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