Eventually, probably after a few decades, you'd probably have a violent collision with something.
#Xkcd simple writer windows#
Impacts with small bits of debris would start to leave pits and scars on your surface they would often find these on Space Shuttle windows after a flight. If you're in a slightly higher orbit, you'll last longer, but you'd also be in the zone where space debris was thickest. If you're in an orbit that passes near the Earth, your orbit will quickly decay, and before long you'll re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. What happens next depends on exactly where in space you are. It's really gratifying to know I'm not the only person who spends a lot of time carefully cataloging weird stuff like that. She reported a wide range of claims, including several pages asserting that we're 98% water. In a footnote in her wonderful book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, writer Mary Roach mentioned that she had methodically Googled the phrase "human body is percent water", for X from 0 to 100. Or is it 65%? Or 80%? The exact number is a little vague, and seems to depend on who you ask. That makes sense after all, according to that commonly-repeated piece of trivia, human bodies are around 70% water. Aufderheide's book The Scientific Study of Mummies. This is how much liquid you can remove from fresh animal tissue, according to lab experiments reported in Arthur C. Instead, you'd become a freeze-dried mummy, after losing about 80% of your body weight in water. Most of the "ecology" responsible for decomposing your corpse would be killed off quickly by the drying process (along with the lack of oxygen, temperature swings, and solar radiation levels), so your body wouldn't decay very much. Once your body made it to space, this process would ramp up quickly. Also, "Chile: Not as Dry as Space!" was probably nixed by the Chilean tourism board. The space tourism industry has not adopted this as a slogan. In extremely dry environments like the Atacama Desert in Chile, "spontaneous mummification" can occur-and space is even drier than Chile. comm.)," which I like to think means it was shared in a conversation that totally broke up the dinner party they were both at.
The citation they give for that fact is "(C.
According to them, it takes a lot of effort to keep corpses from drying out during the embalming process.
#Xkcd simple writer manual#
In the Manual of Forensic Taphonomy, Franklin Damann and David Carter outline the process of human decomposition. This would probably start before you made it to space the dry, climate-controlled air in the pre-launch waiting area would help draw moisture from your body. If you tried this, the first thing that would happen to your corpse would be that it would dry out. This isn't really relevant, but I have to ask: Is there a reason you specifically wanted your corpse to be naked? Just making things extra weird for the technicians loading up the capsule and/or throwing you out of the airlock? Honestly, my main motivation is to baffle someone in the distant future, but it's an interesting scientific question: what would happen to my body in orbit over the course of years, decades or centuries? Not in a "scatter my ashes" sense, but, like, "throw my naked corpse out the airlock" sense. I've often joked I'd like to have my remains put into orbit. What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions comes out 9/13.
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