[masraum]

Originally Posted by jyl

Rick, the way I'm visualizing it is, imagine if a steel rod is placed on one square inch of your body, and a 4,700 lb SUV dropped onto the other end of the rod. With thousands of other steel rods placed on all the other square inches of your body, and thousands of SUVs dropped on those rods. All at once. Those steel rods would instantly pulverize your body, flesh and bone alike, until they meet in what used to be your center.

Your body is 60% water anyway. I think the other 40% of you would instantly become disassociated particles, perhaps gooshing in all directions. That's just my morbid guess and the logic behind it.

This seems way more extreme than an astronaut suffering sudden decompression in space, because he's going from 14 psi to 0 psi, these persons instantly went from 14 psi to 4700 psi.

Most of our bodies are essentually fluid or fluid filled. Except for our lungs and throat which are full of air, wouldn't we be essentially liquid and therefore not likely to compress much? Granted, I think our lungs and throat would do something traumatic and unfortunate. The big thing is that the pressure would be universal. Your example of an SUV focused on a 1" steel rod creates a picture for us, but I think the mental image that is created for most of us centers around that weight only being one that one spot. As you said, if we were completely covered in those steel rods on ever spot from every direction, there wouldn't be any direction for anything to squish.

I wouldn't think the event would be pretty, but I also don't think that it would turn a body to paste. I think our skin would do a pretty good job of holding us together.