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Thread: What happens when a person is "spaced"?

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    Default What happens when a person is "spaced"?

    Watching some sci-fi series recently in which a person is "spaced' i.e. sent into space from a space ship.
    The most recent "spacing" showed the person simply drifting into space.

    My belief is that one of two things, maybe both, will happen:

    1. The person's blood will boil and the body will explode because of the internal pressure, or
    2. The person will be immediately frozen, or
    3. Number 1 will happen and the resultant bits will be frozen.

    Hopefully number 2 otherwise it would be an unpleasant job cleaning the "air lock".
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    With or with out pressurized space suit?
    I am assuming with out! POP
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    Quote Originally Posted by Guiseppe View Post
    Watching some sci-fi series recently in which a person is "spaced' i.e. sent into space from a space ship.
    The most recent "spacing" showed the person simply drifting into space.

    My belief is that one of two things, maybe both, will happen:

    1. The person's blood will boil and the body will explode because of the internal pressure, or
    2. The person will be immediately frozen, or
    3. Number 1 will happen and the resultant bits will be frozen.

    Hopefully number 2 otherwise it would be an unpleasant job cleaning the "air lock".
    Ahh, you have been watching The Expanse. Awesome show.
    That is the only show I am currently aware of that uses the term "spaced".

    Dumping bodies through the airlock into space is of course very popular in many others shows and movies of course.

    It will not be that spectacular, the body will not explode.
    Some Scifi shows have got it very wrong with the instant freeze.

    You are somewhat right about the blood, the oxygen will be instantly released out of it in form of gas but that will not make you explode but almost immediately unconscious as the brain is instantly deprived of dissolved oxygen.
    That and all trapped air/gas will make you expand but there is no air around you and therefore very little thermal conductivity so it will take some time for the body to actually freeze and it will find ways to stretch and balloon out first. Keep in mind that most are also wearing clothing, so death from organ failure will happen before freezing.

    It could take some time (minutes) until you are actually clinically dead but all your blood vessels will burst in the vital areas so any form of recovery highly unlikely even if you were almost immediately retrieved. Brain and lungs would be instantly destroyed.

    I could go on about immediate evacuation of urine, faeces, stomach acid, etc but I will leave all that up to your imagination.
    Last edited by Uncle Fester; 13-02-21 at 10:55 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Guiseppe View Post
    Watching some sci-fi series recently in which a person is "spaced' i.e. sent into space from a space ship.
    The most recent "spacing" showed the person simply drifting into space.

    My belief is that one of two things, maybe both, will happen:

    1. The person's blood will boil and the body will explode because of the internal pressure, or
    2. The person will be immediately frozen, or
    3. Number 1 will happen and the resultant bits will be frozen.

    Hopefully number 2 otherwise it would be an unpleasant job cleaning the "air lock".

    Somebody has been watching The Expanse again.

    OK... so there are two things here and we need to separate them.
    The first is depressurisation and the second is exposure in space.

    Lets start with depresurisation. It's not that dramatic. It's only 14psi. Put a glass on your mouth like a kid and suck the air out. That's pretty much it.
    You can of course simulate a vacuum a little easier with a syringe or a number of other ways. The most public example you might have seen was when the USA athletes were using "cupping". A sham form of other shams.

    Anyhow, you can see what happens to the skin. The blood vessels expand and the skin reddens. The difference here is the person is still alive and blood is circulating.
    That's the first part.

    Next is what happens when we do this to the whole body. A couple of things happen. Liquids do start to boil and the nitrogen in your blood starts to bubble out.
    When we're talking about killing a person by "spacing them" there isn't much time for them to experience the more unpleasant symptoms of decompression sickness.

    So what would you experience if you were spaced. Well provided you didn't hold your breath, it would be a quite peaceful death. You wouldn't feel much different. You might feel a little puffy on the skin but you would breath normally and not notice that air was missing. You wouldn't hear anything, well except for maybe ringing in your ears as a symptom of hypoxia. As you go hypoxic you experience tunnel vision and that vision decreases as you fall asleep and that's end of the line for you. A pretty good way to die.
    A similar sort of thing happens if you flood the air with nitrogen and it is how some methods of assisted suicide work. It's also being considered as a form of execution in the USA replacing cyanide in the gas chamber with nitrogen. Much less dramatic, your serial pedophiles tend not to struggle as much.

    The freezing... well you don't experience that. That happens a few minutes later.
    So no, you don't explode. While your blood will slowly start to boil, it's more an outgassing than boiling. You're pretty much going to be dead before you experience the really bad shit.

    If you hold your breath. Your death is going to be horrible as your lungs expand and you induce a nasty pulmonary embolism and drown in your own blood quicker than the hypoxia would kill you.

    OK... so lets say somebody changes their mind and recompresses you after a few minutes and revives you. You'll wish you were dead as decompression sickness starts to take hold. The pain in your joints is going to start to get nasty and it's going to be painful just to lay still let alone walk. And that is if you don't have some serious blood clots that would cause thrombosis, stroke or heart attack. More unpleasant ways to die by being saved.

    So if you've been watching The Expanse and wondered why Naomi was in such a terrible state, most of the symptoms she has are serious decompression sickness.
    And astronauts doing space walks can suffer similar sort of symptoms. So before doing space walks they "decompress" by breathing 100% oxygen.
    Their space suits run on a lower pressure but also use nitrogen as a dilutent. There are all kinds of oxygen toxicity issues but keeping nitrogen in the breathing circuit helps prevent that. Once at the lower partial pressure reintroducing nitrogen doesn't hurt.

    OK....that leaves the space part.
    Space is cold so if you could survive you'd go hypothermic fairly quickly and die shivering. You can get a good idea of it from the movie Apollo 13. Without insulation and heating , space is cold. And then there is the flip side. There is a big ball of very hot hydrogen not too far away and it is emitting a LOT of UV radiation. Think about standing out in the desert (not the beach) in the sun without a shirt or hat. It's hot, it burns and it stings and you have 100km of atmosphere to protect you. Imagine that is not there.
    Exposed skin is going to start to slowly burn. I could probably work out the attenuation of the atmosphere, but 1 minute in direct space is probably going to be like exposing yourself to 10 minutes of direct sunlight on earth. That's just a guess, but you're going to get burned.
    Unless of course you're a belter out in an orbit near Jupiter where then sun is 25 times less bright.

    So lets say you were going to float from one spacecraft to another without a space suit. Is it survivable. Yes.
    Would it be pleasent? No. Unless of course you breathed pure oxygen before going and didn't hold your breath and that assumes you actually make it.
    Miss or bounce off a surface and you're screwed. There's a reason why astronauts remain 100% tethered. The moment you lose contact you're as good as dead.

    So once you're dead and floating away, yep, you're pretty much going to be vacuum freeze dried floating around for a few thousand or million years.

    OK... so now the fun messy shit that you didn't think of.
    Explosive Decompression. You're spacecraft eats a missile and all the shit on the inside is now on the outside. You'll notice that they suit up in a battle. That gives them a chance because more than likely one of those rail guns is going to put a hole in something or everything. Without the space suit and the decompression from 14 psi to zero.
    All of the above might happen just much quicker. The barotauma might just knock you unconscious first if you're lucky and you weren't holding your breath just before the missile hit.

    You know how the mythbusters do experiments and then take it to the extreme.... lets do that.

    There are more extreme examples of this here on earth. I do a bit of scuba diving. Technical, rebreather and sometimes some decompression diving but not saturation diving which is kind of why I know a little bit about dive medicine. It translates to space quite easily, but I'm not a medical professional, just a technical sport diver.

    There was an incident where a hyperbaric chamber underwent explosive decompression of about 120psi. You're heard the term "Pink Mist". That pretty much sums it up.
    The rest of it is kind of messy and might put you off your lunch for a few days.
    Last edited by trash; 13-02-21 at 11:33 PM.
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    I stumbled upon this yesterday.

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    The ILC / NASA vacuum test referred to in Trash's video.... (I'm glad that I wasn't in a classroom with THAT guy...I'd have nodded off in seconds)

    From the Moon Machines episode on the space suit..

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    Yeah, I'm surprised it's as short as 30 seconds. I would have thought your bag of meat body would have been able to hang on to consciousness for about 2 minutes but the drop in blood pressure must be too great.
    Thinking about it, letting the gas out of your lungs exposes the blood to a large depressurised surface. Trying to hold your breath is going to kill you quicker as the gas expands and the pulmonary embolism causes you to drown in your own boiling blood.

    If you're spaced in a suit, things are not looking much better for you. Thermal stress, Hypercapnia are going to get ya long before the joys of Hypoxia do.
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