this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Spezi@feddit.org 6 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Humans don‘t explode in a vacuum, that‘s an urban myth. The atmosphere difference between the earths surface and space is magnitudes less than between the ocean floor and the surface.

Whats killing us is the boiling blood and the water in our bodies due to the decreased boiling point.

[–] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago

…and this is the puffy-faced fizzblood. We have learned many interesting things about Terra from these creatures. For instance, while they often cry blood, occasionally their eyes will just, you know, burst. Seems to be pretty random, we think they evolved to burst their eyes to confuse predators

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 18 hours ago

Nose bleeding, eye bleeding human?

[–] cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 80 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] PrimeMinisterKeyes@leminal.space 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago

Octonauts done em dirty

[–] Ulvain@sh.itjust.works 43 points 1 day ago

"inverted sausage monkey"

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 25 points 1 day ago (3 children)

People are so fucking stupid.

[–] Opisek@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago

Always what is blobfish never how is blobfish :(

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

People also ask

What's the capital of blobfish?

Is my blobfish pegnerate?

What is Blobfish's net worth?

Can I install blobfish on Linux? I finally ditched Windows and got Mint Cinnamon. It's pretty good but I don't get how tx asflafasdjjll

[–] GiveOver@feddit.uk 10 points 1 day ago

Does their god need a reason to create every single fish? Sounds exhausting

[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 34 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Humans don't explode in vacuum.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 48 points 1 day ago (2 children)

We do, however, swell up quite a bit.

[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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!

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Freezing would happen very slowly, and not at all if the human was relatively near the Sun (around Earth's orbit or closer).

[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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!

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The Earth is actually warmer than an object in space would be due to the greenhouse effect. But even without the effect, a spherical blackbody human won't freeze. Since humans aren't spheres, you could probaby get one to partially freeze by pointing its head or feet at the Sun, minimizing the surface area it receives sunlight from. This is definitely something that needs experimental testing.

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:))

[–] LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe 4 points 1 day ago

There are no cool breezes in space

[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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!

[–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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...

[–] Hjalamanger@feddit.nu 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not sure that I'll get the English terms wrong but basically heat can move in three ways:

  • By convection, aka liquids and gases moving around when theire heated. Obviously this doesn't happen in space
  • By conduction, a hot thing thouches a cold one and heat transfers from hot to cold. And, this neither works in space
  • By radiaton. Hot objects radiate heat as electro magnetic waves (ie ligth). This is the only one that works in a vacuum and this process is rather slow. Also this results I the weird phenomenon that good looking people cool down faster in space since their hoter. Therefore we should only recruit bad looking astronauts, but no one seems to have figured that out

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!=))))

[–] 7eter@feddit.org 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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!

[–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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!

[–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 21 hours ago

Yaaay!🥳 My brain's getting better at brain things!

[–] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.”

[–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It boils, but because of the pressure drop, not because of the temperature change

[–] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

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..

[–] FelixCress@lemmy.world 33 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 18 hours ago

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.

[–] ElectricWaterfall@lemmy.zip 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] notabot@piefed.social 2 points 19 hours ago

Total Recall

[–] cabron_offsets@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

Mans look like he resides in the White House.

"eye popping ape"

[–] logicbomb@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Forget the aliens part and the vacuum of space part. "Blob apes" isn't really a bad name for humans.

[–] YaksDC@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

"Ice Apes" (extinct)