It's always fun asking scientists really, like really, random questions to see if they know the answer. And this is exactly what people did when boffin Paul Doherty took to Reddit.
Paul is a senior scientist at San Francisco's Exploratorium Museum and was also on the research team for the Viking Mars mission.
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In the thread, he teamed up with writer Cody Cassidy to look into 'the most interesting ways you can die'.
And they sound fucking painful.
First up is one for all the claustrophobics out there. What would happen if you were inside an elevator which plunged to the ground?
The duo say: "Laying flat on your back is the best way to spread out the G forces evenly through your body. If you're standing up, your organs may keep falling even though your body has stopped."
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Try picturing your standing body remaining in place while your organs literally rip through your skin and hit the ground.
"You should also hope that your elevator fits snugly in its shaft, so the pillow of air below the car slows the fall and the broken elevator cable below can provide some cushioning."
One redditor suggested that they will now enter every elevator and sit down just to be safe.
Next scenario:. If you were floating one mile away from a neutron star, what would happen?
A neutron star is created when giant stars die in supernovas and their cores collapse. They are about the size of an average city with a mass about 1.4 times that of the sun.
Paul says: "Let's assume the neutron star is unnaturally quiet. You'll be in free fall, and as usual it's not the fall that kills you. Gravity is stronger at close distances and weaker further away. This means if your head is pointed toward the neutron star it will be tugged toward the star much more strongly than your feet and this tidal force will rip you apart."
How pleasant.
What about drowning? Nah that's not dramatic enough. Paul and Cody looked into what would happen if you were at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It's the deepest part of the world's ocean.
Credit: Google Maps
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"Fortunately you're mostly water, and water is incompressible. So you would retain your basic human shape. The air pockets inside you, namely in your nasal cavity, throat and chest, would be a problem. Those would collapse inward, which would fatal."
"Because you wouldn't have any air, you wouldn't float to the surface and you would likely stay at the bottom to be consumed by the bone-eating snot flower, which usually eats whale bones but would probably make an exception in this case."
Pausing his list of horrific ways to die, Paul and Cody said the most interesting part of their research was that you can't actually die from a lack of sleep.
They mentioned a high school kid called Randy Gardner who tried to stay awake for as long as possible in 1964. He managed to stay up for 264 hours or 11 days straight.
"Though he hallucinated that he was a professional football player, mistook a street sign for a pedestrian and eventually lost muscle control he was fine and recovered after a day of sleep."
"It seems that unless you're put on some diabolical machine that forces you to stay awake, like a few unfortunate rats have been, your body will make you sleep."
There you go students, you can stop complaining that staying awake to finish an assessment will kill you.
It's also not a good idea to stick your head into a particle accelerator according to Paul and Cody.
"Whether you would die or not would depend on the power of the particle accelerator and how much radiation it was carrying."
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Russian scientist Anatoli Bugorski found that out the hard way. While he was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment - he stuck his head into a proton beam. The beam was travelling nearly at the speed of light and apparently caused a flash 'brighter than a thousand suns'.
He miraculously had no damage to his intellectual capacity but the proton beam did burn through parts of his face.
Paul and Cody say: "As a result now many years later one side of his face is smooth and unwrinkled while the other side has aged by decades. So maybe old accelerators could be used instead of botox for beauty treatments."
Featured Image Credit: FOXTopics: Death