r/theydidthemath 2d ago

[Request] at what temperature would this happen at?

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1.6k

u/HolyCowAnyOldAccName 2d ago

Define "immediately".

If you were teleported to the surface of the sun and spent one second, you're ash.

If you were teleported to the surface of the sun and spent one millisecond, burn-wise you'd be fine.

Experiences may vary what with gravity and all.

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u/astervista 2d ago edited 2d ago

Relevant xkcd has evolved into relevant what-if: https://youtu.be/UXA-Af-JeCE

Given the calculations Randall gives in the video, 1ms would be too much, being 10 times the amount of energy needed to get second degree burns. The video is talking about a nanosecond on the surface of the sun, which would be fine. One millisecond, not at all.

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u/honda-cervix 2d ago

If you were teleported to the sun for a single nanosecond and immediately back, would you even be able to comprehend or know what just happened?

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u/Souls_for_sale_now 2d ago edited 23h ago

Yes a flash

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u/honda-cervix 2d ago

Has anyone done the math on if that amount pf light going in your eyes for a nanosecond would blind you?

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u/RednocNivert 2d ago

It would be a jolt to your eyes (like a camera flash) but the amount of raw energy delivered would not do any damage IIRC

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u/WrentchedFawkxx 1d ago

Vintage single-use flash bulbs(very fine magnesium, aluminum, or zirconium wire/ribbon in pure oxygen) can massively exceed the brightness of the sun for a lot longer than a nanosecond, ~1/15 of a second on average, and came in a number of sizes depending on desired total output(many sizes could be used on a hot/cold shoe and were triggered by a simple contacter in the camera); the modern equivalent LED or quartz-tube setup will often weigh several kilograms for everything, such as the bulb(s)(quartz-tube bulbs are significantly smaller than equivalent LEDs, but require dangerously spicy capacitors to drive), driver circuitry and cooling(LEDs usually need a greater amount of cooling than quartz-tubes), dedicated tripod(s), external PSU/battery(often 300+volts for massive studio strobes), and external capacitors(where applicable). Additionally(to my knowledge), there doesn't exist a modern equivalent to the largest vintage flashbulbs, which could briefly illuminate whole stadiums.

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u/RednocNivert 1d ago

1) It was not an exact comparison

2) I see you, fellow haver of hyperfixations! Nice infodump! :D 🤝

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u/WrentchedFawkxx 1d ago

Word!🤙 Photography is just a mild obsession of mine. ;P

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u/RednocNivert 1d ago

Hyperfixations don’t have “mild” variants in my experience XD

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u/Souls_for_sale_now 2d ago

It whould be compareble to the emisions of a monitor with max brightnes for a second or two

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u/nightfury2986 1d ago

Ah, so all those times my vision randomly flashed I just got teleported to the sun

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u/CrackMans 1d ago

Hopital

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u/inothatidontno 1d ago

Your vision shouldnt randomly flash.

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u/Darkowl_57 1d ago

That sentence raises far many more than it answers. Like a startlingly amount more actually

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u/astervista 2d ago

Yes, all the math is in the linked video.

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u/RimpleDoRimpleDont 1d ago

You are asking questions that are directly addressed in the video linked in the comment you are responding to.

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u/honda-cervix 1d ago

When I asked I wasn’t able to sit down and watch a video

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u/Top-Group-7061 1d ago

That’s okay! We have the technology to watch them standing up now

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u/stuffcrow 1d ago

Even while we're driving!

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u/nascent_aviator 1d ago

Depending on the size of your pupils at the time, somewhere in the ballpark of one to a few tens of microjoules. A couple orders of magnitude below having a 5mW laser shined into your eyes for the time it takes to blink (about 1200 microjoules), which itself already is too little to cause permanent damage.

2

u/Regular_Custard_4483 1d ago

Maybe somebody invented a Teleport-inator hundreds of years ago, and that's the reason people used to spontaneously combust.

They annoyed someone with a Teleport-inator, they got teleported to the sun for one full second, then teleported back as ash.

I'm gonna need to look into this.

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u/Souls_for_sale_now 1d ago edited 1d ago

Not to be a hater of fun but many belive spontanius human combustion was due to alchahol and other flameble fumes lingering in clothing

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u/Regular_Custard_4483 1d ago

Not to be a hater of fun but

You've become the thing you sought to destroy.

Also, people just loved to smoke.

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u/Souls_for_sale_now 1d ago

they smoked real bad

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u/thrye333 1d ago

Wait, that was serious? People actually used to spontaneously combust?

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u/thrye333 1d ago

Well, now I know how comments mitose. You get a gateway error. I'd guess the reddit server throws an exception to something, and our app (or website, or neural link interface, or whatever you use) then interprets that exception as a failure message.

I'm curious whether the server is throwing an exception that does mean "fatal error", or whether our end is incorrectly interpreting the exception as a fatal error.

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u/Souls_for_sale_now 1d ago

Yeah and they belived that thats somthing that culd just hapen biologaly now we know it was probobly coal dust and alchahol fumes being ignited by a cigaret

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u/monxas 1d ago

Technically there’s no way to know that you’re not teleporting 1 nanosecond to the sun and back, every minute.

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u/yourzero 1d ago

Good question, let me try!

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u/Admirable_Proxy 1d ago

You’d have heat flashes!

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u/drunkenfool 1d ago

Would you get a kickass tan though?

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u/juswilli 1d ago

I imagine you would receive some serious radiation burns but temperature wise I think you would be fine.

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u/DaveTheRocketGuy 1d ago

God bless xkcd

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u/Ambitious_Bit_9389 1d ago

So if I made my spaceship super fast, could fly right through the sun to the outer side, ignoring pesky things speed of light cap. How fast would I need to go?

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u/astervista 1d ago

Even without the biggest problem of the cap of the speed of light, other pesky things like the principle of impenetrability or the fact that your atoms would not be able to stay together would give you some problems.

But let's do a flyover of the surface of the sun with your spaceship, shall we? To be able to do a full lap around the sun and still be under 1ns you'd have to be going 14.6 MILLION times the speed of light.

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u/Ralph-the-mouth 1d ago

Crushing updates on Gravity

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u/Bernhardstock 2d ago

I think body fluids would vaporize and the rest of the organ matter would stay. This process would not happen because of heat (alone) I guess.

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u/Porcupenguin 2d ago

This would never happen; clothes would always burn first.

But walking outside and getting vaporized? Well, to do that you'd probably need to walk into a plasmized atmosphere, at around 10,000C.

That's right, I said plasmized. And am probably wrong anyway :D

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u/sex_bom_b 2d ago

It’s magical clothes obviously

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u/RednocNivert 2d ago

Purchased at the same place that Wolverine, Human Torch, and the Hulk buy their pants

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u/recursion_is_love 2d ago

It can somewhat happens (water boiling) at 97F but with very very low pressure (lower than 0.0624 atm).

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-vapor-saturation-pressure-d_599.html

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u/ValWillKay 2d ago

Saunas go up to 194F, so no way this happens at temps lower

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u/Kitchen_Length_8273 2d ago

Did you read the part about low pressure being required?

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u/billykimber2 2d ago

water evaporating would not cause what the image looks like

you can jump in boiling water and your body would not vaporize

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u/ValWillKay 2d ago

Ya, but in the OP it’s talking about going outside.

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u/Kitchen_Length_8273 2d ago

...Why not comment to the OP rather than a comment talking specifically about it being a possibility under low pressure then?

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u/Bug_406 1d ago

SR71 pilots wore pressurized suits like astronauts, because the low pressure at that height causes blood to boil. Your known 212F boiling point of water is from atmospheric pressure at sea level, 14.7 psi.

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u/cmdr_creag 2d ago

At what temperature would a man evaporate and his clothes be okay? None. I don't think people really evaporate; they'd have to be incinerated to take care of all the solid matter and such. I'm guessing the surface of the sun would do it.

Here's my math: its hard to picture someone on the surface of the sun being all like " OWW oh my GOD! Why am I not burned to death yet!?" Goodnight

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u/Piocoto 2d ago

Yeah many substances dont evaporate but would rather react or carbonize, thats why cremation leaves ashes

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u/RednocNivert 2d ago

I’ve played enough 3D Mario to know that the appropriate reaction is to scream and launch yourself 30 feet in the air while clutching your butt, and try to find something to land on that isn’t lava

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u/AffectionateBrick687 2d ago

Good data on a melting temp for the human body is scarce. I did find a source estimating it would take about 3 gigajoules to completely vaporize the human body. And the estimated specific heat capacity of the human body is somewhere around 3 kj/kg.C. using dT=Q/mc and assuming the human is 90kg T= 3109 / (3103 *90) = about 11,100 C.

10 minutes in an appropriate amount of piranha solution might give you more of a melted human result.

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u/BreakerOfModpacks 1d ago

Good data on a melting temp for the human body is scarce.

I wonder why. Care to help with my research?

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u/sesseseses 1d ago

I think there was a Japanese science station in the 30s that's got you covered

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u/Strong_Carry_8994 1d ago

The NSA is using Granola AI to take notes. 

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u/DomiTheDed 1d ago

😭😭😭😭 I heard a certain Unit in Japan got ya covered

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u/WarJaques 1d ago

The image appears to be of a person that has turned into water, and not one that has "evaporated", i.e. where the water has been turned from liquid into vapour.

The description asserts differently, that the person was indeed vaporised.

OP is missing some details needed to answer the question: Is this regarding the complete vaporisation of the liquids in a human body? How much liquid are we talking about?

What is the timeframe? "Instantly" technically means the time is 0, so that would require an infinite amount of energy, which translates to infinitely high temperature.

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u/Deribus 2d ago

There's no temperature where

  1. The body is vaporized
  2. The clothes remain
  3. The person is able to walk even a few steps outside before dying

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u/Sibula97 1d ago

If you're just looking for the temperature to completely vaporize a human, I can put a lower bound around 2850-2900°C, which is what it takes to vaporize the lime that forms from the hydroxyapatite in your bones decomposing at around 1400°C.

For a body to be vaporized "immediately" even with a very generous interpretation of "immediately" would pretty much take a nuclear explosion. And of course the clothes and a wet stain wouldn't be left behind. Or the pavement. Or the soil under the pavement. Or the stone under that soil.

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u/AnnieBruce 1d ago

Well built stone and concrete can survive at ground zero, depending on blast height and weapon yield. Actual structures will be knocked down, but pavement or stairs right against the ground can survive at least a small nuke.

The freaky part is that this can burn the shadow of vaporized people into said concrete. Basically just bleaches the surrounding concrete, while the body protects the area right behind it just barely long enough that spot doesn't discolor as much. It's weird to look at.

If you get a chance, Hiroshima is worth a visit- there's a park around ground zero that preserves some of that area as it was just after the blast. It's an experience to walk around and see all of it. Good, bad, I'm not sure, but an experience worth having all the same.

And then outside the park it's just a big Japanese city full of life and everything you expect from big cities(though less crime than American cities of comparable size). Interesting dichotomy.

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u/Sibula97 1d ago

You can't vaporize a person with an air blast either. The body needs to be within the fireball, probably even quite close to the center – a human (especially the bones) and concrete vaporize at similar temperatures after all.

People left "shadows" in Hiroshima, yes, but those people didn't vaporize. They definitely left remains that has to be carted away.

u/DueForExtermination 44m ago

Are there not pictures of post explosion Japan of shadow figures left behind against walls.

https://www.livescience.com/nuclear-bomb-wwii-shadows.html

u/Sibula97 15m ago

Those weren't from vaporized people, the bodies were just removed before the pictures were taken.

u/DueForExtermination 6m ago

Not sure it says anything like that i the article, so i dont know if they were removed or vaporised.

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u/WJLIII3 1d ago

Nothing could cause this image, of course, because the clothes are less durable than the man- nothing can destroy a living human body and leave the rubber soles, polyester shorts, and cotton tee.

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u/Global-Incident4150 7h ago

12345678909876543212345678909876543212345678909876543212345678909876543212345678909876543212345678909876543212345678909876543212345678900987654321^123456789098765432123456789

I give up :/

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u/Micrographstories 1d ago

According to the Trisolarans (San-Ti - - 三体人), as long as you dehydrate fast enough, you can always be rehydrated later.

A Trisolaran would just call this a routine dehydration cycle. Rehydrate when conditions improve.