11 ms·

Can someone walk me through what would have happened, physically, to a human body in the moment this happened. I’m curious. Similar to wondering what happens to

by deanc 3y ago

Can someone walk me through what would have happened, physically, to a human body in the moment this happened. I’m curious. Similar to wondering what happens to people in space.

js2 3y ago
In outer space, you pass out in about 15 seconds from lack of O2 to the brain, then your heart stops and eventually you freeze. NASA has done the experiments: > Chimpanzees can withstand even longer exposures. In a pair of papers from NASA in 1965 and 1967, researchers found that chimpanzees could survive up to 3.5 minutes in near-vacuum conditions with no apparent cognitive defects, as measured by complex tasks months later. One chimp that was exposed for three minutes, however, showed lasting behavioral changes. Another died shortly after exposure, likely due to cardiac arrest. Then there was this oops: > In 1965 a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by disrupting a hose. After 12 to 15 seconds he lost consciousness. He regained it at 27 seconds, after his suit was repressurized to about half that of sea level. The man reported that his last memory before blacking out was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered for four days following the accident, but he was otherwise unharmed. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space-unprotected-possible/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space... Dying in a submarine would be very different. The pressure differential in space is a single atmosphere. Water increases by about one atmosphere every 33 feet. At Titanic's depth it's ~ 368 atmospheres of pressure. Reddit discussion from 3 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/submarines/comments/gy1wc6/what_exactly_does_happen_when_a_submarine_goes/ https://old.reddit.com/r/submarines/comments/gy1wc6/what_exa... > The collapse of a submarine pressure hull happens quick, just 37 milliseconds in the case of the Scorpion. The incoming water had a velocity of about 2,000 mph. [...] Over such small time scales, there is no time for the water or the steel hull to absorb any heat from the rapidly compressing air inside of the submarine. Because no heat is transferred from the air to the water or hull, the compression is adiabatic. [...] The collapse halted when the air pressure was approximately equal to the water pressure at 1,530 feet, which is 4,630,000 Pa. [...] 1,122°F. That was at 1,530 feet. Contact was lost with the Titan at 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive. A typical dive to the bottom took it 3 hours. So it was likely at least halfway to the bottom (6000 feet). Its implosion would have involved even more spectacular forces. They were dead before they knew what happened, incinerated and pulverized. There are no bodies to recover. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_inciden... See "Why the USS SCORPION (SSN 589) Was Lost 50 years Ago" https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/scorpion_loss_50years.pdf https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/scorpion_loss_50y...
meepmorp 3y ago
Imagine you're inside an empty beer can as it's being run over by a car, but from all directions at once.
rozal 3y ago
[flagged]
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Nice effort but that's not how carbon fiber fails. It shatters rather than crumples.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    Does it change anything?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Yes, materially so.
      - scotty79 3y ago
        How? Does it lower crew lifetime from 30ms to 10ms after the failure?
  - serf 3y ago
    there isn't "a way carbon fiber fails", it fails according to how the structure was designed, and how the carbon fiber is utilized. buckling delaminations -- espescially when alongside honeycomb or similar substrates -- very much looks like a 'crumpling'; unless you want to classify all epoxy matrix failures as a 'shattering', but I think that's far too generous given the variety of failure modes. [0]:https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Compressive-failure-modes-of-fibre-composites-a-Elastic-micro-buckling-b-Fibre_fig9_245573502 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Compressive-failure-mode...
- trollied 3y ago
  How did you write this? ChatGPT?
- scotty79 3y ago
  Not sure about decompression, after all they started at normal pressure before the incident so they wouldn't have unreasonable amounts of gasses in theur bodies that could expand to huge volumes when pressure lessens.
hotpotamus 3y ago
Randall Munroe probably said it best, "You would just stop being biology and start being physics."
- eBombzor 3y ago
  I'm definitely going to hell for laughing at that.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    I thought it was actually a rather polite way of saying that the forces involved are just way beyond anything in normal human experience.
dvt 3y ago
Gas-filled cavities in the body instantly compress. So this means that your lungs, stomach, etc. instantly get crushed, rupturing in the process. Depending on circumference, depth, etc., the hull itself moves at speeds of ~1000+ mph towards itself, crushing everything inside in less than 100 milliseconds. Someone linked a great safety video of what happens under a pressure column (not gore)[1]. Though as some people mentioned, since carbon fiber was used here, it's more likely that the hull shattered, essentially turning it into shrapnel. I think this depends on the exact proportion of the life support gases they are using, but, due to the relation P ∝ T, the gas inside the submersible can ignite (like an engine piston essentially), turning all organic matter to ash instantly. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM
- pests 3y ago
  > turning all organic matter to ash Is this actually true? I see it being repeated everywhere but there is a lot of mass in a human body. Can 100 milliseconds of "ignition" (as you put it) really burn off all of that?
  - maverwa 3y ago
    I am no expert on any of this but was curious. So I entered some guesstimates in online calculators. Assuming they were at 12,500 ft / 3810m we get a pressure down there of 5546 PSI / 382 Bar. Compressing the air in the cabin from roughly atmospheric pressure to 382 Bar would heat it to above 1300°C, or 1600°F. As far as I understand, in milliseconds. That’s a lot of heat energy. The water around them will absorb some of that, but they‘d be toast.
    - Auracle 3y ago
      That doesn’t seem nearly hot enough to burn bodies before the water takes the place of all that hot air. Do the bodies themselves get hot from being compressed? I’d assume largely no with our water content.
      - 3y ago
TrackerFF 3y ago
At that depth, the pressure is quite intense - around 6000 psi. That means 6000 pounds pr square inch - that's almost a Ford F150 truck pr square inch, everywhere. And now imagine how many square inches the surface area of a human is - especially your upper torso where your lungs are located. The sub (hull) is made of a carbon fiber and titanium mix - and I'm not sure how that would react, if it buckles / collapses like regular metal, or if it simply shatters into millions of pieces like glass. If the sub just collapsed / imploded into itself, well - that's that. The crew got crushed to death in an instant. If the sub explode, then that would be a very violent reaction. Probably enough to kill them, purely from that - but let's say they don't die instantly from the crushing influx / wave of water: Air / gasses in the body would compress significantly, if not allowed to exit the body. Your lungs would collapse in an instant, and your chest cavity would collapse on itself, until all air has escaped, and then replaced by water. Your ear eardrums would also rapture in an instant. With a severely collapsed upper torse, which would happen in an instant, I think your heart and major arteries would also become destroyed in an instant. All that space would instantly get filled up with water. I personally think that the violent process would kill them instantly - as in milliseconds...and then when all air has escaped the body, water would fill that space, until the pressure has reached an equilibrium. EDIT: I personally don't think they suffered. The sub likely imploded in an instant, without little prior warning (noises) if the material behaves in the way I suspect it does. Just lights out, and that's that. Brain didn't even get time to react.
- gdubs 3y ago
  What if the impassion happened higher towards the surface, like, 2000 feet?
  - TrackerFF 3y ago
    So let's say that they by some miracle survive implosion without getting knocked out, and have lungs full of air - well, that air would still compress by a huge amount. And with negative buoyancy, they would sink. Pressure at 2000 feet is still a bit over 400 PSI.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Jnelson1969 3y ago
I think it would be like a heated, oxygen bubble filled with human soup & debris blast Out both ends of the failed hull whenever the titanium ends were blasted off essentially they became exhaust waste. How quick the titanium ends were blasted off versus full compression of the capsule must be in milliseconds also but must have some lag time even though it seems the titanium ends being blown off are acting as relief from the initial event.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jve 3y ago
https://youtu.be/C1VKotduWek?t=119 https://youtu.be/C1VKotduWek?t=119
dctoedt 3y ago
https://www.quora.com/How-do-humans-die-when-a-submarine-implodes https://www.quora.com/How-do-humans-die-when-a-submarine-imp...
- shagie 3y ago
  I found https://www.quora.com/When-a-submarine-exceeds-its-crush-depth-and-the-crew-is-killed-are-they-squished-flat-Do-they-die-instantaneously-due-to-the-pressure-What-happens-to-them-physiologically https://www.quora.com/When-a-submarine-exceeds-its-crush-dep... to be more descriptive > When a submarine implodes, a variety of fairly ugly things will happen to the crew. If we assume that a pressure hull implodes at 2000 feet (~60 atmospheres), the pressure will increase from 14.7 to about 875 PSI almost instantly. In the parts of the submarine that have volumes of trapped air, it would be like being inside a diesel engine cylinder when begins its compression stroke. > Anything flammable would burst into flames until a huge wall of water slams into the area and snuffs it out again. The impact of the water would cause significant injury to anyone unlucky enough to still be alive and there would be no time to suffer the effects of oxygen poisoning or anything else. > As others have stated, most human tissues are fluid-filled and are for the most part, incompressible. Human lungs and sinuses would be crushed instantly and the immense shock would render them unconscious immediately. Of greater concern would be the surge of incoming seawater, bulkheads, decks, heavy equipment, motors and other random bits of equipment being slammed into the crew at high velocity. > Essentially, the crew would be killed several times over in less than a blink of an eye. and from another answer: > When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond. > A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds. > The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye. > Sounds gruesome but as a submariner I always wished for a quick hull-collapse death over a lengthy one like some of the crew on Kursk endured. --- While specifics differ, it would be over very fast.
BoxFour 3y ago
Outer space is vastly different due to the significantly lower pressure differential. For this case: To put it simply, picture an unexpected scenario where an airplane plummets from above and lands directly on top of you. The impact would be quite painless.

by deanc 3y ago

Can someone walk me through what would have happened, physically, to a human body in the moment this happened. I’m curious. Similar to wondering what happens to people in space.

js2 3y ago

In outer space, you pass out in about 15 seconds from lack of O2 to the brain, then your heart stops and eventually you freeze. NASA has done the experiments: > Chimpanzees can withstand even longer exposures. In a pair of papers from NASA in 1965 and 1967, researchers found that chimpanzees could survive up to 3.5 minutes in near-vacuum conditions with no apparent cognitive defects, as measured by complex tasks months later. One chimp that was exposed for three minutes, however, showed lasting behavioral changes. Another died shortly after exposure, likely due to cardiac arrest. Then there was this oops: > In 1965 a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by disrupting a hose. After 12 to 15 seconds he lost consciousness. He regained it at 27 seconds, after his suit was repressurized to about half that of sea level. The man reported that his last memory before blacking out was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered for four days following the accident, but he was otherwise unharmed. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space-unprotected-possible/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space... Dying in a submarine would be very different. The pressure differential in space is a single atmosphere. Water increases by about one atmosphere every 33 feet. At Titanic's depth it's ~ 368 atmospheres of pressure. Reddit discussion from 3 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/submarines/comments/gy1wc6/what_exactly_does_happen_when_a_submarine_goes/ https://old.reddit.com/r/submarines/comments/gy1wc6/what_exa... > The collapse of a submarine pressure hull happens quick, just 37 milliseconds in the case of the Scorpion. The incoming water had a velocity of about 2,000 mph. [...] Over such small time scales, there is no time for the water or the steel hull to absorb any heat from the rapidly compressing air inside of the submarine. Because no heat is transferred from the air to the water or hull, the compression is adiabatic. [...] The collapse halted when the air pressure was approximately equal to the water pressure at 1,530 feet, which is 4,630,000 Pa. [...] 1,122°F. That was at 1,530 feet. Contact was lost with the Titan at 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive. A typical dive to the bottom took it 3 hours. So it was likely at least halfway to the bottom (6000 feet). Its implosion would have involved even more spectacular forces. They were dead before they knew what happened, incinerated and pulverized. There are no bodies to recover. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_inciden... See "Why the USS SCORPION (SSN 589) Was Lost 50 years Ago" https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/scorpion_loss_50years.pdf https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/scorpion_loss_50y...

meepmorp 3y ago

Imagine you're inside an empty beer can as it's being run over by a car, but from all directions at once.

rozal 3y ago

[flagged]

jacquesm 3y ago
Nice effort but that's not how carbon fiber fails. It shatters rather than crumples.
- scotty79 3y ago
  Does it change anything?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, materially so.
    - scotty79 3y ago
      How? Does it lower crew lifetime from 30ms to 10ms after the failure?
- serf 3y ago
  there isn't "a way carbon fiber fails", it fails according to how the structure was designed, and how the carbon fiber is utilized. buckling delaminations -- espescially when alongside honeycomb or similar substrates -- very much looks like a 'crumpling'; unless you want to classify all epoxy matrix failures as a 'shattering', but I think that's far too generous given the variety of failure modes. [0]:https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Compressive-failure-modes-of-fibre-composites-a-Elastic-micro-buckling-b-Fibre_fig9_245573502 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Compressive-failure-mode...
trollied 3y ago
How did you write this? ChatGPT?
scotty79 3y ago
Not sure about decompression, after all they started at normal pressure before the incident so they wouldn't have unreasonable amounts of gasses in theur bodies that could expand to huge volumes when pressure lessens.

hotpotamus 3y ago

Randall Munroe probably said it best, "You would just stop being biology and start being physics."

eBombzor 3y ago
I'm definitely going to hell for laughing at that.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I thought it was actually a rather polite way of saying that the forces involved are just way beyond anything in normal human experience.

dvt 3y ago

Gas-filled cavities in the body instantly compress. So this means that your lungs, stomach, etc. instantly get crushed, rupturing in the process. Depending on circumference, depth, etc., the hull itself moves at speeds of ~1000+ mph towards itself, crushing everything inside in less than 100 milliseconds. Someone linked a great safety video of what happens under a pressure column (not gore)[1]. Though as some people mentioned, since carbon fiber was used here, it's more likely that the hull shattered, essentially turning it into shrapnel. I think this depends on the exact proportion of the life support gases they are using, but, due to the relation P ∝ T, the gas inside the submersible can ignite (like an engine piston essentially), turning all organic matter to ash instantly. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM

pests 3y ago
> turning all organic matter to ash Is this actually true? I see it being repeated everywhere but there is a lot of mass in a human body. Can 100 milliseconds of "ignition" (as you put it) really burn off all of that?
- maverwa 3y ago
  I am no expert on any of this but was curious. So I entered some guesstimates in online calculators. Assuming they were at 12,500 ft / 3810m we get a pressure down there of 5546 PSI / 382 Bar. Compressing the air in the cabin from roughly atmospheric pressure to 382 Bar would heat it to above 1300°C, or 1600°F. As far as I understand, in milliseconds. That’s a lot of heat energy. The water around them will absorb some of that, but they‘d be toast.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    That doesn’t seem nearly hot enough to burn bodies before the water takes the place of all that hot air. Do the bodies themselves get hot from being compressed? I’d assume largely no with our water content.
    - 3y ago

TrackerFF 3y ago

At that depth, the pressure is quite intense - around 6000 psi. That means 6000 pounds pr square inch - that's almost a Ford F150 truck pr square inch, everywhere. And now imagine how many square inches the surface area of a human is - especially your upper torso where your lungs are located. The sub (hull) is made of a carbon fiber and titanium mix - and I'm not sure how that would react, if it buckles / collapses like regular metal, or if it simply shatters into millions of pieces like glass. If the sub just collapsed / imploded into itself, well - that's that. The crew got crushed to death in an instant. If the sub explode, then that would be a very violent reaction. Probably enough to kill them, purely from that - but let's say they don't die instantly from the crushing influx / wave of water: Air / gasses in the body would compress significantly, if not allowed to exit the body. Your lungs would collapse in an instant, and your chest cavity would collapse on itself, until all air has escaped, and then replaced by water. Your ear eardrums would also rapture in an instant. With a severely collapsed upper torse, which would happen in an instant, I think your heart and major arteries would also become destroyed in an instant. All that space would instantly get filled up with water. I personally think that the violent process would kill them instantly - as in milliseconds...and then when all air has escaped the body, water would fill that space, until the pressure has reached an equilibrium. EDIT: I personally don't think they suffered. The sub likely imploded in an instant, without little prior warning (noises) if the material behaves in the way I suspect it does. Just lights out, and that's that. Brain didn't even get time to react.

gdubs 3y ago
What if the impassion happened higher towards the surface, like, 2000 feet?
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  So let's say that they by some miracle survive implosion without getting knocked out, and have lungs full of air - well, that air would still compress by a huge amount. And with negative buoyancy, they would sink. Pressure at 2000 feet is still a bit over 400 PSI.
- lamontcg 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Jnelson1969 3y ago

I think it would be like a heated, oxygen bubble filled with human soup & debris blast Out both ends of the failed hull whenever the titanium ends were blasted off essentially they became exhaust waste. How quick the titanium ends were blasted off versus full compression of the capsule must be in milliseconds also but must have some lag time even though it seems the titanium ends being blown off are acting as relief from the initial event.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jve 3y ago

https://youtu.be/C1VKotduWek?t=119 https://youtu.be/C1VKotduWek?t=119

dctoedt 3y ago

https://www.quora.com/How-do-humans-die-when-a-submarine-implodes https://www.quora.com/How-do-humans-die-when-a-submarine-imp...

shagie 3y ago
I found https://www.quora.com/When-a-submarine-exceeds-its-crush-depth-and-the-crew-is-killed-are-they-squished-flat-Do-they-die-instantaneously-due-to-the-pressure-What-happens-to-them-physiologically https://www.quora.com/When-a-submarine-exceeds-its-crush-dep... to be more descriptive > When a submarine implodes, a variety of fairly ugly things will happen to the crew. If we assume that a pressure hull implodes at 2000 feet (~60 atmospheres), the pressure will increase from 14.7 to about 875 PSI almost instantly. In the parts of the submarine that have volumes of trapped air, it would be like being inside a diesel engine cylinder when begins its compression stroke. > Anything flammable would burst into flames until a huge wall of water slams into the area and snuffs it out again. The impact of the water would cause significant injury to anyone unlucky enough to still be alive and there would be no time to suffer the effects of oxygen poisoning or anything else. > As others have stated, most human tissues are fluid-filled and are for the most part, incompressible. Human lungs and sinuses would be crushed instantly and the immense shock would render them unconscious immediately. Of greater concern would be the surge of incoming seawater, bulkheads, decks, heavy equipment, motors and other random bits of equipment being slammed into the crew at high velocity. > Essentially, the crew would be killed several times over in less than a blink of an eye. and from another answer: > When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond. > A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds. > The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye. > Sounds gruesome but as a submariner I always wished for a quick hull-collapse death over a lengthy one like some of the crew on Kursk endured. --- While specifics differ, it would be over very fast.

BoxFour 3y ago

Outer space is vastly different due to the significantly lower pressure differential. For this case: To put it simply, picture an unexpected scenario where an airplane plummets from above and lands directly on top of you. The impact would be quite painless.