:
Thank you, this makes a lot of sense!
Also, guess I missed my mark, would've been the ideal astronaut based on this! Does being dumb also help help? I mean, less going on up in the ol' noggin, thinking energy is transferred slower that way:))) Or that I use less, which would make me fuel-efficient!=))))
Radiation will still transfer heat. But that will be relatively slow. This image gives a quick overview of the ways heat may be transfered.
Yep, this is very clear, thank you! Visual aides are OP, I swear!
It's exactly what the other commenter said, to transfer heat efficiently you need something else to transfer it to. In a vacuum, you only lose energy by radiation. Therefore on a spaceship you're actually in greater danger of overheating than freezing to death.
Another counterintuitive thing that stems from this is that space vacuum isn't even, strictly speaking, cold. The few and far between particles of space dust and gas can have very high energy flying by, at least until they hit something. It's only cold when you average out over all the empty space.
Huh, that's really interesting! Yeah, given all of these factors, I would imagine that absolute vacuum would be... well, nothing in terms of cold or hot:-? Wow, that's a huge paradigm shift, I shoud dare to be stupid online more often, I'm learning more from this thread than I would have expected!
Thank you!
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Yaaay!🥳 My brain's getting better at brain things!
Doesn’t all the water in us boil. Like instant Bends.
Also aliens who evolved on planets without magnetospheres: “these earthlings are interesting but they seem to get stressed and lumpy in space.”
It boils, but because of the pressure drop, not because of the temperature change
Yeah, also the nitrogen escapes (along with the rest of the now gasses too), but I guess you wouldn’t have time to feel those effects.
No, that doesn’t happen. The bends is worse because you can go from multiple atmospheres of pressure to just 1. The worst space can get is from 1 atm to 0 atm.
Yeah good point, also you wouldn’t have time to feel the effects, since the water is all going to vaporize, not just dissolved gases in your blood.
As close to the sun as we are, you will rather get crisp cooked. Freezing only happens after Mars or in a large body's shadow.
I swear the Universe never stops getting more and more interesting to me, even if it's in a pretty horrifying way!
i mean after you're dead, sure, but that happens on earth too
afaik surface-dwelling mammals exposed to a vacuum just get some terrible damage to things like the lungs and eyes, and the more sensitive blood vessels, and if left in the vacuum and exposed to the sun they'd go kinda crispy..
This movie is so good. It captures the feeling of not knowing if you're stuck in a simulation better than The Matrix. While the movie is about implanted memories, not a simulation, it keeps the questioning going much longer than The Matrix.
For me it lasted about two weeks.
What movie is this?
Total Recall
Total Recall! It's worth a watch. This shit gives the idea that it's some sort of space horror movie, it's not. It's actually a bit funny at times. I loved it.
Wasn't there also one about a murder crime in a train and in multiple runs, he figures out it's all from his memories from his harvested brain, run in a simulation. And at the end he goes off the train, whch is handwaved with some quantum reality bullshit.
Mans look like he resides in the White House.