Experts explain: The 5 most fantastic and creepy ways to die
What happens if you fly through the center of the Earth or fall on a neutron star? What does a person feel when descending to the bottom of the Mariana Trench without a bathyscaphe?
Physicist Paul Doherty and science fiction writer Cody Cassidy appeared in a forum thread on the popular network resource Reddit, where they talked about their two-year work in search of the most terrible ways to die. Experts answered the questions of users who began to offer their own versions of the most brutal deaths.
In 2016 , Paul Doherty and Cody Cassidy released a book under the optimistic title "And then you Die", in which they collected the most sophisticated circumstances of death and, from the point of view of science, answered questions like "What would happen if I was swallowed by a whale" or "What would happen if I put my hand into the hadron collider".
Experts have considered many deadly situations, and here are the five most interesting ones, four of which, fortunately, do not threaten us in real life.
A sound louder than 185 decibels is considered a lethal volume threshold for a person. Too loud a sound leads to an air embolism - the penetration of bubbles into the artery and its blockage. As a result, blood stops flowing to the heart and brain.
120 decibels is painful. 150 decibels is the volume of the jet engine of an airplane, if you stand next to it. The sound of 154 decibels is used to test the strength of spaceships. An explosion is known to produce a sonic shock wave that tears apart human lungs. A sharp sound with a power of more than 190 decibels is something similar. So yes, sound can kill.
If you just slowly sink into The Mariana Trench with a load on your feet, then you will simply drown. Therefore, it is much more interesting to find out what will happen if you get out of the bathyscaphe, once at the bottom. Basically, the human body consists of water, so you will generally remain the same shape as on land. But there is a problem with air cavities in the body: in the nose, throat, chest. They'll fall in, of course. And then you will die. And the compressed body will not even float up, but will remain at the bottom.
Approximately the same thing will happen on the surface of Mars, on which a person will be able to survive for about 15 seconds before the air from the lungs completely leaves.
This is a classic school physics problem. As you know, you will fly to the opposite end in 45 minutes. But this answer is very boring, because the most interesting thing will happen to you along the way.
In fact, you will burn to atoms even before hitting the core, because the center of the Earth is hotter than the surface of the Sun. In addition, the air pressure and density double every 4.57 km of depth, so after a 10-fold doubling (at a depth of 45.7 km), the air will be as dense as water and will not allow you to dive deeper.
If you find yourself near a neutron star, then your body will either be torn in half by a strong and uneven attraction, or the strongest magnetic field will destroy all the bonds between the atoms in the body, and it will turn into a piece of liquid plasma.
Experts explained that jumping in a falling elevator is useless, but lying on your back is a good option. So the blow will be distributed evenly throughout the body. If you stand, you will already land, and your organs will continue to fly to the floor. The only hope is that the walls of the elevator are relatively tight against the walls of the shaft and there will be a slight air pressure at the bottom, plus the fallen cable will slightly self-shock.