Ask Lemmy

A wizard drops you on the moon. You immediately panic about not being able to breathe, plus your salivia is boiling and your blood is...well, it killed you pretty darn quickly.

Thankfully, the wizard noticed and set spells that puts a tiny bit of atmosphere right over your head, and , repairs the damage inflicted already. There is a chair and a go-board in front of you.

"Wait, that's it?" you ask the wizard after he explains what the spells did. "Arent I going to burn, or freeze, or something?"

"Eventually, yeah," says the wizard as he sits down. "But the human body's great at homeostasis. Since your blood isn't boiling it can circulate heat within you, you can burn calories to add heat as needed, and sweating is absurdly effective since the relative humidity of a vacuum is pretty much less than zero."

"But, didn't the Apollo capsule spin to manage heat, and aren't there huge radiator fins on the ISS so they don't slowly burn? I thought managing heat was hard?"

"It is. For an inanimate object. Especially one that isn't filled with water or surrounded by a thermo exchange medium. You ever see a capsule bleed or a probe sweat?"

Even once you achieve the perfect rotation, the unfiltered UV would likely eventually give you cancer.

You should post this in c/askScience

Seems like a good question for Randall Monroe, if he hasn't already done something similar.

Outside of all the assumptions to make this work, the real issue is that the "dark side" doesn't cool you like you're thinking. Getting rid of heat in space is actually a hard problem to solve as a vacuum is a great insulator. Heat has to be radiated away, and that takes time and lots of surface area.

As an earthling, you have evolved over the course of billions of years to deal with sunlight at a distance of one astronomical unit. That's the distance of the earth's orbit. That's probably the most comfortable distance.

The Apollo moon missions used a so-called "barbecue" mode that rotated the capsules at three revolutions per hour. They did this during the 3-4 day coast phases to and from the moon. As far as I know this was able to mostly hold the interior temperatures in the "survivable" range.

Probably significantly further away than the earth’s orbit, given that (1) you can die of heatstroke from exposure to the sun at earth’s surface, and that’s with miles of air still absorbing much of the radiation; and (2) in the vacuum of space, there would be no air or other substances to conduct away your body heat, so you’d have to rely solely on radiative heat to cool off.

I have no idea where to even start with this one, but I love the question!