Extreme heat and extreme cold can kill within hours if not minutes. In extreme cold, the human body without clothing does not maintain a high enough temperature to live. If you were to be naked at freezing point of zero degrees, it would take you only twenty minutes to die. Our bodies are simply not strong enough to work as hard as it would need to to keep us warm enough to survive.
One thing we need even more than warmth is oxygen. Mount Everest’s summit, for example, has incredibly thin air. To survive the trip to the top, a climber would have to move slowly over a period of several months for their body to adjust to the change in oxygen. If somehow we were able to teleport to the top of Mount Everest, we would only be able to survive for about 2-3 minutes because there simply isn’t enough oxygen!
Death would come even quicker if you were at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. You would be submerged under 7 miles of water – that’s about 11 kilometers! At pressures of 15,000 pounds per square inch, your lungs would collapse immediately and you would fall unconscious in under 20 seconds; you would be dead in under 90 seconds.
Swan diving into a molten lake of lava would be something else. I bet you think your body would burn up in seconds and become ash or burn to nothing at all. Well, actually, It would be a lot like fireworks! Technically lava is liquid rock, burning four times hotter than your oven at home could ever get. Our bodies are comprised of mostly of water, which, when exposed to that kind of heat, turns to steam – explosively!
If we were to measure danger by fatalities caused rather than how rapidly we would die in the world’s most extreme temperatures, we would have to consider something as microscopic as the flu. In 1918, influenza killed nearly one hundred million people. At the time, this would account for 3% of the world’s entire population. Between 1347 and 1353, a third of all people in Europe died because of the bubonic plague, also known as black death. Though it was at its most lethal all those years ago, it is still around. In fact, five to fifteen people get the plague in America every year. Even with those stats, influenza and the plague have nothing on plasmodium – it’s a micro-organism that can get into our blood because of mosquito bites and causes malaria. Researchers such as Nobel Laureate Baruch Blumberg have determined that, of all the humans who have ever existed, it is likely that half died from malaria. So, statistically speaking, any place where one could be bitten by a mosquito and contract malaria would be called the most dangerous place on Earth!
