What would happen to your unprotected body in outer space?

well .,.... was it one of the James Bond films ?? some corny adventure film anyway ... the baddy is outside the space craft in his space suit when it gets punctured - the body blows up and explodes inside the space suit because of the vacuum of space .... not pretty .... red blood and stuff splattered inside the visor ........ but maybe an attractive fate for someone annoying you

Yeah, that's nice.

In space, no one can laugh at your nudity.

I don't know if you'd really get a total body explosion, but four factors that come to mind immediately are:

1. The inside of your body is pressurized at one standard atmosphere of pressure, because, on Earth, if it were not, you would be crushed.

2. In a vacuum, the boiling temperature of fluids is drastically lower, so that your blood and other body fluids would probably boil. I say probably, rather than definitely, because some of your body fluids are sort of enclosed, and not exposed to the vacuum, so what would happen is probably complicated.

3. We need air to breathe.

4. There would be no atmosphere to attenuate the passage of light into or out of your body, so you would either become too hot, or too cold, depending on how close you were to the sun.

I hate to use science fiction as a reference for real science, but I note that in the movie "2001," astronaut David Bowman was able to make a mercifully brief emergency re-entry into the Discovery without a space helmet. I have read enough of Clarke's commentary to know that this scene was intended to disabuse viewers of the notion that a person would explode instantly.

My guess is that you would explode and burst into flames all at once... that is, IF you were as close to the sun as the Earth is.

Interesting question.

I don't know if Dragonball Z is a reputable, but apparantly it's possible to fly arond in space unprotected and be completely fine.

Yup. Space is a vacum. Your body is pressurized. The old physics axiom is that "nature abhors a vacum".

Your internal body pressure would be enough to cause your body to explode. I don't think it'd be anything like a supernova or anything but umm.. yeah.. messy.

I picture that the head would explode first, and then the rest of the body would be sucked into the void created by that instantaneous dispersion, and essentially implode to about the size of a pea, squeezing the boiling blood out into space. Gravity would eventually pull the blood and mush from your head back to the pea, and it would create a miniature equivalent of Waterworld, just with blood and mush instead of water. The boiling would slow as the blood freezes, and eventually this little frozen blood planet would be sucked into a star or larger planet, and in either case burn up.

Lack of oxygen will kill anybody without protective clothing and oxygen. Freezing might be a little bit faster.

Wow, I'm picturing all these things happening simultaneously to the most annoying person I have to deal with at work. I love fantasies.

Does anyone else hate their meaningless horrible ****-ass job as much as I do?

I think their hemorrhoids would be sucked into their ass and then blow up to the size of the Goodyear Blimp before any of that other stuff happened......and the prick probably deserves it.....

Kicky

You have some rather morbid fantasies: however...

The human body on earth is in equilibrium with air pressure at the earth's surface. that is about 15 pounds per square inch or 1015 mbar.

So all the internal organs, blood vessels and other bits and pieces have gas water blood and all the other unpleasant substances in the body, which I dont like to talk about, but on this occasion I will make exception of, at 15 lbs/in2

Now if your unpleasant workmate was shot off into space, let us say for argument transported instantly beyond the Earth's atmosphere, then his her or its internal pressure would still be as that on the surface of earth, but the external pressure would be close to zero.

So his her or its body would suddenly have to cope with a pressure differential of 1 atmosphere. And to answer you question, internal organs would rupture, blood vessels would burst, the eyes would probably pop out, along with unpleasant stuff via the rectum, ears would burst...in short it would not be a very pleasant experience. (the shot in 2001 when Dave gets back into the ship by chancing a short trip without his pressurised helmet is completely fanciful, and probably Arthur C Clarke was annoyed).

I hope this mode of death is sufficiently gruesome for you to continue thinking it appropriate for your work colleague.

I'm inclined to think all of this would happen at the cellular level, so rather than the blood vessels popping, the very constituents of the blood vessels would violently evaporate. Or maybe not. But animal cells are pretty delicate things.

Kicky, your new avatar and some of your thought provoking observations do indeed make a beautiful marriage.

The film was "Outland" and starred Sean Connery. In it a black hat gets his suit punctured and he bloats up and explodes - really graphic.

I guess you would just pass out pretty quickly so most of the really horrific things (like your blood boiling and prob'bly your intestines exploding) wouldn't bother you too much. Of course an incredibly improbably event would be to be rescued immediately by a passing spacecraft flown by a two-headed fellow with a girl called Trillian that you once met at a party.

Very nearly infinitely improbable.

I think I'm going to change it soon. I am not convinced that this monkey is really me.

Take the glasses off!

.....and falling.