posted 06-04-99 01:56 AM ET            

Here's a quote from the Urban Legends web site at: http://www.urbanlegends.com/death/bodies_explode_in_space.html

It's refering to decompression in outer-space, but I'd believe that the effects would be much more mild on Mars. Probably you'd slowly suffocate to death.

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.

posted 06-04-99 02:25 AM ET            

Explosive decompression - what happens in going from a pressurized space suit or cabin to exposure to space, which is generally either very hot or very cold, is a hell of a lot different than a controlled reduction of pressure in a room temperature environment.

"Possibly" the bends? I'm a certified SCUBA divemaster/master & rescue diver with over 800 logged dives - don't even count 'em anymore. You'd have the worst kind of case of the bends you could imagine - the body is much more sensitive to pressure changes, and the worst rate of pressure change conceivably possible in SCUBA is nowhere near the rate of pressure differential from an explosive decompression event in space.

Unless they are talking about a relatively small breach of a space suit - say a ripped glove or elbow, that is quickly mitigated, the Urban legends article is full of ****.
BTW, my background's in physics. It's all a function of Delta P and Delta T.

posted 06-04-99 02:45 AM ET            

...To experience the vacuum is to die, but not quite in the gristly manner portrayed in the popular movies Total Recall
and Outland. The truth of the matter seems to be closer to what Stanley Kubrik had in mind in 2001: A Space
Odyssey.

According to the McGraw/Hill Encyclopedia of Space, when animals are subjected to explosive decompression to a
vacuum-like state, they do not suddenly balloon-up or have their eyes pop out of their heads. It is, in fact, virtually
impossible to compress or expand organic tissues in this way. Instead, death arises from the response of the free
gasses trapped within the tissues. If decompression takes 1/2 second or longer, even lung tissue remains intact.
When the ambient pressure falls below 47 millimeters of mercury, about 1/20 the atmospheric pressure at sea level,
the water inside all tissues passes into a vapour state beginning at the skin surface. This causes the collapse of
surface cells and the loss of hugh amounts of body heat via evaporation. After six seconds, the process of cell
collapse involves the heart and lungs causing circulatory interruption, followed by acute anoxia, convulsions and the
relaxation of the bowel muscles. Yes, that's right. If you take your helmet off in space, within less than a minute
your suit may fill up with fecal matter. After 15 seconds, mental confusion sets-in, and after 20 seconds you become
unconscious. You can survive this for about 80 seconds if a pressure higher than about 47 millimeters of mercury is
then reestablished.

....

posted 06-04-99 10:27 AM ET            

I was playing as University, and was really a perfectionist - small number of big bases with lots of SP on a small continent. Santiago called the council and asked to melt the polar caps, and everyone agreed, and I was left with ONE size 6 water base!!! I woke up in the middle of the night sweating like hell. I am damn serious. The first thing I did in the morning was to go play a couple of turns to see whether there would be a council, but there was not. Wheewwww! Boy, was I relieved!