Wednesday, September 04, 2024

Could You Survive a Nanosecond on the Sun?



The question that came into Randall Munroe's What If? series specifically asked if a human could survive a nanosecond on the sun if he were teleported there and back instantly. That glosses over the danger of approaching and leaving the sun, because a human couldn't survive long enough to get near the surface if traveling in a conventional manner. But a nanosecond is a billionth of a second, so this question deserved to be explored. The surface of the sun is a few thousand degrees, so you'd want to know what to expect before you embark on such a mission, if it were at all possible. The interior of the sun is much hotter, so you teleporting machine would have to calibrated just so. Just to be safe, if you want to teleport somewhere to warm yourself up, make it the Seychelles, and stay longer than a nanosecond.


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