What happens to you in space? A simulation for all ages.

[Fivelives]

This may or may not have anything to do with the thread... but the discussion of space "temperature" being 0K got me wondering...

Since 0K is the temperature in which cryogenics is theoretically possible, is the reason the bodies aren't preserved, because they aren't losing their heat fast enough? Obviously this is ignoring the depressurization, which I'm sure would do a number on the corpse.

It's the opposite. Freezing something too fast results in cells bursting from the expansion of water as it goes from a liquid to a solid. It's hitting that Goldilocks Zone, where it's not being frozen too slow or too fast, but just right.

[Snake-Aes]

Is it the one that says [pressure*volume]/temperature is a constant for any gas? It's blocked here too.

[Njall]

...and at the last possible moment of survival, you are picked up by a ship using the Infinite Improbability Drive.

[rodos]

Reading this lead me to a funny discovery regarding my workplace's Websense filter. I was trying to remember from freshman chemistry how depressurizing the corpse would affect the temperature.

Unfortunately the Wikipedia article on Gay-Lussac's Law is blocked for the reason of sex education. Kinda makes me wonder what kind of kinky shit my bosses are into.

Gotta love those filters. My mother is a school teacher. One day the lesson was about birds. In Australia we have a bird called the "Black Cockatoo". Turns out this is not a permissible search term on a school computer, due to an unfortunate substring. Interestingly "Cockatoo" was fine, and also a related animal, the "White Cockatoo". Not only incorrect, but racist too!

I feel bad for the people whose address is in Scunthorpe.

[Fetzie]

Don't forget that something at zero kelvin would be invisible.

Light crashing into something warms it up, meaning it is no longer at 0K. If light cannot crash into it (and be reflected) we can't see it.

btt: if you were to jump out of a space-craft in outer space you would be cooked within seconds, basically the same thing happens to you that happens in a microwave oven. Except you also get bombarded with full force XRays and gamma radiation from the various black holes and other bad stuff that fly around in deep space

[Brutalicus]

Don't forget that something at zero kelvin would be invisible.

Light crashing into something warms it up, meaning it is no longer at 0K. If light cannot crash into it (and be reflected) we can't see it.

btt: if you were to jump out of a space-craft in outer space you would be cooked within seconds, basically the same thing happens to you that happens in a microwave oven. Except you also get bombarded with full force XRays and gamma radiation from the various black holes and other bad stuff that fly around in deep space

Gamma rays. They do the body good.

Edit: Fun! I posted my little analysis on the GamesRadar forums and they inexplicably banned me for it. Pricks :/

[Skye1013]

Don't forget that something at zero kelvin would be invisible.

Light crashing into something warms it up, meaning it is no longer at 0K. If light cannot crash into it (and be reflected) we can't see it.

Interesting... so if/when science finally gets to the point they've "mastered" cryogenics, they'll have to take careful notes about who is in which chamber... so they don't accidentally open one that's in use .

[Fetzie]

I don't see why they would need 0K for cryogenics. Especially as it is impossible to reach. You can get to about 4K with liquid helium (my dad uses that stuff to cool his X-ray equipment at work) but any lower is pretty much unworkable. -160°C would be enough, that is liquid oxygen temperature.

[Fivelives]

You'd need to halt cellular respiration for cryogenics to be possible. The only way to do that is to stop all molecular movement, hence absolute zero.

[Arnock]

Even then I'm pretty sure you'd run into the issue of ice rupturing cell walls and causing all sorts of other havoc within the body

[Dorvan]

0K would mean absolutely no change in state, but it's not inherently obvious that that's necessary. Figuring out how to get flesh to survive the zero C transition is a much bigger problem imo....not to mention the whole "rebooting vital processes" issue.

[Fetzie]

pretty sure the enzymes that make cellular respiration work stop working below 50°C. Which is why you get frostbite.

[Fridmarr]

I don't see why they would need 0K for cryogenics. Especially as it is impossible to reach. You can get to about 4K with liquid helium (my dad uses that stuff to cool his X-ray equipment at work) but any lower is pretty much unworkable. -160°C would be enough, that is liquid oxygen temperature.

They can get very close to 0K though. I was watching a documentary about it, and they described how close they are as something like drawing a line from Boulder, Colorado to some city in Europe (I forget which one they said) with that city being 1K and Boulder being 0K, that they are about the length of a pencil from Boulder. That was when they were trying to produce the Bose-Einstein condensate. The whole thing was pretty neat.

Anyhow as Dorvan mentioned, the whole "thawing" process is a pretty big obstacle as well.

[Arnock]

pretty sure the enzymes that make cellular respiration work stop working below 50°C. Which is why you get frostbite.

Sure hope not, seeing as human body temp is around 37C IIRC

[Fivelives]

Frostbite is caused by the circulatory system shutting down in your extremities to preserve the core body temperature. The black color you see in frostbitten flesh is clotted blood and ruptured capillaries, along with necrotic (oxygen starved) tissue.

Sure, you can stop cellular respiration by denaturing the enzymes that work in the krebs cycle. But that would kill the person being cryogenically frozen, which is sort of the opposite of what we're trying to do here.