Breathing Space Trivia Quiz

Answer: Nitrogen

The air we breathe is primarily nitrogen; it makes up 78% of the atmosphere on Earth. Oxygen only accounts for 21%. When we breathe, nitrogen remains unchanged. What it does do is disperse the oxygen; a concentrate of oxygen would not be fully absorbed by our bodies, but through a breath of primarily nitrogen, our bodies can fully collect all the oxygen within the air and leave the nitrogen untouched.

Answer: Hyperoxia

Typically, in space, the danger would be a lack of oxygen, which would cause hypoxemia (low oxygen in tissue), hypoxia (low oxygen in blood) and finally anoxia (no oxygen at all), but inhaling too much oxygen can be just as bad.

Hyperoxia refers to an excessive amount of oxygen in the lungs and tissues. While this does not present an immediate danger, oxygen toxicity over time can damage your organs and tissues, leading to eventual death. The lack of pressure in space, and the quick loss of oxygen would slow down this toxicity significantly, but prolonged excessive oxygen exposure would still ultimately lead to fatal toxicity levels.

Answer: They would expand and ultimately burst

The vacuum of space would provide no pressure for your lungs. Your body would try to equalize itself against the conditions of space, but it would not be able to maintain the pressure put on your body on its own volition. With that in mind, the air from within the lungs would try to escape, dispersing itself into the emptiness, as gas tends to try and fill whatever "container" it finds itself in.

Your lungs, no longer being a suitable container to hold the air inside, would begin to expand, leading to eventual rupture when the expansion reached its peak.

Answer: No

Just like in the lungs, oxygen and other gases would try to escape your body into the vacuum of space, trying to fill all the space it could. While it may seem like this could cause you to explode, the process is fairly slow, and your skin is extremely elastic. Between the skull's heartiness and the skin's stretchiness, you would swell up like a balloon; to over twice your original size on Earth.

The process isn't so immediate as to cause your head to explode, however.

Answer: Diarrhea

Hypotension is a condition of the body when you have low blood pressure. As we have seen, space has no pressure; it's a vacuum! Therefore, your blood would have no way of being pumped to any of your vital organs, including your brain. When no blood reaches your brain, you can experience dizziness, fatigue, headache, nausea, blurred vision, and ultimately a loss of consciousness.

While this is possible here on Earth (even minor incidents like standing up too fast), it would be accelerated greatly in the zero-pressure atmosphere of space. Because you would lose consciousness within only a few seconds, it is quite possible you would not experience (or at least, not notice, given all the other things going on with your body at the time) all of these symptoms in space.

Answer: Ebullism

The boiling point of most liquids becomes much lower with a lower pressure so, when the body is exposed to the complete lack of pressure in space, liquids begin to bubble and become gas, essentially "boiling" off your body. This is largely what will cause your body to expand to twice its size; gases are not just escaping from air pockets in your body, but also from the liquids within you.

Remember, the human body is over 70% water, so there is a lot of liquid to convert to gas. Surface liquids will dissipate much more quickly, of course, as they are directly exposed to the vacuum of space. This means that your eyes will dry out almost immediately, and an open mouth would render you saliva-less, making it nearly impossible to breathe even if you did have the right compounds present.

Answer: Earth

With no atmosphere present for heat to escape, you would actually freeze more slowly in space than on Earth. Pressure is needed for heat transfer to occur; and space would actually act as an insulator to keep you from freezing.

This does not mean you'd stay warm, however. The heat transfer might be lessened, but how you feel is entirely dependent on your surroundings, so you may feel cold even without freezing.

Answer: Convection

Heat transfer is a lot slower in space, as there is no other object creating or absorbing the heat. A vacuum is a lack of all those materials. If you were to find a nearby surface to hold, the conduction process would quicken; this is the transfer between objects.

Convection, on the other hand, is heat transfer between liquids. Heat transfer is why we feel temperature differences. We like the "cool side of the pillow" because we have already transferred more heat to the "warm side", so with a higher heat transfer differential, we recognize the other side as "cool". We tend to feel liquids differently than solids (convection in liquids feels different to our bodies), which is also why we tend to feel cold surfaces as "wet"... our bodies are experiencing heat transfer with both conduction and convection.

Answer: Cosmic Microwave Background

The cosmic microwave background is almost uniform in all of space, indicating a high heat source billions of years ago, the source of the Big Bang. The lingering "heat" (not by what you'd feel as a temperature, as it is -450F) is found everywhere in the universe, just over the threshold of absolute zero (the lack of all heat).

Given that space is a vacuum, and the heat transfer is so slow, you would not feel this "heat" in the same way you would if you were to come across a -450F day on Earth. In fact, you would not really feel much of any hot or cold unless directly in line with the sun, or shadowed from it, as thermal radiation plays a much larger factor in your feeling of heat than the overall surrounding radiation.

Answer: Sunburn

Without an atmosphere to stop the harmful UV rays projected from the sun, your skin would be the very first thing to come in contact with those rays and the sunburn would be quite intense. If you had your mouth open, even your tongue would burn; it would also be in the direct path of the sun's harmful rays. Even though you'd be sunburned, you'd still be cold, as it's the radiation that causes the sunburn as opposed to the heat.

This doesn't mean the sun won't provide ANY heat to you, of course. As you are the first thing in the path of the sun in this instance, you'll absorb some of the heat. But the overwhelming emptiness around you means that heat transfer won't feel as warm as it would through the atmosphere of Earth.