Ask Mike: Heads in space
Hey Guys,
Watch enough sci-fi movies and you’re sure to notice that if a character takes off his or her helmet in outer space, that person’s head will explode (think: “Total Recall”). It’s a rock-solid certainty in cinema, but is it true in real life? Not having access to a rocket and helmet-less volunteer, I perused the Web for the straight scoop.
I thought I might be one of the first people to ponder this admittedly morbid question. How wrong I was. There are a slew of sites dedicated to the fates of skulls in space. However, only a few have the air of authority.
The aptly named site Damn Interesting seems to know its stuff. Writer Alan Bellows explains that over the past several decades a number of live organisms have been exposed to the vacuum of space. What happens obviously isn’t a good thing, but rest assured, the head does not explode like a pumpkin.
So, what does happen? An excellent article from NASA explains that “to experience the vacuum is to die, but not quite in the grisly manner portrayed in the movies.” Instead of the head blowing up or the eyes popping out of the head,” death arises from the response of the free gasses trapped within the tissues.”
Fortunately, the death isn’t instantaneous. Again, according to NASA, a person can survive “for about 80 seconds if a pressure higher than about 47 mm mercury is then reestablished.” If not, “you turn into freeze-dried dead meat on a stick.” Fair warning to space tourists.
So, not surprisingly, Hollywood has taken considerable artistic license when it comes to ill-fated explorers in space. Can you think of any other cinematic clichés that might not be 100% realistic? Sound off in the comments below.
Thanks for reading,
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What is the force of gravity between two 1455 kg cars separated by a distance of 48 m on an interstate highway?
All space ships seem to have gravity but the method is never explained.
All aliens speak English.
Actually, the Japanese did tests on POWs in WW2 and knew the effects of vacuums on humans properly for quite a while. What I’d heard was that the human body doubles in size as the liquids boil but the tissue can tolerate the stretching. 30 seconds was the number I’d seen for survival, instead of 87 seconds – yay for the extra time!
I’ve noticed that in several movies people can be fighting with guns, knives, ect. and even after the people have been shot or injured in another way they can still fight like they just started. What’s up with that?
Wow, that was random
So the helmet-less re-entry scene in “2001″ is plausible, as was claimed at the time.
kool
In the cartoon movie Titan AE, two of the main characters have to manuever from their broken shuttle pod, to the main ship. Right before one of them kicks out the window to start this adventure one of them says “Breath out” and then they use a fire extinguisher to propel themselves into the hangar of their ship.
My question is, would it be better to breath in or breath out right before you were jettisoned into space?
Dennis, I think the only way to replicate gravity on a space ship is to create centrifugal force (a spinning motion). To create 9.8 m/s/s of acceleration, though, would require an extreme amount of energy, probably more than NASA is capable of storing on a space ship.
Kris, i read that it is better to breathe out since that decreases the pressure in your body.
What bothers me more is fire and sounds of explosions in space. I am sure vast amount of energy would create light and some heat in no atmosphere but like the explosions you seen in scifi is just so unreal and bothers me. I am no scientist but it is common since that you must have oxygen to burn and sound waves to travel.
Ok, some basic math.. using the inverse proprotions for pressure. and 14.7 PSI as normal sea level pressure. The change in pressure, from 14.7 to 7.4 is the same pressure changing as 14.7 to 29.4 i.e. invert the 1/2 to 2/1 (or 2..) and it builds from there.
14.7 Starting
7.4 vs 29.4 1/2 atmosphere vs 2 atmospheres
3.7 vs 58.8 1/4 vs 4
1.8 vs 117.6 1/8 vs 8
0.9 vs 235.2 1/16 vs 16
0.45 vs 470.4 1/32 vs 32
0.22 vs 960.8 1/64 vs 64
0.11 vs 1921.6 1/128 vs 128
0.05 vs 3843.2 1/256 vs 256
ok, 256 atmospheres of pressure is the same as 8448 feet of pressure under water. and the change from 256 atmospheres to normal sea level is the same as going from normal sea level to 1/256th of atmosphere or approx .05 psi. near vacum
Now based on the above.. They have pulled fish and tube worms and such up from the bottom of the ocean in the 8 to 10K range. and slowly pulled up cause no deformity in the animals. Killed em yeah, in most cases but not deformed from bloating and pressure… Now on this since they were mostly water, and water is virtually incompressible it is expected to not change volume..
Air will change volume. A pingpong ball from 33 feet under water to surface without leaking will expand approx 30% (not full expansion because the ball keeps back some of the pressure increasing the internal pressure.)
Ok, now based on this information.. What SHOULD happen to the body.
1. All gases in the body will expand until the “bag” of the body compensates and holds the pressure difference down. (in the short term, astronauts bloat some from long term lower pressure in spacecraft.) Now the air in the blood stream is actually not much at all in total volume. so it would not bloat the person up like a balloon.
2. If the person has air in his lungs it will expand until it fills the lungs, keeps expanding and then keeps pushing until the lungs blow up pushing air into the rest of the body.. If the person basicly opens his mouth and screams and keeps screaming (or silently pushing the air out) as it expands, a blown lung can be avoided.. (this is done by submariners who need to use the rescue hatch on a submarine) (now grant you they go several hundred feet, not 8000.
3. The liquids in the body should remain pretty stable because the “bag” of the body will hold pressures up to 14.7 easily, if the internal pressure goes too low, the fluids would boil and expand and increase the pressure until stabilized. Now with the mouth open, the fluids in the lungs and mouth / nose etc will boil off and basicly freeze dry the cells. however it would probably not affect the WHOLE body.
4. The eyes would probably have the vitrious fluid boil off and pop the eyes and if it only was 30-50 seconds and the person survived, the eye might not have popped at that time, but the pressure difference would probably cause gloucoma or seperation of the lens and cornea of the eye.
5. The eardrums would blow out as the middle ear equalizes and probably boil off the inner ear cochlear fluids.
6. If the condition lasted for less than a min or so, it might not cause death, but a whole host of damage to many of the systems. After that death, if for more than a few min, more and more would be freeze dried on the outside and frozen solid in the center.
As far as fire and explosions in space.. It is possible..
1. The Sun, it burns, it has no O2, just Fission.. and superheated gas or vaporized particles can glow and cause a plasma-like glow that might be assumed to be “fire”
2. Energy can be neither created or destroyed but can be converted. So various energy if for some reason it converts to an energy that is in the audiable range.. But the occurance for that would be near impossible. The wave of energy would have to be a continuous or else you would have a single finite noise, not a explosion that keeps going for more than an instant. And it would have to hit whatever you were going to hit the noise (side of spacecraft, spacesuit etc).. Now with the energy hitting (similar to solar winds) you would need the energy to convert to an audible range and that would be the hard one. (possible like telegraph, electricity to clicking, or radio / television) however improbable.
How about the effects of rapid depressurization from great depth? Like 7 miles down. I seen several sci-fi movies of this type and no two agree on what would happen. In one you simply exploded at some point and in another you hemorrhaged to death.
On the sounds in space, I’m sure the movie makers know it is not scientifically accurate, but a movie with no sound isn’t exactly as fun to watch.
Mr p idk how to send u my project so i think ima send u in in a comment n then ima print it if u want it okay
There is one sci-fi movie where the exploding head thing didn’t happem
In 2001 -A Space Odyssey HAL locks Dave out of the ship
Dave gets his shuttle craft next to a door on the Odysssy , opens an airlock on the Odyssey , triggers explosive bolts on the shuttle craft-which don’t make a sound – goes tumbling into the Odyssey and closes the airlock door.
No sounds are made and Dave’s head doesn’t explode
Kudu’s to Kubrick for getting that right
Me bad
I really didn’t mean to give the late Stanley Kubrick a large African antelope as a token of apprciation for his great film-making skills.
At least one homosexual lover dies or is or turned evil. It doesn’t just happen in Brokeback Mountain or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One has even written online explaining all the evil/killed off lesbians in movies and TV.
Spacecraft are the ultimate clown cars. They are very roomy inside, yet compact on the outside.
There is ammo for high powered rifles that you can buy that can’t pierce anything including the thin sheet metal of vehicles all you see is a spark where the bullet bounces of an object and it can be any object (including glass and wood).
Reloading doesn’t need to happen except at a critical time.
Western gunslingers would practice on glass bottles, a one time event. Cans and paper targets would have been much more common, although probably boring. Who wants to watch a person put holes in paper?
Cell phone service sucks. There is even an online video with about 20+ movie scenes where cell phone service cuts out or doesn’t even work.
Modern aerial dogfights would be extremely rare. Missiles can engage targets from several miles away including beyone visual range. Here is how the Top Gun would have really happened. Two F-14s would have launched 8 AIM-54 missiles total at once from as fara away as 131 miles. From about 20-31 miles (depending on the model) away both sides would have traded missiles with two F-14s able to shoot 4 AIM-7 missiles total. Now if anybody is left after that, 2 F-14s would have had 4 missiles left to engage targets from about 11 miles out. Then comes the dog fight, if neither side was destroyed by then. Also aircraft can’t really dodge missiles. The modern missile goes much faster than an aircraft and can pull much tighter turns. Decoys are possible but if the missile still locks onto the aircraft it’s all over. The missile is more likely that a missile will just fail in flight.
no fire is possible because they burn oxygen thats how the space shuttle works anyway
and there is no sound in space becuase the sound waves cant travel becaseu there is no medium for them to travel through
Very interesting mike i guess i watch way to much sci-fi movies to amuse me about space.
Ha ha i would pretty love to see if a person head does explode in space.
2001 is the most accurate movie of this, the book explains the science and physiology of “Space Breathing”
The gravity simulation is also explained !
The original (not more recent and far better version) Battlestar Galactica was infamous for questionable science. Probably the best example of the writer’s feeble grasp of various scientific principles was the excrable “Fire in the Sky” episode, where the landing hangers were on fire. Bypassing the entire question of how the open-to-space hangers could be burning to being with, they replaced the laser cannons of the fighers with fire extinguishers (a neat trick in itself) and then the pilots made strafing runs to try and put out the flames – completely ignoring the point that, since they were in deep space, it would have been a simple task to match speeds and fire away with no need to fire and peel off at the last second.
Everyone being sucked out a plane if the window is smashed! LIE!
Does Arthur C. Clark lie? After it was Arthur that was one of the first to propose geo-synch orbits before it happened back in the 40’s. I would imagine that Arthur also had access to the Nipponese and NASA data too.
People not needing helmets half the time? Taking only five minutes of space travel in most movies?
While your eyes certainly won’t be sucked from their sockets, you forget one important detail: Radiation. Space is chock-full of radiation, which we are normally protected from by our atmosphere and ozone layer.
So, vacuum aside, you wouldn’t survive a second exposed to space, because the instant you had even the smallest tear in your space suit you would be flooded with radiation, killing every cell in your body almost immediately.
That being said, as Mars has no atmosphere, on Total Recall Arnie and his girlfriend should have died immediately, not even having time for their eyes to bulge out.
So the scene from the Star Trek series, where they are trapped in a cargo bay with potentially explosive cargo and a plasma fire, and eject the cargo and extinguish the fire by depressurizing, is plausible.
Even down to the breathing out and about the right time to repressurize – I guess they checked the facts for that one.
Since you are pondering such peculiar questions that aimlessly pop into your odd mind, would you mind finding out the answer to this question that goes about my brain every day?:
“If a tree falls, without anyone around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Star Trek checks out the science behind the show. And yes a tree does make the sound.