Spin to Win | Black Holes, Part 2

In the previous part of this series, I tried to analyze what it would be like to fly an Apollo Command Module into black holes of various sizes. This time, though, I’m going to restrict myself to a single 1-million-solar-mass black hole. The difference is that, this time, I’m going to let the black hole spin (at 98% of the maximum possible spin, which is pretty average for a fast-spinning hole). But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I go on, here’s my vehicle:

(From the website of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum)

That’s the actual command module Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong took to the Moon (minus the Plexiglas shroud, of course). It would fit in even a medium-sized living room. This time, the crew will consist of me, Jürgen Prochnow (Das Boot Jürgen, naturally. Captain’s hat and all), and Charlize Theron. I was gonna take David Bowie and Abe Lincoln along again, but frankly, I’ve put Bowie through enough, and Lincoln was just so damn grim all the time.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand: the scary monster that is a rapidly-spinning black hole. All the black holes I discussed in the last part were Schwarzschild black holes, meaning they had no spin or electric charge. This black hole, though, is a Kerr black hole: it spins. The spin means this trip is a whole new ballgame. We’re still going to die horribly, of course, but hey, at least it’ll be interesting.

The first difference is that you can get closer to the event horizon of a spinning black hole. For a non-spinning black hole, there are no stable circular orbits closer than one and a half times the radius of the event horizon (the Schwarzschild radius), because in order to be in a circular orbit any closer, you’d have to travel faster than light. For spinning ones, there’s a lozenge-shaped region outside the event horizon called the ergosphere (My first-born daughter will be Ergosphere Sullivan). Objects near a rotating hole (or any rotating mass, to a lesser extent) are dragged along with the hole’s rotation. But inside the ergosphere, though, they’re being dragged along so fast that, no matter what, they can’t stand still. Inside the ergosphere, you have to rotate with the hole, because traveling anti-spinward would require going faster than the speed of light.

Here’s roughly what a free-fall trajectory into our Kerr black hole would look like (looking down at the hole’s north pole):

The ergosphere is the gray part. The event horizon is the black part.

Jürgen and Charlize are suspicious of me, but I gave them my word that we’re just orbiting the black hole. To make some observations. For science, and all that. When they’re not looking, I’m gonna hit the retro-rocket and plunge us to our deaths. I feel like there’s a flaw in my reasoning, but I don’t have time for such things.

Even orbits don’t work the way they normally do, near a spinning hole. Orbits around ordinary objects are very close to simple ellipses or circles. But, sitting in our command module, here’s what our orbit looks like (starting from parameters that should have given us a nice elliptical orbit):

This is because, when we orbit closer to the hole, we get a kick from the spin that twists our orbit around.

From nearby, a non-rotating black hole looks like its name: a black circle of nothingness, surrounded by a distorted background of stars and galaxies. From our orbit around the spinning million-solar-mass hole, though, the picture is much different:

(Picture and simulation by Alain Riazuelo.)

In that picture, the hole’s equator rotates from left to right. The reason the horizon is D-shaped is that photons coming from that direction were able to get a lot closer to the horizon, since they were moving in the direction of the rotation. On the opposite side, the horizon is bigger because those photons were going upstream, so to speak, and many of them were pulled to a halt by the spin and then either pulled into the hole, flung away, or pulled into a spinward orbit. Black holes are bullies. Spinning ones say “If you get too close, I’m going to eat you. And if you’re standing within a few arm’s lengths, you have to spin around me, or else I’ll eat you.”

(Incidentally, if you read about the movie’s background, the black hole in Interstellar was spinning at something like 99.999999% of the maximum rate. Its horizon would have been D-shaped like the picture above, from up close. From a distance, it would have looked…well, it would have looked like it did in the movie. They got it right, because they hired Kip motherfucking Thorne, Mr. Black Hole himself, to help write their ray-tracing code.

Speaking of Interstellar, the fact that you can get so much closer to a spinning black hole than a non-spinning one (providing you’re orbiting spinward) means you can get much deeper into its time-dilating gravity well. That means, as long as the tides aren’t strong enough to kill you, you can experience much bigger timewarps. The only way to get the same timewarp from a non-rotating black hole is to apply horrendously large forces to hover just outside the horizon. It’s much more practical to do in the vicinity of a spinning hole. Well, I mean, it’s no less practical than putting a Command Module in orbit around a black hole.

According to the equations from this Physics Stack Exchange discussion, as Jürgen, Charlize, and I zip around the hole close to the innermost stable orbit, time is flowing upwards of four times slower than it is for observers far away. I’m gonna keep us in orbit for a week, to lull my crewmates into complacency, so I’ll have the element of surprise when I try to kill us all. Well, we think it’s a week. Everyone outside thinks we’re orbit for a month and change

Then, without warning, I flip us around, turn on the engines, and take us into the hole. Jürgen fixes me with those steely blue eyes and that pants-shittingly intimidating face he was doing all through Das Boot. Charlize spends fifteen seconds trying to reason with me, then realizes I’m beyond all help and starts beating the shit out of me. Did you see Fury Road? She can punch. Neither of them can do anything to stop me, though: we’re already seconds from death.

But because this is a big black hole, the tides are gentle, at least outside the horizon. They’re stronger than the tides the Moon exerts on the Earth (which are measured in hundreds of nanometers per second per second), but they’re not what’s going to tear us to pieces.

What’s going to tear us to pieces is frame-dragging. Let’s go back to the metaphor of the whirlpool. The water moves much faster close to the center than it does far away. Because your boat is a physical object with a non-zero size, when you get really close, the water on one side of your boat is moving significantly faster than the water on the other side, because the near side is significantly closer than the far side. This blog hasn’t had any horrible pictures recently. Here’s one to explain the frame-dragging we experience:

In this picture, the capsule orbits bottom-to-top, and the hole rotates clockwise (this is the opposite of the view in the orbit plots; in this picture, we’re looking at the hole from the bottom, looking at its south pole; the reason has nothing to do with the fact that I screwed up and drew my horrible picture backwards).

Space closer to the hole is moving faster than space farther from the hole. The gradient transfers some of the hole’s angular momentum to the capsule, which is bad news, because that means the capsule starts spinning. It spins in the opposite direction of the hole (counter-clockwise, in the Horrible Picture (TM)).

I say the spin is bad news because, from the research for “Death by Centrifuge“, I know that things get really messy and horrible if you’re in a vehicle that rotates too fast.

Here’s a fun fact: Neil Armstrong came perilously close to death on his first spaceflight. During Gemini 8, while Armstrong and crewmate Dave Scott were practicing station-keeping and docking maneuvers with an uncrewed Agena target vehicle, the linked spacecraft started spinning. Unbeknownst to them, one of the Gemini capsule’s thrusters was stuck wide-open. Thinking it was the Agena causing the problem, they undocked. That’s when the shit really hit the fan, though I think Armstrong probably described it more gracefully. A video is worth a thousand words: here’s what it looked like when they undocked. Before long, the capsule was tumbling at 60 revolutions per minute (1 per second), wobbling around all three axes.

Did you ever spin in a circle when you were a kid? I did. Did you ever try it again as an adult, just to see what it was like? I did. I spent the next fifteen minutes lying in the grass (because I couldn’t tell which way was down) wondering if I should just go ahead and puke. Human beings don’t handle rotation well. According to this literature survey (thanks to Nyrath of Project Rho for helping direct me to it; it was hell to try and find a proper paper otherwise), average people do okay spinning at 1.7 RPM. At 2.2 RPM, susceptible people will probably start puking everywhere. At 5.44 RPM, ordinary tasks become stressful, because, thanks to the Coriolis effect (that troublemaking bastard), things like limbs, bodies, and inner-ear fluid don’t move normally, which plays hell with coordination. Also, it makes you puke. At 10 RPM, even the tough subjects in the study were seriously distressed.

Armstrong and Scott were spinning six times faster. When you spin, your brain loses the ability to compensate for movements of the eyes: you lose the ability to stabilize the image on your retinas, and the world wobbles and jumps. That’s bad news, especially if, for instance, you’re stuck inside a metal can which is spinning way too fast, and the only way you can stop it spinning way too fast (so that you don’t die) is by focusing your eyes on buttons and moving your Coriolis-afflicted hands to press them. Armstrong was an especially tough, calm dude, and he managed it, even though both men were starting to have serious vision problems. He did what any good troubleshooter would do: he switched the thrusters off and then on again (more or less). That saved the mission.

Now, I don’t know how fast the black hole will spin us, because the math is very complicated. But considering it’s a black hole we’re dealing with, probably pretty fast. Like I said, nothing about black holes is subtle. At 10 RPM, I throw up. My vomit describes a curved Coriolis-arc through the cabin and splatters on the wall. Jürgen doesn’t throw up until 20 RPM (after all, he’s a seafaring submarine captain). Charlize doesn’t throw up until 25,because she’s a badass.

At 60 RPM, I’m already screaming my head off, hyperventilating, and desperately regretting my decision to plunge us into a black hole. I try to hit buttons (pretty much at random), but I can’t get my fingers to go where I want them, and I press all the wrong ones. Jürgen is trying to calm me down and telling me he wants proper damage reports, but in my panic, I’ve forgotten all my German. Charlize has written both of us off and is trying to re-orient us and thrust away from the horizon, but it’s already too late.

At 60 RPM, the centrifugal acceleration on the periphery of the CM is already over 7 gees. There’s probably a bit of metal creaking, but nothing too serious. Because the crew couches are only a foot or so from the center of mass, we only experience an acceleration of 1.2 gees. For the moment, our main problem is that we’re punching and/or throwing up on each other.

At 120 RPM, the command module is starting to complain. Its extremities experience 28 gees. Panels slam shut. A cable pops loose and causes a short that trips the circuit breakers and kills our power. Even in our couches, we’re feeling almost 5 gees. I’m making a face like this:

(Source.)

At 200 RPM, the heat shield, experiencing 77 gees of centrifugal acceleration, cracks and flies off. It’s possible that the kick it gets from leaving our sorry asses behind, combined with the kick from being in the hole’s ergosphere (sounds dirty) is enough to slingshot the fragments to safety. Kind of a moot point, though, since I only care about the human parts, and all of those have blacked out at 13 gees.

Somewhere between 200 RPM and 500 RPM, the hull finally tears open. The bottom dome is flung off, letting important things like our air, our barf bags, and possibly our crew couches, fly out. Not that it matters: at 83 gees, we’ve all got ruptured aortas, brain hemorrhages, and we’re all in cardiac arrest.

At 1000 RPM (16.7 revolutions per second), the command module is flung decisively apart. Thanks to conservation of angular momentum, all the pieces are spinning pretty fast, too. Jürgen, Charlize, and I, are very dead, and in the goriest of possible ways: pulped by centrifugal force, and then shredded as we were spun apart.

The fragments closer to the horizon appear to accelerate ahead of us. The parts farther away fall behind. Most of the fragments fall into the hole. Spaghettification takes a while: once again, a more massive hole has weaker tides near the horizon.

As for what happens as we fall into the really nasty part of the hole (because it was sunshine and jellybeans before…), physics isn’t sure. The simplest models predict a ring-shaped singularity, rather than a point-shaped one. Some models predict that the ring singularity might act as an actual usable wormhole to another universe. But it’s also possible that effects I don’t pretend to understand (which have to do with weird inner horizons only rotating holes have) blue-shift the infalling light, creating a radiation bath that burns our atoms into subatomic ash. Either way, we’re not going to be visiting any worlds untold.

Once again, I’ve killed myself and two much cooler people. At least I only did it once this time. In the next and final part, I’m going to spend a little more time playing around with far less realistic black holes. (WARNING! Don’t actually play with black holes. If you have to ask why, then you skipped to the end of both articles.)

Centrifuging Fruit

In my last post, I detailed some of the very gory things that would happen to a human being in a high-gee centrifuge. Then I remembered that I have access to a high-gee centrifuge. Sort of. You see, I’ve got one of those fancy front-loading washing machines. It saves time on drying by spinning your clothes at a ridiculous speed at the end of the wash cycle. And when I say “ridiculous speed”, I’m talking 1,100 RPM (at least, according to the manufacturer). That’s 18 revolutions per second! I measured the drum’s diameter at 55 centimeters. If you do the math, it tells you that the acceleration on the inner surface of the drum, when the thing’s running full pelt, is 372 gees. Okay, so it’s not ultracentrifuge material, but that’s still a lot of acceleration.

And I thought, you know what? We’ve got some fruit in the refrigerator that would be just as tasty pulped as it would be whole. Let’s see what 372 gees does to it! (Sometimes, I worry about how close I came to growing up to be a serial killer…)

I’ve tried this experiment once before (for another blog, which is why this one might look a bit familiar). Let’s do it again, but this time, with our gory, scary centrifugal thought experiment in mind. Here are our astronauts:

That’s a plum and a lime. The plum was pretty soft. We had a firmer one, but it wouldn’t fit in the container, and, crazy as I am, I didn’t want to risk splattering the inside of my washing machine with plum pulp. The lime, on the other hand, was so hard it could probably cut glass. Either way, these are our volunteers (it was a pain in the bum getting them to sign the release forms, let me tell you…) Let’s seal them in their space capsule.

I must say, they look pretty brave, as far as produce goes. Note the extra precautions: each fruit sealed in an individual bag, and packing tape to seal up the container. I didn’t want it flipping over during spin-up and seeping stuff everywhere. But enough talk! Let’s get ’em in the centrifuge!

There they are, their capsule strapped into place. Can you tell how worried I was I’d end up painting the inside of my washing machine with fruit?

I could’ve sworn I heard a high-pitched shriek when the washer reached maximum spin. Then again, I’ve been hearing a high-pitched shriek ever since the Exploding Kikkoman Bottle Incident, so perhaps it’s just me.

This is what the picture above would have looked like if I’d remembered to turn the flash on. Believe it or not, the drum is actually spinning here. Sometimes, I’m impressed by what my cheap little point-and-shoot camera can do. And then I remember that it’s got no time-lapse or long-exposure settings, and I stop being impressed. Either way, in this picture, the top of the container is experiencing about 237 gees (2,322 m/s^2). The bottom is experiencing 372 gees (3,649 m/s^2). The difference is because the top of the container is significantly closer to the axis of rotation than the bottom, and the acceleration is the distance from the axis times the square of the angular velocity. I’m surprised how well the space capsule tolerated the gees. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, lives are at stake here. The capsule was engineered to survive all conditions. Still, considering how many times that capsule has been through the dishwasher, I’m impressed that it didn’t collapse.

Other things, however, did collapse…

This is almost exactly how our juicy astronauts were when I pulled them out of the centrifuge. I moved them around for photographic purposes, but that’s it, and even I’m not clumsy enough to completely obliterate a plum just by touching it. At least not when I’ve had my coffee.

The lime did remarkably well. It was noticeably flattened on the bottom, but it was very much intact. Now, under 1 gee (earth surface gravity), my scale says that a similar lime (someone ate my surviving astronaut; the nerve!) weighed around 100 grams. Under 372 gees, that lime weighed the equivalent of 37 kilograms. That’s 82 pounds. That’s the size of the dumbbells those really gigantic scary guys with the tattoos are always curling at the gym. It’s heavier than a gold bar. But the lime had little trouble. It’s the toughest substance known to man. I feel sorry for whoever ate it.

The plum, as you can see, didn’t fare so well. Here’s a gory close-up:

(Just an aside: I wonder if there’s anybody who’s genuinely upset by the sight of squashed fruit. Not in a “that’s a waste of food” sense, but in a visceral sense, the way some people can’t stand the sight of blood. If that’s you, I apologize. And you might want to consider some counseling. I’d give you the number of my therapist, but she lives on Jupiter.)

That plum is flattened. It looks like it was squashed under a very heavy weight. Which is exactly what happened. I don’t have a similarly-sized plum for comparison, but I’d say it’s reasonable to assume that, without all that weird white pithy stuff to decrease the density, the plum was at least twice as heavy as the lime, meaning, at maximum acceleration, it weighed almost 80 kilograms (176 pounds). That’s as much as my cousin. (I would invite her over for a comparison test, but even I recognize that “Will you come to my house and stand on a plum for me?” is a pretty weird request.)

But here you have an excellent practical demonstration of what I talked about in the last article. Under high acceleration, the weight of the plum exceeded its structural strength, and it split and oozed horribly all across the bottom of its bag. If the pit had been denser, it might very well have squelched down through the pulp and ended up on the bottom, but even my terrifying washing machine has its limits.

Oh, and before anybody complains that I’m wasting food on silly experiments… First of all, NYEH. Second of all, I didn’t waste it. I ate the plum. Somebody else ate the lime (for some reason). And you know what? That plum was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I’m serious. It was all squishy and ripe. I used it because I thought it had gone over the edge already. But no. It was perfect. So not only did I get to centrifuge something, but I got some lovely fruit, too! I might have to try these practical experiments more often…

Or perhaps not. I must remember the Exploding Kikkoman Bottle Incident…

Death by Centrifuge

WARNING! Although it won’t contain any gory pictures, this post is going to contain some pretty gory details of what might happen to the human body under high acceleration. Children and people who don’t like reading about such things should probably skip this one. You have been warned.

In my last post, I talked a bit about gee forces. Gee forces are a handy way to measure acceleration. Right now, you and I and (almost) every other human are experiencing somewhere around 1 gee of head-to-foot acceleration due to the Earth’s gravity. Anyone who happens to be at the top of Mt. Everest is experiencing 0.999 gees. The overgrown amoebas at the bottom of the Challenger deep are experiencing 1.005 gees.

But human beings are exposed to greater gee forces than this all the time. For instance, the astronauts aboard Apollo 11 experienced up to 4 gees during launch. Here’s an awesome graph from NASA:

Fighter pilots have to put up with even higher gee forces when they make tight turns, thanks to the centrifugal acceleration required to turn in a circle at high speeds. From what I can gather, many pilots have to demonstrate they can handle 9 gees for 10 or 15 seconds without blacking out in order to qualify to fly planes like the F-16. Here’s an example of things not going right at 9 gees:

Yes, it’s the same video from the last post. I spent fifteen or twenty minutes searching YouTube for a better one, but I couldn’t find it. I did, however, discover this badass pilot in a gee-suit who handled 12 gees:

The reason we humans don’t tolerate gee forces very well is pretty simple: we have blood. Blood is a liquid. Like any liquid, its weight produces hydrostatic pressure. I’ll use myself as an example (for the record, I’m pretty sure I would die at 9 gees, but anybody who wants to let me in a centrifuge, I’d love to prove myself wrong). I’m 6 feet, 3 inches tall, or 191 centimeters, or 1.91 meters. Blood is almost the same density as water, so we can just run Pascal’s hydrostatic-pressure equation: (1 g/cc [density of blood]) * (9.80665 m/s^2 [acceleration due to gravity]) * (1.91 m [my height]). That comes out to a pressure of 187.3 millibars, or, to use the units we use for blood pressure in the United States, 140.5 millimeters of mercury.

It just so happens that I have one of those cheap drugstore blood-pressure cuffs handy. You wait right here. I’m gonna apply it to the fleshy part of my ankle and check my math.

It’s a good thing my heart isn’t in my ankle, because the blood pressure down there is 217/173. That’s the kind of blood pressure where, if you’ve got it throughout your body, the doctors get pale and start pumping you full of exciting chemicals. For the record, my resting blood pressure hovers around 120/70, rising to 140/80 if I drink too much coffee.

The blood pressure at the level of my heart, meanwhile, should be (according to Pascal’s formula) (1 g/cc) * (9.80665 m/s^2) * (0.42 m [the distance from the top of my head to my heart]). That’s 41.2 millibars or 30.9 mmHg. I’m not going to put the blood-pressure cuff on my head. To butcher that Meat Loaf song “I would do any-thing for science, but I won’t dooooo that.” I can get a good idea of the pressure at head level, though, by putting the cuff around my bicep and raising it to the same height as my head. Back in a second.

Okay. So, apparently, there are things I won’t do for science, but there aren’t many of them. Among the things I will do for science is attempting to tape my hand to the wall so my muscle contractions don’t interfere with the blood-pressure reading. That didn’t work out. But the approximate reading, because I was starting to fear for my sanity and wanted to stop, is 99/56. 56 mmHg, which is the between-heartbeats pressure, is higher than 41.2, but it’s in the same ballpark. The differences are probably due to stuff like measurement inaccuracies and the fact that blood vessels contract to keep the blood pressure from varying too much throughout the body.

Man. That was a hell of a digression. But this is what it was leading to: when I’m standing up (and I’ve had coffee), my heart and blood vessels can exert a total pressure of about 131 mmHg. Ordinarily, it’s pumping against a head-to-heart pressure gradient of 41.2 mmHg. But what if I was standing up and exposed to five gees?

In that case, my heart would be pumping against a gradient of 154.5 mmHg. That means it’s going to be really easy for the blood to flow from my brain to my heart, but very hard for the blood to flow from my heart to my brain. And it’s for that reason that the handsome young dude in the first video passed out: his heart (most certainly in better shape than mine…) couldn’t produce enough pressure to keep the blood in his head, in spite of that weird breathing and those leg-and-abdomen-straining maneuvers he was doing to keep the blood up there. People exposed to high head-to-foot gees see their visual field shrink, and eventually lose consciousness altogether. Pilots call that G-LOC, which I really hope is the name of a rapper. (It stands for gee-induced loss of consciousness, in case you were wondering).

You’ll notice that, in almost all spacecraft, whether in movies or in real life, the astronauts are lying on their backs, relative to the ground, when they get in the capsule. That’s because human beings tolerate front-to-back gees better than head-to-foot gees, and in a rocket launch or a capsule reentry, the gees will (hopefully) always be front-to-back. There is at least one documented case (the case of madman test pilot John Stapp) of a human being surviving 46.2 front-to-back gees for over a second. There are a few documented cases of race drivers surviving crashes with peak accelerations of 100 gees.

But you should know by now that I don’t play around. I don’t care what happens if you’re exposed to 46.2 gees for a second. I want to know what happens if you’re exposed to it for twenty-four hours. Because, at heart, I’ve always been a mad scientist.

There’s a reason we don’t know much about the effects of extremely high accelerations. Actually, there are two reasons. For one, deliberately exposing a volunteer to gee forces that might pulp their organs sounds an awful lot like an experiment the Nazis would have done, and no matter your course in life, it’s always good if you don’t do Nazi-type things. For another, building a large centrifuge that could get up to, say, a million gees, would be hard as all hell.

But since I’m playing mad scientist, let’s pretend I’ve got myself a giant death fortress, and inside that death fortress is a centrifuge with a place for a human occupant. The arm of the centrifuge is 100 meters long (as long as a football field, which applies no matter which sport “football” is to you). To produce 1,000,000 gees, I’d have to make that arm spin 50 times a second. It would produce an audible hum. It would be spinning as fast as a CD in a disk drive. Just to support the centrifugal force from a 350-kilogram cockpit, I’d need almost two thousand one-inch-diameter Kevlar ropes. Doable, but ridiculous. That’s the way I like it.

But what would actually happen to our poor volunteer? This is where that gore warning from the beginning comes in. (If it makes you feel better, you can pretend the volunteer is a death-row inmate whose worst fears are, in order, injections, electrocution, and toxic gas, therefore making the centrifuge less cruel and unusual.)

That’s hard to say. Unsurprisingly, there haven’t been many human or animal experiments over 10 gees. Probably because the kinds of people who like to see humans and lab animals crushed to a pulp are too busy murdering prostitutes to become scientists. But I’m determined to at least go through the thought experiment. And you know what, I’m starting to feel kinda weird talking about crushing another person to a pulp, so for this experiment, we’ll use my body measurements and pretend it’s me in the centrifuge. A sort of punishment, to keep me from getting too excited about doing horrible theoretical things to people.

The circumference of my head is 60 cm. If my head was circular, I could just divide that by pi to get my head’s diameter. For most people, that assumption doesn’t work. Luckily (for you, at least), my head is essentially a lumpy pink bowling ball with hair, so its diameter is about 60 cm / pi, or 19.1 cm.

Lying down under 1 gee, hydrostatic pressure means the blood vessels at the back of my head will be experiencing 14.050 mmHg more pressure than the ones at the front. From the fact that I don’t have brain hemorrhages every time I lie down, I know that my brain can handle at least that much.

But what about at 5 gees? I suspect I could probably handle that, although perhaps not indefinitely. The difference between the front of my head and the back of my head would be 70.250 mmHg. I might start to lose some of my vision as the blood struggled to reach my retinas, and I might start to see some very pretty colors as the back of my brain accumulated the excess, but I’d probably survive.

At 10 gees, I’m not so sure how long I could take it. That means a pressure differential of 140.500 mmHg, so at 10 gees, it would take most of my heart’s strength just to get blood to the front of my head and front of my brain. With all that additional pressure at the back of my brain, and without any muscles to resist it, I’m probably going to have to start worrying about brain hemorrhages at 10 gees.

As a matter of fact, the brain is probably going to be one of the first organs to go. Nature is pretty cool: she gave us brains, but brains are heavy. So she gave us cerebrospinal fluid, which is almost the same density as the brain, which, thanks to buyoancy, reduces the brain’s effective mass from 1,200 grams to about 22 grams. This is good because, as I mentioned, the brain doesn’t have muscles that it can squeeze to re-distribute its blood. So, if the brain’s effective weight were too high, it would do horrible things like sink to the bottom of the skull and start squeezing through the opening into the neck (this happens in people who have cerebrospinal fluid leaks; they experience horrifying headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, a metallic taste in the mouth, and problems with hearing and balance, because their leaking CSF is letting the brain sink downwards and compress the cranial nerves).

At 5 gees, my brain is going to feel like it weighs 108 grams. Not a lot, but perhaps enough to notice.

But what if I pulled a John Stapp, except without his common sense? That is: What if I exposed myself to 46.2 gees continuously.

Well, I would die. In many very unpleasant ways. For one thing, my brain would sink to the back of my head with an effective weight of 1002 grams. The buoyancy from my CSF wouldn’t matter anymore, and so my brain would start to squish against the back of my skull, giving me the mother of all concussions.

I probably wouldn’t notice, though. For one thing, the hydrostatic blood pressure at the back of my head would be 641.100 mmHg, which is three times the blood pressure that qualifies as a do-not-pass-Go-go-directly-to-the-ICU medical emergency. So all the blood vessels in the back of my brain would pop, while the ones at the front would collapse. Basically, only my brainstem would be getting oxygen, and even it would be feeling the strain from my suddenly-heavy cerebrum.

That’s okay, though. I’d be dead before I had time to worry about that. The average chest wall in a male human is somewhere around 4.5 cm thick. The average density of ribs, which make up most of the chest wall, is around 3.75 g/cc. I measured my chest at about 38 cm by 38 cm. So, lying down, at rest, my diaphragm and respiratory muscles have to work against a slab of chest with an equivalent mass of 24.4 kilograms. Accelerating at 46.2 gees means my chest would feel like it massed 1,100 kilograms more. That is, at 46.2 gees, my chest alone would make it feel like I had a metric ton sitting on my ribs. At 100 gees, I’d be feeling 2.4 metric tons.

But at 100 gees, that’d be the least of my problems. At accelerations that high, pretty much everything around or attached to or touching my body would become deadly. A U.S. nickel (weighing 5 grams and worth 0.05 dollars) would behave like it weighed half a kilogram. But I wouldn’t notice that. I’d be too busy being dead. My back, my thighs, and my buttocks would be a horrible bruise-colored purple from all the blood that rushed to the back of me and burst my blood vessels. My chest and face would be horrible and pale, and stretched almost beyond recognition. My skin might tear. My ribcage might collapse.

Let’s crank it up. Let’s crank it up by a whole order of magnitude, and expose me to 1,000 continuous gees. This is where things get very, very messy and very, very horrible. If you’re not absolutely sure you can handle gore that would make Eli Roth and Paul Verhoven pee in their pants, please stop reading now.

At 1,000 gees, my eyeballs would either burst, or pop through their sockets and into my brain cavity. That cavity would likely be distressingly empty, since the pressure would probably have ruptured my meninges and made all the spinal fluid leak out. The brain itself would be roadkill in the back of my skull. Even if my ribs didn’t snap, my lungs would collapse under their own weight. The liver, which is a pretty fatty organ, would likely rise towards the top of my body while heavier stuff like muscle sank to the bottom. Basically, my guts would be moving around all over the place. And, at 1,000 gees, my head would feel like it weighed 5,000 kilograms. That’s five times as much as my car. My head would squish like a skittle under a boot.

At 10,000 gees, I would flatten. The bones in the front of my ribcage would weigh 50 metric tons. A nickel would weigh as much as a child or a small adult. My bones would be too heavy for my muscles to support them, and would start…migrating towards the bottom of my body. At this point, my tissues would begin behaving more and more like fluids. This would be more than enough to make my blood cells sink to the bottom and the watery plasma rise to the top. 10,000 gees is the kind of acceleration usually only experienced by bullets and in laboratory centrifuges.

By 100,000 gees, I’d be a horrible fluid, layered like a parfait from hell: a slurry of bone at the bottom topped with a gelatinous layer of muscle proteins and mitochondria, then a layer of hemoglobin, then a layer of collagen, then a layer of water, then a layer of purified fat.

And finally, at 1,000,000 gees, even weirder stuff would start to happen. For one thing, a nickel would weigh as much as a car. But let’s focus on me, or rather, what’s left of me. At 1,000,000 gees, individual molecules start to separate by density. The bottom of the me-puddle would be much richer in things like hemoglobin, calcium carbonate, iodine-bearing thyroid hormones, and large, stable proteins. Meanwhile, the top would consist of human tallow. Below that would be an oily layer of what was once stored oils in fat cells. Below that would come a slurry of the lighter cell organelles like the endoplasmic reticula and the mitochondria. The heavier organelles like the nucleus would be closer to the bottom. That’s right: at 1,000,000 gees, the difference in density between a cell’s nucleus and cytoplasm is enough to make the nucleus sink to the bottom.

I think we’ve gotten horrible enough. So let’s stop the centrifuge, hose what’s left of me out of it, and go ahead and call up a psychiatrist.

But before we do that, I want to make note of something amazing. In 2010, some very creative Japanese scientists decided to try a bizarre experiment. They placed different bacteria in test tubes full of nutrient broth, and put those test tubes in an ultracentrifuge. The ultracentrifuge exposed the bacteria to accelerations of around 400,000 gees. Normally, that’s the kind of acceleration you’d use to separate the proteins from the membranes. It’d kill just about anything. But it didn’t kill the bacteria. As a matter of fact, many of the bacteria kept right on growing. They kept on growing at an acceleration that would kill even a well-protected human instantly. Sure, their cells got a little weird-shaped, but so would yours, if you were exposed to 400,000 gees.

The universe is awesome. And scary as hell.

Actually, I think I’ll let Sam Neill (as Dr. Weir in Event Horizon) sum this one up: “Hell is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.”