A simulation showing what would happen to a human in space without a space suit has been created.
And spoiler: It's about as terrifying as you could imagine.
Advert
The video was created by DG EYE science on YouTube and reveals exactly what a human could expect if they were to be stripped of their space suit and thrown out into the wilderness of the universe.
Lost in space, you might have already guessed is a far from an ideal situation.
But in the video, viewers see just how horrifying it actually is.
Although they explain that ‘surprisingly you probably wouldn’t explode, what does happen is probably just as shocking.
You can watch below:
The video explains that in the first few seconds, the gases in the human body would 'start to expand’ which would cause the lung tissues to rupture.
Advert
Within five seconds, the ‘water on the surface of eyes, skin and mouth’ start to evaporate, and the water in your blood ‘starts to boil’.
In the simulation, viewers see the body swelling and becoming bigger, due to the skin being 'elastic and strong enough to withstand pressure’.
Finally, after all of that, the heart eventually ‘slows down and stops’ before the person dies of asphyxiation.
There's no atmosphere or pressure in space, and in the absence of pressure, water within our bodies would boil, turning from a liquid into a gas.
Advert
Considering as humans we are two thirds water, this is kind of a big deal.
"As you can imagine, given that 60 per cent of the human body is made up of water, this is a serious problem," Dr. Kris Lehnhardt, element scientist for the Human Research Program at NASA, told Live Science.
"In essence, all of your body tissues that contain water will start to expand."
One astronaut who came close to experiencing this was aerospace engineer at NASA, Jim LeBlanc.
In 1966, he was testing the performance of spacesuits in a vacuum chamber. At one point, the hose which supplied pressurised air into his suit was disconnected.
Advert
LeBlanc explained that he started to feel the effects before he eventually blacked out.
"As I stumbled backwards, I could feel the saliva on my tongue starting to bubble just before I went unconscious, and that's kind of the last thing I remember," he explained in documentary series, Moon Machines.
Considering how horrifying this is, it's kind of surprising that people *want* to venture into space.
Lucy Devine