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After hearing how Google exec Alan Eustace jumped out of a balloon 42 km up and survived,
I started to wonder about what would happen if he had been even higher.
How would his body have handled the extreme conditions of the atmosphere?
What if you fell from space to Earth?
Let’s go waaay up to the Karman line, where space technically begins, 100km above Earth’s
surface.
We’re going to jump out of this rocket and find out what happens.
As you can see, we are immediately knocked unconscious.
Brain cells need a constant flow of oxygen, which there’s not very much of up here.
So when they don’t get that, the brain goes into a state of hypoxia and kinda just shuts
down.
In serious cases, this can lead to seizures, coma, and even brain death.
Also, up here in the thermosphere, we’re being exposed to some very intense X-Rays
and UV rays from the sun.
If this alone doesn’t kill us, we’ll likely start vomiting due to radiation poisoning.
When we get to the mesosphere, which reaches from 85 km above Earth down to 50 km, things
don’t get much better.
We’re met with extremely cold temperatures here, almost negative 100 degrees celsius,
giving us some serious frostbite!
But on top of that, the friction of falling this fast from this high up is literally burning
through our skin!
This is also the layer of the atmosphere where meteors disintegrate.
They leave trails of dust and light behind them, which is what makes them look like shooting
stars.
If you were to fall through the atmosphere, it would kind of be like you’re a human
version of a shooting star, which doesn't sound fun when you actually think about what's happening.
Next, we’ll enter the stratosphere, which is between 50km to about 15 km above the Earth’s
surface.
There’s a point in the stratosphere above which, your blood starts to boil, around 23
km up.
At this level of atmospheric pressure, liquids boil at much lower temperatures because the
change in pressure of the liquid allows molecules to move more freely between liquid and gas
states.
The lower the pressure, the quicker it boils.
So with low pressure levels at this height and above, your blood boils.
It could also happen with other bodily fluids like stomach acid and urine too!
The troposphere would likely be the least excruciatingly painful of the atmospheric
levels.
In this layer that stretches about 15 km above the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere becomes
a lot more rich in oxygen and we can finally regain consciousness.
But what next?
No one has ever fallen from 100 km up, but people have survived some pretty impressive
falls.
Like WWII pilot Alan Magee who survived a fall of 6 km after crashing through a glass
roof which absorbed some of the impact.
Or Vesna Vulovic whose plane exploded 10km up.
She fell to the ground inside a piece of the plane and survived!
And it goes without saying, but obviously do not attempt this yourself.
I want you to be safe.
So, have you ever been skydiving? Would you want to go skydiving?
Let me know in the comment section below, or tell us, what should we talk about next?
I know a lot of you watch our videos to “Keep on Thinking,” and want to build the skill sets
for doing so, and that’s why I’m so excited to team up with our sponsor Brilliant
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when you are falling from space to earth, it involves a lot of physics
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As always, my name is Blocko.
This has been Life Noggin.
Don't forget to keep on thinking.