Why would we explode in open space?

Question

I read somewhere the the lack of air pressure would make us explode. How does air pressure keep us from exploding?

Answer 1

Actually if you go outside of a spacecraft in outer space, you will not die from low pressure or from cold or anything like that, you would actually die from lack of oxygen / asphyxiation / suffocation.

The pressure is very low, yes, but that wont kill you because your cells have enough strength to keep together, they wont pop or anything like that, though they will expand slightly. If you were able to breath but the rest of your body was not in a pressurized suit, it is likely that you would get something like the Bends, which is nitrogen bubbles in your blood which causes sickness and possibly death.

As far as temperature goes, well thats simple physics. 'Heat' is actually a property of mass, it is how fast the molecules are moving. Heat can be transfered from one object to another (a pot sitting on the hot coils of an electric stove) or through air (the cold air in your freezer is taking the heat away from the water in the icecube tray), but not through a vacuum. Since space has very few molecules to transfer heat, it's not exactly cold in the same way visiting Antarctica would be.

Essentially what would happen is that you would probably be scared and try to take a deep breath. As you do that, all of the air in your lungs would quickly shoot out your mouth and within a few minutes you would suffocate. You would probably feel very strange due to the low pressure, and you may feel a little cold, but neither of those matter when your brain can only live a few minutes without oxygen.

Answer 2

At sea level, there is 15 pounds of air pressure on every square inch of your skin. If you didn't have internal pressure, it would crush you.

Deep sea divers undergo tremendous changes in pressure, so much so that they have to add helium to their air supplies so their lungs can absorb the thicker oxygen. When they return to the surface, they have to do it slowly because the nitrogen absorbed in their blood will turn back into a gas under lower pressure, causing painful circulation problems if it happens too fast.

If a person were to go into space without a pressure suit or a pressurized cabin, the same thing would happen. The vapor pressure of the gasses absorbed in the blood stream would become greater than the external pressure and they would start to "boil", creating painful, lethal embolisms and even bursting blood vessels. Any other pressurized areas, the G-I tract, lymphatic system, eyes, etc., would all become reverse-pressurized. Ruptures or "explosions" would occur whenever the membrane holding an organ together broke catastrophically.

Some times you may see "high-altitude" directions on a food package. This is because water boils at a lower temperature in higher altitudes and can't cook as efficiently. The higher vapor pressure of the water turns it to gas more easily up there.

Answer 3

Some people say this because we have pressure inside our bodies. You don't notice on Earth, because the atmosphere presses in on your body, and the body pressure pushes out, so they cancel.

The idea is that in outer space, without any atmosphere, the pressure inside our bodies would explode outward.

But that doesn't really happen, because our skin and muscles and guts are more than strong enough to hold the pressure. But you would feel very uncomfortable.

Things are different if a human is put into a vacuum **suddenly**.
Then, the air dissolved in you blood will un-dissolve (the "bends"), you lungs might bleed, you will lose consciousness, etc. That might kill you.

Answer 4

Air pressure keeps us from expanding. Because there is no air pressure in space, we can expand to the point where we explode from getting to stretched out.

Answer 5

With no external pressure on us and asuming our bodies were at atmospheric pressure, you'd have 14 lbs per square inch plu your bblood pressure pushing outward. Any bodily fluids exposed to space would also boil away.

Answer 6

There is pressure inside each of your cells and the air pressure outside is equivalent to that, keeping the cell walls intact. If you remove the outside pressure, the pressure inside cannot compensate and will force the cell walls to rupture, like overinflating a balloon.

Answer 7

your body exerts an outward pressure to counter the inward pressure exerted by the air, hence you use your muscles to breath in but do not to exhale. in space, you would not explode, but your blood vessels would pop.

Answer 8

air pressure also keeps gases in your tissue disolved. when the pressure is relieved, the gases come out of solution (your blood actually boils). Boiling is not just a function of temperature, but also pressure.

Answer 9

No, you could survive for a while, a couple of minutes, but would black out due to lack of air in you lungs in what... 20 seconds?

Answer 10

we wouldn't explode as such.
The air would be forced out of your lungs bacteria would die and ptomaines would mummify your body.