this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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We do, however, swell up quite a bit.
Thanks! I was about to ask if there is time for the pressure differences to act upon our biology, or if the freezing bit happens before everything has a chance to go pop!
For gases, volume is inversely proportional to pressure, which means as pressure approaches zero, very slight changes in pressure will make a big difference to the behavior of the gases.
But for solids and liquids, the absence of pressure doesn't make that big of a difference. Yes, vapor pressure means that water will boil at lower temperatures in a vacuum, but the way the actual liquids stay together, especially when enclosed in in a way that limits vapor pressure, remains the same in low pressure environments as they are in medium pressure environments.
So when you go scuba diving, the doubling of pressure when you hit a depth of 10 meters is simply accommodated by you breathing denser air out of your tank. But nothing else about your body feels any different under that pressure. Go even deeper, and some things might start getting affected by the dissolved gases in your blood and other bodily fluids, but we're talking about huge pressure differences from the surface, basically 1 atmosphere of pressure for each 10 meters you descend.
In contrast, the difference between sea level atmospheric pressure and the vacuum of space is only one atmosphere of pressure. The liquid and solid parts of your body will be fine. Your reliance on breathing might not fare so well, but see how militaries deal with it: pressurizing the cabin to some degree but making sure that the actual breathing mask is delivering the right amount of oxygen even when the cabin pressure is the equivalent of a high altitude.
So when that blobfish gets yanked out from 900 meters deep up to the surface, that's a sudden loss of pressure from 91 atms to 1 atm, a 90 atm swing. But for a human going from 1 to 0 atms, that's just a 1-atm difference. If you open your mouth and exhale while it's happening, maybe relax your eustachian tubes if you know how to do that, you probably won't have any issues from the decompression, until you start to try to breathe.
Oh, wow, so not all of that sci-fi was purely -fi! This makes so much sense, yet I've never conceptualised it as such. Like, I knew the concrete pressure differences, but never had them set in a big picture view:-?
Jesus, now I wish I would've taken up more physics, would've happily soldiered through the math for this amount of interesting!