Hollywood showing things instantly exploding or shattering the second they hit a vacuum does that to us, but the actual physics of space and the biology of cells are a lot tougher than the films make it seem.
Neither the human body nor the bacteria inside it would burst, and the cold space environment behaves much differently than some expect lol
The pressure difference between the inside of a human body and the vacuum of space is exactly 1 atmosphere (which is not that much in the grand scheme of things).
And bacteria are tiny tanks, because they are microscopical, the physical forces acting on them are minuscule. Scientists have tested exposing bacteria directly to the vacuum of space outside the ISS, and many species survived for years.
And about the cold, because space is a vacuum, counterintuitively, heat is actually hard to lose lol, it can only escape slowly through thermal radiation (there is no cold air to whip past and steal heat away), so they would still be gradually working for some time. And even when finally reaching extreme cold, we usually think of it as destructive, but for microbes it’s actually “preservative”. When Labs want to keep bacteria alive for decades without them changing or dying, they freeze them. So a lot of them wouldn’t even die, but stay “suspended”.
Hollywood showing things instantly exploding or shattering the second they hit a vacuum does that to us, but the actual physics of space and the biology of cells are a lot tougher than the films make it seem.
Neither the human body nor the bacteria inside it would burst, and the cold space environment behaves much differently than some expect lol
The pressure difference between the inside of a human body and the vacuum of space is exactly 1 atmosphere (which is not that much in the grand scheme of things).
And bacteria are tiny tanks, because they are microscopical, the physical forces acting on them are minuscule. Scientists have tested exposing bacteria directly to the vacuum of space outside the ISS, and many species survived for years.
And about the cold, because space is a vacuum, counterintuitively, heat is actually hard to lose lol, it can only escape slowly through thermal radiation (there is no cold air to whip past and steal heat away), so they would still be gradually working for some time. And even when finally reaching extreme cold, we usually think of it as destructive, but for microbes it’s actually “preservative”. When Labs want to keep bacteria alive for decades without them changing or dying, they freeze them. So a lot of them wouldn’t even die, but stay “suspended”.