First we can't decide how many planets we have in our solar system now THIS Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on :
I've always wondered how it is that they can get an image of the entire galaxy from here.
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
Google, that's how.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Easy, just observe far enough away with a really powerful telescope and since space & time are curved you'll eventually see the back of your own head...zoom out a bit and you can see the galaxy in which said head resides. I haven't slept in a while.
Posted by Daniel Butler (Member # 1689) on :
We're such precocious little scamps. Trying to define great big clumps of matter we don't even understand. "Hey that spirally thingy is spinning differently than that dead guy said it should!" 'Well it must be surrounded by invisible stuff that doesn't react with anything except gravity!' "Yeah! Wait what's gravity?" 'Well that other dead guy was talking about curvature of space but...its a bit over my head really...' "That dark matter idea was cool, though."
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
What a pickle if you where to suddenly find yourself at the spot where that picture was taken. Would you even be able to see the galaxy like in the picture, or would it just be black?
Wonder if ISS- or Mir-personnel have taken rats and gerbils up in orbit, attached electrodes and stuff to them and put them out in vaccuum, just to see what happens. Someone should have by now, you'd think.
Hell, I'd do it as a last act of my old life if they paid the trip. Go up there, sleep one night there, have one sex in weightlessness with some sturdy astronaut woman, then drink something expensive and just go EVA. With all the shit on, of course. Even one of those pin-helmets from Ghostbusters.
If you have a sealed helmet with air tube on your head, but your body is naked, would you still die? Would space drag the atmosphere from the shuttle through your nose out your ass? Would it hurt? Or would it just be the world's rarest fetish?
Posted by Da_bang80 (Member # 528) on :
The vacuum would most likely boil your blood while you were alternately frozen and fried depending on which side of your body the sun landed on.
Not sure about the ass venting though. It would probably hurt. But it would sound funny as hell.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
No, it wouldn't. Vacuum. No sound.
Posted by shikaru808 (Member # 2080) on :
Pwned!
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Nope, Da Bang's assumption of hellafunniness may still be valid. If you where right behind the guy and your head was aligned with the air, you could get some seconds worth of air and soundwaves, perhaps? Say it took 3 seconds for all the air of the ISS to force itself through that brave man, without any deviation in course (alternate escape routes).
I don't have any hard figures on airjet acoustics, but maybe those guys on stardestroyer.net who calculate turbolaser travel speed and "gigajoule" strength could make themselves useful. Unlike the things they work with, this scenario has hypothetic testability!
Posted by shikaru808 (Member # 2080) on :
I always wondered what would happen if you could get close enough to the sun where the space is warm enough for the human body to just live with a helmet and air.(and lets just say they developed anti-cosmic-radiation sunscreen for the sake of arguement).
That would be neat.
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
That could never happen since you would be exposed fully to the heat and radiation of the sun without any sort of protection. Unless you like bacon of course.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Um, "space" in itself can't be warm since space is nothing, there's just objects reacting with sun beams. As for sun strength, I think just at the surface of the moon your skin would start blistering from unobstructed sun glare. Ignoring the vacuum effects, if there is any boundary where you won't get burned by the rays, it's maybe between Mars and Jupiter?
But to be frank, I really believe the esophagus could make or break the whole project.
If one learns to loosen it, say by pencil-stabbing beer cans and drinking without gulps, you might have a shot at this. If your esophagus clenches, all that incoming air might go out through the sternum. Which is an entirely different project (Amish Iron-Man) but ruins our work here and now.
Maybe some sort of speculum...
Posted by Daniel Butler (Member # 1689) on :
In the 60's a NASA scientist was in a vacuum chamber that accidentally got turned on. The air pressure was just barely above total vacuum; it took several minutes for the chamber to be repressurized. He survived with minimal injuries. I think it mostly depends on how *quickly* the air is evacuated from your environment - if you survive the decompression itself, you'll survive until you suffocate. Your blood won't boil - this guy's didn't - it's in a closed system. It'd only boil if it was open to the vacuum. Hence your spit will boil off your tongue.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
I never quite got the blood boiling thing, myself... though I imagine that the capillaries (i.e. near the eyes, etc.) might still suffer. Certainly the eyes could dry out quickly. And if your lungs were completely depressurized, wouldn't the blood maybe boil out through the alveoli? (Wow, I actually spelled that right. Hooray for me remembering biology class!)
However, aside from the boiling, I have a feeling that the cold would also have a severe effect on a person in space. That NASA guy was probably still in room-temperature conditions; I'd bet that your capillaries could freeze. I guess that would depend on how fast heat could be exchanged. And yeah, sunburn would be a bitch.
I've always wondered why there's never been more research about what would actually happen to someone exposed to space. Especially because it's bound to happen sooner or later, and being prepared would help prevent or mitigate the effects to a person. Maybe the Russians could find a death row inmate to volunteer to take a walk outside the ISS or something? (Kidding, kidding...)
Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on :
What was that movie...? I saw a clip on YouTube of a Chinese movie about Japanese experiments on people during WWII. In this scene a guy is put in a vacuum chamber and starts to blow up like a balloon...
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"That NASA guy was probably still in room-temperature conditions[.]"
I don't think you can have a room-temperature vacuum. Or, to put it another way, in a vacuum, the room's temperature is very very cold.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Yeah I was going to ask that. But one question... is an absolute vacuum, absolute zero?
Posted by B.J. (Member # 858) on :
Temperature is a physical property, so you have to have something there in order to measure its temperature. In a vacuum, there's nothing there, so there's nothing to measure, therefore there is no temperature. That does not equate to absolute zero.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
But space is not an absolute vacuum. It's just a near-vacuum. Therefore, it has temperature. Right?
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
According to Wikipedia:
Contrary to popular understanding, outer space is not completely empty (i.e. a perfect vacuum) but contains a low density of particles, predominantly hydrogen plasma, as well as electromagnetic radiation. Hypothetically, it also contains dark matter and dark energy.
Posted by Daniel Butler (Member # 1689) on :
It has a temperature, MinutiaeMan, because there is some gas out there (see the wiki on the heliopause, btw, its very interesting) but it's very very low. If memory serves, somewhere around -450*C. But the vacuum the scientist was exposed to would have a similar temperature. What you must remember is that 'cold' is the absence of heat; in other words, if you're in a cold room, what you mean is that the temperature in the room is lower than your body temperature so that you're losing heat to the air around you. In space you can't lose heat via convection (very efficiently) but you do lose heat by radiation. However it'd take hours and hours to freeze in that fashion - maybe days, I haven't done the math.
The boiling effect is because when you lower the pressure of a liquid enough, it will phase to a gas to fill the vacuum (and actually, that takes heat energy to accomplish, so as your spit boiled your tongue would feel cold, not hot). That's what happens when you crack your knuckles, according to a study John Hopkins did a while back - you lower the pressure of the fluid in the joints enough that some of it turns to a gas, creating bubbles. It happens very suddenly, hence the crack.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Close, Daniel. Absolute Zero -- or 0 Kelvins -- is about -460° Farenheit, but -273.15°C. You can still have matter present with no temperature. Absolute Zero is an indicator of no atomic motion at all (above zero-point energy), since motion is heat. I think the coldest we've been able to achieve in careful experiments here on Earth is about 700 nK, and the coldest temperature we've found in deep space so far is about 1 K, and I think the lowest it gets in the vicinity of our solar system is about 3 K. And the vacuums to which test subjects are exposed are far warmer due to being far less perfect.
I remember cringing when watching episodes of TNG and later Trek when someone gives a temperature as "minus three hundred (something) degrees Celsius" or otherwise gives a temperature below Absolute Zero. *heh*
--Jonah
Posted by WizArtist II (Member # 1425) on :
quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus:
I remember cringing when watching episodes of TNG and later Trek when someone gives a temperature as "minus three hundred (something) degrees Celsius" or otherwise gives a temperature below Absolute Zero. *heh*
--Jonah
Maybe they just reworked the scale like they did with warp factors. Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
And 0 K can never be attained... that's unless you have the end of the universe.
Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on :
Milliways!
Posted by Daniel Butler (Member # 1689) on :
Right, got C and F mixed up Should've checked the wiki before I hit the post button.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Well, Kelvin and Celsius make sense to me. Farenheit has been losing its grip on my brain slowly but steadily. Especially since I found out how Farenheit got his zero point. I'd wondered for a long time what it was based on, since it obviously wasn't water... A brine of water, ice, and ammonium chloride -- the temperature at which that froze. Um... what?
--Jonah
Posted by Sean (Member # 2010) on :
Celsius makes more sense to me, but since I was raised using Farenheit, I can't understand it. I can walk outside and know what a 50F day feels like, but Celsius man, what is 50F like 14C?
Kelvin is just whatever celsius is, +/- 273 degrees, and even that seems to make more sense than Farenheit.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
It's simple. Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. So 50 degrees centigrade is fooking hot, or if you wish, half way towards scalding, by definition.
Posted by Daniel Butler (Member # 1689) on :
There's a reason they used that frozen-brine measurement. I think when you mix that stuff together, there's a thermal reaction that occurs which brings the temperature to 0*F.
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
What you just said sounded like they used the brine measurement because they wanted the 0*F, but it should read as they used 0*F because of the brine measurement.
Posted by Sean (Member # 2010) on :
quote:Originally posted by Reverend: It's simple. Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. So 50 degrees centigrade is fooking hot, or if you wish, half way towards scalding, by definition.
I should probably clarify. I know how celsius works, as it is the only measurement of temperature that we use in science class. It's just that if the US suddenly switched to Celsius (as if), I would feel weird lableing a day with spring jacket weather as 14 degrees. For measurements though, C is much more efficient, as it is a hell of a lot easier to remember that water boils at 100 degrees, rather than 212 degrees.
Posted by Daniel Butler (Member # 1689) on :
I like Kelvin because then you can say it's a nice balmy 300 degrees outside. I like that for some reason.
Also, it makes you realize how incredibly frigid our planet is. I mean, it's only a couple hundred degrees above absolute zero. It's strange to think that stars are so hot, and everything else is (by comparison) unimaginably cold, receiving feeble warmth from their (mostly wasted) outpourings of radiation.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
Should've checked the wiki before I hit the post button.