Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Hey there, welcome to Life Noggin!

  • After hearing how 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 way up to the Karman line, where space technically begins, 100 km 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 10 km 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 toKeep 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 dot org.

  • Brilliant offers you engaging problems to get you interested, and they help explain

  • how to break the problem down into relevant concepts, think through each part, and build back up to the conclusion.

  • when you are falling from space to earth, it involves a lot of physics

  • and because physics is so interesting, Brilliant offers both basic and advanced courses in physics!

  • I tried them, I absorbed the information, they're fantastic.

  • To support Life Noggin and learn more about Brilliant, go to brilliant dot org slash Life Noggin and sign up for free.

  • There's a link at the top of the description.

  • Also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premium subscription.

  • 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

  • As always, my name is Blocko.

  • This has been Life Noggin.

  • Don't forget to keep on thinking.

Hey there, welcome to Life Noggin!

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it