Re: AAH
Richard Foy (rfoy@netcom.com)
Tue, 16 Jul 1996 14:01:44 GMT
In article <31EBF60E.F9B@tip.nl>, Paul Smith <paul.smith@tip.nl> wrote:
>Richard Foy wrote:
>>
>> Newborns or adults kicked out iof an airlock, without a space suit,
>> would not kick for a few seconds. They would "explode" instantly.
>
>The idea that people would explode if exposed (rapidly) to high vacuum is
>a common one but there are good reasons to think it is not true. In the
>Apollo missions a cabin pressure of 1/3 atm. oxygen was used and
>decompression from 1/3 to 0 atm. is equivalent in terms of gas evolution
>to suddenly decompressing from a saturation dive at 3m in seawater (US
>Navy dive tables permit an indefinite null time down to 10m, though most
>sport diving associations these days are more conservative). Someone
>doing this while using scuba gear might injure their lungs if they forgot
>to breathe out and could have problems with their sinuses, but they
>wouldn't explode and nor would an Apollo astronaut exposed to space.
>Instead, they would lose consciousness through hypoxia and, if not
>retrieved, slowly freeze-dry into a sort of orbiting instant-coffee
>granule until scooped-up by any passing aliens who happened to think it
>would be a laugh to re-hydrate them. I know this has nothing much to do
>with paleoanthropology but I just thought you might want to know.
Whethere it would happen or not, I believe would depend on the initial
pressure and how fast the exposure to a vacuum is accomplished.
In and case the way this came up related to a claim that infants
would kick if thrown out of an arilock in the Space Shuttle as I
recall.
All of the comments on this topic have been speculation. This is what
gets AAT supporters condemnation by many posters in this ng.
--
"It's not merely cruelty that makes men love war, it's excitement."
--Henry Ward Beecher
URL http://www.he.tdl.com/~hfanoe/women.html
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