Doctor Who's Oxygen: What would really happen to a human in a vacuum?

I know everyone who just watched Doctor Who will be thinking, "I wonder what would really happen if the human body was exposed to a vacuum?"

Good question. NASA used to have the answer on its pages, but it disappeared a couple of years ago. Luckily, nothing is truly gone from the Inner Tubes, and so I proudly present their answer, ripped from the Wayback Machine.  [Their answer is ripped from an even earlier page, referenced in the text.]



Ask an astrophysicist: What happens to a human body in the vacuum of space?

The Answer

From the now extinct page http://medlib/jsc.nasa.gov/intro/vacuum.html:

How long can a human live unprotected in space?
If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts -- and animal experiments confirm -- that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.
Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.
You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood. If your skin is exposed to direct sunlight without any protection from its intense ultraviolet radiation, you can get a very bad sunburn.
At NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in '65. He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil.
Aviation Week and Space Technology (02/13/95) printed a letter by Leonard Gordon which reported another vacuum-packed anecdote:
"The experiment of exposing an unpressurized hand to near vacuum for a significant time while the pilot went about his business occurred in real life on Aug. 16, 1960. Joe Kittinger, during his ascent to 102,800 ft (19.5 miles) in an open gondola, lost pressurization of his right hand. He decided to continue the mission, and the hand became painful and useless as you would expect. However, once back to lower altitudes following his record-breaking parachute jump, the hand returned to normal."

More info and references are at the link.

So I think Doctor Who got it right, don't you?

Knock Knock - the woodlice

Knock Knock!

Knock on wood!

Can you shoot an episode of a tv series about the relationship of these two unrelated sayings? Doctor Who can.

Do you think Doctor Who writers research whether English terms are used in the US? (Or Australia, or wherever, but I'm thinking of BBC America here.)

Doctor Who's bugs are clearly pillbugs.

Last night's episode was about alien pill millipedes, which they kept calling woodlice - often just lice - even though the pilling kind and the woodlice kind are entirely different. The pilling kind are Myriapods (millipedes), and the woodlice are Crustaceans (like crabs). And they're called sowbugs and pillbugs around here in the western US. They have lots of other names around the world - like roly-polys and wood pigs - and the woodlice name seems to be relatively uncommon. 

Pillbugs, unrolled and rolled.

Woodlouse. That's the way a woodlouse rolls, i.e. it doesn't roll at all.

I was especially revolted by a killer pillbugs plot as I have just started a farm (with both pillbugs and sowbugs, since my yard teems with both) because my chameleon ADORES eating them, but they're known to be parasitized in the wild. No, I'm not talking about the Isopods that ARE parasites like the famously off-putting fish-tongue-eating Isopod, Cymothoa exigua, that continues to live in the fish's mouth and perform tongue duties as the price of its meals; in their turn our garden Isopods can get a parasite that makes them walk above ground in the sunshine where they're easy prey for birds, who are in turn colonized by the parasites. (They're called Plagiorhynchus cylindraceus. Calling Charlie Stross!) I thought a farm would be a good idea as I can keep the birds away and hopefully raise a generation of healthy sowbugs and pillbugs. I did not expect to see cheap CGI of them eating people.


I suppose I shouldn't agonize too much over the comprehensibility of their common name since the characters in Doctor Who kept calling them insects, which is like calling humans a type of bird. (We do have two legs, like birds.) Since the young housemate characters were all students, I'm hoping none of them is a zoology student. 

Loved the pun about, "How do you feel? Rotten?" though. Hahaha.


Spoilers below.


The common name of the Isopod  wasn't the most confusing thing about the episode, however. They presumably went with 'woodlouse' because the wood of the house - the 'fabric' as the doctor called it - had something to do with the plot. As did the wood of the trees outside, since they also attacked a character. But it didn't really hang together - the woodnymphs, the dryads, the tree spirits, the tower, the wainscotting, the woodlice, OK. Eating someone's vital essence to preserve someone else's life as they turned to wood, OK. Yet, somehow the victims themselves being preserved forever - or so the landlord said? In what way was Pavel preserved as part of the house if he'd been used up? Aliens summoned by a tuning fork or a musical box, and yet halted from action by a stuck record? Seems a bit, well, rushed, to put it charitably.

For Doctor Who, a brickbat (not really)

I'm sure everyone who watched Doctor Who last night (2015-09-19) enjoyed the Douglas Adams-style jokes in the arena. One of them sounded familiar.

I'm not accusing Moffat of ripping this off - I'm sure two people can come up with the same to-a-person-from-the-far-future-British-culture-gets-confusing joke. It's just I re-read it recently and it was on my mind, along with the whole paragraph of great puns around it.

It's from Michael Moorcock's Dancers At the End of Time tales, this one being Pale Roses, from New Worlds Quarterly 7, edited by Hilary Bailey and Charles Platt, 1974.

Doctor Who is Cliff Richard's father

Unearthed from 1969, a Tyne Tees series in which Cliff Richard tries to do the right thing.

Nicholas Whyte is responsible for the disinterment. There are three episodes surviving, down from six originally broadcast.  The TV is itself remarkably primitive - the black and white square box looks as though it's from 1949, not 1969. And the sentiments aren't much more modern.

It seems to stem from a Sunday sermon program. I don't recall it, but then I didn't see much Tyne Tees (I was in Yorkshire) in 1969.  The format is: youth is disaffected; youth goes in search of his roots; youth learns he is wrong and the Church of England is correct. Wait, that sounds boring. But it's not boring! It's Cliff Richard at the height of his powers along with The Settlers singing fairly good songs. If you like to play "guess the parable", or if you just wonder how Imaginary Youth interacted with Imaginary Police, this is the series for you.





NSFW: Beware that when you see what's graffiti'd on the wall at the beginning of Johnny Up the Creek, you'll want to bail. No TV station on earth would put that phrase up there for all to see nowadays. But the program's heart is in the right place. The type of person who wrote the slogan is shown up as an idiot later on. Still alarming to see, though.





The great delight is seeing William Hartnell, the original Doctor Who, as Johnny's father in Johnny Come Home.


4/23 Edited to put the NSFW warning earlier in the post.
[edited to renew links 10/17]

06/10/2023 I've updated three links but I'm unable to find part 2. If anyone has it, please let me know in comments - many thanks!

Slightly behind on Doctor Who

We've been rewatching season 5 and season 6  of Doctor Who. So far so good - but how do we watch season 7? There must be a legal option but we've failed to figure it out so far.



That's the Tardis, the real deal, on Google at this coordinate.

Nerdgasm: Doctor Who on Star Wars

Or Barty Crouch on Star Wars! whichever you prefer.

David Tennant is a Star Wars fan! He will play a character on Cartoon Network's Clone Wars. 

The Doctor Who fave will play an ancient droid called Huyang, a servant in the Jedi Order.



Love that large-eyed, vulnerable look he has. Tennant, not Huyang. Though Huyang's pretty hot for a decrepit metal schoolteacher.

IGN.com has the story, and even better, an exclusive clip from the cartoon.

RIP Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

I was sorry to hear about his passing.

I'm not at all sure how Nicholas Courtney, Brigadier Alex Lethbridge-Stewart, got to be 81, and subsequently died, but apparently he did and now there is another thing to mourn in the Doctor Who canon.

He always portrayed a large and in charge personality on Doctor Who, although he was regularly undermined as a bit of a blowhard.

I think Doctor Who should concentrate on stopping the deaths of his compadres. They are scaring me.

Exterminate - Forty five years of Doctor Who and the Daleks

1963 is one of my favorite years. That was the year it all changed, and not just for me, apparently. Philip Larkin put it this way in his Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP

At five I was a little too young to realize that two of those things existed. The Beatles I was big on. Forty-five years on, 1963 looks like the watershed year it was.

This day, on 22nd November, 1963, President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. I have a vague memory of that – not the assassination itself, but of my family being strangely subdued and my grandmother buying a memorial book, Four Days, which I still see around. My family lived in Yorkshire, England. The impact of that deed was worldwide.

Also on that day, the Beatles' second LP, With the Beatles, was released. I already knew about the Beatles. Now there was a phenomenon with impact. I missed most of the other 1963isms. The dreadful weather; General De Gaulle's Non to British hopes of joining the Common Market. I remember the White Heat of Technology Speech by the new leader of labor, Harold Wilson, but I'm sure I heard of it much later. One of Britain's many communist spies, Kim Philby defecting to Russia, the Profumo Scandal, and the authorization of Britain's third TV channel, BBC2, with a mandate to edumacate the masses or something, I don't know, I didn't see it for many years afterwards. In fact I don't remember ever watching ITV, the second channel. BBC (the first one) was all we had. (I'd occasionally sneak round to houses with lower parental morals in order to catch an ITV programme, but that's probably another story.)

But tomorrow, 23rd November, is the forty-fifth anniversary of the day the world REALLY changed. On that day, the first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast. And then, as Philip Larkin put it,

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

Dr Who debuted on the BBC, in glorious black and white. It was the story of an old duffer and his niece, made far more strange and beautiful than the usual BBC story by the fact that the old man – the doctor – was a traveler in time and space. His vehicle was disguised as an emergency telephone booth, a rather steampunk attempt at fitting in with 1960s planet Earth. I'm no otaku and I can't remember a single original Dr Who storyline, although I do remember the (1965) motion picture in great detail. All I knew of it was Dr Who fought the Daleks, and that was enough. Here's a clip from the 1965 movie.



This clip opens with a flipbook of the book The Dalek World, which - oooh! - I have.



After that, I insisted on getting Dalek material in my own chosen medium, the written word. I still have some of it – a couple of Dr Who annuals, which I reread recently and was surprised to find were simple in terms of word-length but complex in terms of moral values, depiction of unpleasant events and so on, and the Dalek Pocketbook and Space Travellers' Guide,



which had a fair amount of facts (as then believed) about the solar system and was therefore my introduction to science. (Thanks, I think, Dr Who!) Unlike most, I did not hide behind the sofa when the Daleks appeared, and unlike 99.9% of people at the time, I knew that the effect that produced the Dalek voice was ring modulation. (My father worked in audio electronics.) I don't know why. Chicks dig Daleks, what can I say.



Hey, I used to have a little black battery-operated Dalek like the one she's holding…

The BBC has some historical photos and background on its site here.

Department of Dancin' White Boys Part II

Much more funny, up to date and culturally important than the clip below, this is the only surviving clip of the Beatles singing Ticket To Ride on Top of the Tops in 1965. The BBC wiped all the tapes of early TOTP during one of its many frugal but stupid moments. This fragment survived because it was shown during a broadcast of Dr Who as a glimpse of the distant past seen through some sort of device in the Tardis.

So it's a glimpse of the distant past showing up as a fictional glimpse of the distant past in a long gone TV show, on the show's internal TV. That's very meta. Deep.



Or just watch the first Doctor and his companions demonstrate how to groove to a Beat Combo in authentic fashion. But wait, they're actors, not real fans. They are faking their authenticity, despite being of the correct non-Austin Powers time period! That's deep too! I need a drink.

Can I just say that at least in the last two clips I've put on the blog, I haven't said anyone is hot? I think that's progress.