I Abhor a Vacuum

August 23, 2008

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
-- Dave Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey

That's one of the greatest lines in sci-fi movie history, uttered by intrepid astronaut (and future StarChild) Dave Bowman in his final showdown against HAL, the rogue ship's computer in Stanley Kubrick's Oscar-winning masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. A glitch in HAL's programming has driven the machine insane, to the point where the AI has taken out (i.e., "killed") all of Dave's colleagues and locked Dave himself out of the mother ship, in a pod with limited life support, and no helmet.

(Yes, I know, it's a spoiler, but is there really anyone left out there who hasn't already seen the movie? If you haven't, skip the next sentence and add the DVD to your Netflix queue. Go! Now! We'll wait....) Ultimately, Dave uses explosive bolts on the hatch of his pod to propel himself out of it and into the ship's airlock, closing it just in the nick of time before exposure to the vacuum of outer space kills him. Go, Dave!

Just how much time did Dave have to spare? Arthur C. Clark's original 1968 novel spills the beans: about 15 seconds of consciousness, "before his brain was starved and anoxia overcame him." However, Clark's narrator maintains that "any properly trained man in good health could survive in vacuum for at least one minute" --provided he had time to prepare. Poor Dave didn't. It made me wonder just how long I might survive in the vacuum of outer space without protection, and this handy online quiz* supplied the answer:

Created by OnePlusYou - Online Dating

Go, me! Of course, that is likely to be the worst 1 minute and 23 seconds of my entire life, so I'm not too keen to conduct the experiment. There are lots of descriptions floating in the ether about the effects of vacuum on the human body. My ear drums would burst, for starters. Since water will spontaneously convert into vapor in the absence of atmospheric pressure, the saliva on my tongue would start to boil, along with any natural moisture in my eyes.

Within 30 seconds the nitrogen in my blood would form gaseous bubbles -- deep sea divers know this as "the bends" -- and the evaporation of the water in my muscles and soft tissues would cause bloating so severe that some parts of my body could expand to twice their normal size. (Specifics seem to be lacking on exactly which body parts would be expanding. Ladies: Imagine the PMS from hell and multiply by 100.)

On the upside, I'd be unconscious for most of this; asphyxia sets in around the 10-15 second mark, causing loss of vision, impaired judgment, and finally a merciful loss of consciousness. In fact, unless I had the good sense to exhale in the first few seconds, my lungs would rupture and kill me in mere seconds, as the gas in them expanded rapidly. That might be preferable to what follows.

My heart and brain would remain undamaged until around the 90-second mark, at which point my blood pressure would be so low that my blood would begin to boil. Death would follow soon after. But at least I wouldn't burst at the seams and splatter my surroundings with gooey innards, as so often seems to happen in sci-fi films. The body's skin is strong enough to keep from bursting in the vacuum of space. At most, I might have a bit of bruising due to broken capillaries, but I'll be far beyond worrying about spider veins at that point.

Should help arrive in the nick of time, my body would rebound surprisingly well from these horrific-sounding effects, apart from some lingering hypoxia-induced blindness. Scientists know this because they've been conducting experiments on the effects of a vacuum on living creatures for hundreds of years, ever since Robert Boyle commissioned the first vacuum pump in 1659. He performed all kinds of experiments with it, including studying the effect on small animals as more and more air was gradually pumped out of the container. By the 1700s, traveling scientists were regularly using birds to demonstrate the wonders of the vacuum -- although sometimes they would replace the living creature with a small model lung if squeamish sorts objected.

The question of survival in a vacuum moved front and center again with the dawn of the Space Age in the 1960s. NASA conducted their own experiments using large altitude chambers to simulate the vacuum of outer space. There were a few accidents, notably in 1965, when a defective space suit caused a technician to collapse in 14 seconds. However, once the chamber was re-pressurized, he was revived, with no long-term ill-effects. He claimed that the last thing he remembered before passing out was the water on his tongue beginning to boil. I'm sure he entertained his progeny at family reunions for years with the tale of his white-knuckled brush with death.

Three Russian cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz spacecraft in 1971 weren't so lucky when their capsule suddenly lost pressure due to a malfunctioning ball joint in the capsule's pressure equalization valve. One of them tried to shut off the valve manually, but it takes 60 seconds; he passed out before he could close it completely, and all three men perished. Such is the price of expanding our frontiers, a grim reminder to respect the power of the vacuum.

*Alas, the quiz is part of one of those online dating sites, but you don't have to join their network to find out your results. And I find it amusing that folks might be basing their choice of partner on who'd be mostly likely to survive in the vacuum of space.

Photo: "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump," Joseph Wright Derby. Original owned by National Gallery in London. Source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Comments

[Dave Mosher]

You can survive 6 seconds longer than me. Happy vacuuming!